Welcome to Pleb Chain Radio, a live show brought to you by Plebs for Plebs, which focuses
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Join QW and Avi as they run down the weekly news and developments, breaking down the current
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All right, we are live.
Welcome, gentle pioneers, to the lightning-laced airwaves. Today is Friday the 19th of December. This is episode 142 of Plep Chain Radio, and we have our year in review.
Vitor Pamplona, creator of Amethyst and Condoleon, world-renowned mimer and cultural commentator and indeed philosopher, join us to talk about the year that has gone by.
But first, folks, welcome back, QW. How you been, man?
You know, holidays are busy, but I'm a little, honestly, I'm a little exhausted, but that's okay.
I've been productive, really tackling life a bit, and it's working out.
But, man, it sucks just catching the recordings of Pleb Chain Radio.
But time is of the essence, and somehow I have to put it into my time.
So here I am, though. Here I am.
Good to have you back, buddy.
I think more importantly, Avi, how is it spreading your wings solo?
Oh, it's great.
It is good.
Finally nothing to hold you back, you know?
No chains.
The chains are broken.
I can be myself, finally.
You can do a 6 a.m. Eastern time show, no problem.
Indeed, indeed.
But folks, don't miss the second edition of our Value for Value music segment coming up later in the show.
Another independent music banger that's emerged from the messy but energetic human web.
That is the Noster Commons section when I asked for recommendations.
So stay tuned for that.
90% of your boost during the song will go to the artist.
And all the more reason that if you are listening to the show on Apple or Spotify,
I would urge you to hit pause and switch over to the Fountain Podcasting app
and support the Value for Value revolution while you listen.
And while you're there, we would appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button.
Your support goes a long way in keeping our mics warm and this podcast ad-free.
The show is streamed live all over Nostra on any Nostra client that supports streaming,
such as Amethyst, Nosture, Fountain, Primal, and Nostria.
And a quick note here, folks.
July 18, the sequel to my first novel, 24, is now out.
As is the second edition of 24 itself.
This is a very recent development.
The link to purchase both is in the show notes.
And also, Nosfabrica, the Web of Trust hackathon that is being conducted, or Wattathon,
that is underway with a fifth group call taking place earlier this week.
Teams are still forming, and it's not too late to join in.
You can find out more by going to nosfabrica.com slash Wattathon.
that's w-o-t-a-t-h-o-n and qw you've had a lot of time to pay attention to bitcoin and
gnosticulture over the last week or the over the last several weeks as a matter of fact what have
you witnessed let's be real here we're all here i think this might be i kind of see the writing on
the wall and i feel like uh you guys are going to surprise me today but uh i'll jump the gun and
let everyone know it is my third Nostra birthday today. So I appreciate everyone here celebrating
me. I know as a culture, we like to celebrate birthdays. You know, some people more than others
if you followed Nostra the last week. But I think reflecting back, you know, I think every year...
Derek Ross and disbelief.
Yeah, I think every year we get to this December part, right? And there's an energy about us that's
kind of just remembers the great hatcheting, like the beginning.
And you can call us OGs or you can call us, you know, whatever, pioneers at that time when invoicing was happening.
But it's a special time.
And it's not just holiday.
I think it's a special time in general that I think we all just need to kind of reflect back on how far we've come.
And it's been, what, three years for me.
Avi, you were probably a couple days ago, huh?
I was December 15th.
15th as it turns out kw the same day as kondalorian and our dear friend of the show who we like
teasing uh but uh derek ross as well yeah so i mean do you feel like that that as well do you
think it's just kind of a i mean obviously we have these holiday shows or the year-end shows
but it does kind of coincide with the first time you clicked on the uh astral ninja and the confusion
began and uh it just it's it's it really gives us especially people that were there in the beginning
uh something to compare where we're at now uh and how far it is the first time it's i raw dog my
old nsec into what is that enigma.io which had the suffered from the xss that will never not be
funny and that will always over time, uh, just, just, just be a better story, right?
The more Nostra develops into something that more people are using, the more you can just say,
Hey man, you don't know how, you know, you don't know what it was like back there. You know,
that's, that's my, that's my culture corner, more of a reflection. Um, I don't need to, um,
follow the everydays to kind of think about, uh, Nostra as a whole and the community as a whole.
No, it is a beautiful time. It is the most wonderful time of the year in more ways than one, especially for us Nostrishers. And this is a good segue, QW, into the sermon, which is the year the roots took hold.
So we've reached the end of 2025, and if you're listening to this, dear gentle pioneers, congratulations, you survived.
You survived the dark Noster era of Zap farming bots.
You survived the thousandth proclamation that Noster is dead back in the summer.
We even held a funeral.
The tombstone said died of irrelevance.
And yet, from six feet under, we could still hear the unmistakable ping of a zap.
In the so-called graveyard, the corpses kept posting via Amethyst, Darmus and Primal,
kept hopping between clients, chats, relays and tools,
and somehow hosted music live streams from across the globe.
You also survived the vibe coding debates, the core versus knots wars,
and the endless deafening noise of the fiat world collapsing in slow motion outside our windows.
When we look back at this year through the rearview mirror,
it would be easy to see a year of hiccups.
A year when the moon didn't always arrive on schedule,
when projects full of promise curdled into the inevitable abandonware,
and when the drama sometimes felt louder than the signal.
But I want to offer you a different frame.
I believe 2025 will be remembered not as the year we went mainstream, but as the year we went deep.
We stopped just posting and started transacting.
I mean, just last week we saw Eric from Conduit Market remind us that a bazaar is not a platform, but a conversation.
We saw Aaron of Essex and the new music Nudge unit from a few weeks back
prove that an artist doesn't need a label, they need an NPUB and a fan with a lightning wallet.
We saw the digital bleed into the physical.
From the humid jungles of the Primal House in Costa Rica
to the golf courses of Vegas and the rain-slicked streets of Manchester for BitFest,
we realized that while the protocol is code, the network is ours.
We spent the last few years building the shiny skyscrapers of the city, but 2025?
2025 was the year we went down into the basement and checked the foundation.
We poured the concrete. We fixed the plumbing.
And yes, plumbing is unsexy. Plumbing is messy, but plumbing is what allows a civilization to live.
The ups and downs of this year were just settling of the soil.
The loose dirt is washing away.
The speculators and the tourists who came for the quick flip are bored and leaving.
Good. Let them go.
What remains is bedrock.
What remains are the roots.
So as we look towards 2026, I'm not going to promise you that this is the year of mass adoption.
I don't care about mass adoption.
I care about true adoption.
I see a year ahead when we stop asking for permission,
when the tools we build in the bear market of engagement this year finally turn on.
Where finding a job, funding a film, selling soap,
or discovering a song happens entirely within a loop that no bank can touch and no censor can silence.
The storm outside is going to get louder. We know that.
The fiat world is not going to go quietly into the night.
But inside the fortress we built, the fire is lit.
The pantry is stocked.
The music is playing.
And the band is getting paid in real time.
The roots have taken hold, my dear pioneers.
Now we grow And with that it is time to welcome Corn Delorean and Vitor back to Pleb Chain Radio Welcome gents Hello hello Good afternoon
Avi, is Corn Delorean good for our ratings? I feel like, you know, he might be a divisive
little Lego man sometimes. Everything's good for Pleb Chain Radio.
That is true. That is true. So, folks, what we decided to do for today's episode is all of us,
QW, I don't know if you've had the time to do this, but the rest of us have prepared. No,
I'm sure you have. We prepared a list of fives, five things that we thought went well in 2025,
five things that could have gone better, and five things that we're looking forward to in
the year ahead in 2026.
And we'll go through them one by one,
maybe jumping categories
and having, hopefully, vigorous discussions
over each one.
So, Vitor, I will put you on the spot.
Oh, I start. Okay.
Sure.
So, I guess the five things that worked great.
We'll start with one.
Let's start with one, yes.
And I do sincerely believe this.
I think our signers are like the heroes
of this entire community.
because they just work.
You know, it has been a while that I haven't found issues or bugs
or difficulties operating signers in general.
But specifically like Amber and Albi and all the extensions out there,
they seem to be just working fine.
And clients seem to have an easy time integrating them.
I think all the AI frameworks that showed up last year or so,
facilitating some of that development.
But frankly, it just works.
And it's so good to see it.
It's something that we are doing for,
as an open source project,
as some of us, for the fun of it,
it just stays there and it's stable
and it kind of serves as this foundation
for the entire ecosystem.
QW, agree or?
Yeah.
I agree.
but it's like isn't that cool like it's just it's funny how human nature is where we we don't even
think about signers anymore uh because they just work right it's like we all think about the bugs
or like these things that just need to fit get fixed and then they get fixed you never think
about it again just like yeah you just move along uh how how often do you think about your signer
abby i don't i think and i think that is vtor's point yeah yeah and it's a really good point right
It's like these types of things, they work when they're quiet and ubiquitous.
If you're talking about signers, that probably is not a good thing.
Well, except for like the remote, like the hardware devices, you know, we've all want to see, you know, and there is a couple products on the market.
I've never had one in my hand, and I don't know if you have, Vitor, but is there something that you can kind of hold your in-pub or your in-sec on off-chain or whatever?
Not yet, but there are enough people working on it that I think the future is bright for that field,
either through a regular physical device that we were signing for you
or through something like Frost that is able to split your signatures in many keys
and just protect yourself better than a regular signer of today.
Korn?
Well, yeah, so what would it take to, or is it even possible, you know, for all of us who basically created our key in an app like Domus or Primal or Amethyst or, you know, any, whatever our app of choice, you know, that app already has our key.
I know mine has been there for, you know, three years now.
Is it possible to use that app as a signer?
I've seen some people post about that, but I don't understand the technical side of it, what's possible or feasible.
It seems like that would be easy if I was going to post something on a web client, if it could somehow ping my mobile app and I could just approve it right there.
Yeah, and frankly, that I think is the goal, not only for Amber on Android, but we've got to figure out this on iOS too.
some way that your phone can just hold your keys
and your desktop doesn't need to have the keys anymore.
So you don't keep transferring the NSAC
between the phone and the desktop back and forth.
Or you don't need to store it in some other way
to transfer over from one device to another,
which is one of the security points,
the security risks we have today.
But if you're using Frost, for instance,
it's just the same key.
You just keep using the same key.
what the system does, it splits the key in many parts
and it sends a different key for different devices.
And in the end, you have your Frost signer somewhere secured
so that when a new message from any one of these apps that you use shows up,
the Frost signer itself kind of confirms your transaction
and offers the rest of the key to create the signature.
So it splits it up and then merges them back together.
when it's time to sign.
So then you don't need to change.
But there are other protocols that are coming up
that do require us changing the NSAC that we have today,
which will trigger different discussions in the future
of what is reputation?
If you can't pass your reputation from one key to another,
can we do something about it?
Because rotating keys is just like starting from scratch on Nuster.
So you don't really get any benefits from your previous key.
But maybe the Web of Trust tools that we are seeing underdeveloped right now can help us with that.
Yeah.
So, Korn, let's have your item.
What is one of the things on your list that you thought went well in 2025?
So the first thing that came to mind that I wrote down is I think that by and large, the popular apps, and we can each probably define that list, but there are a few standout names anytime Noster comes up in terms of app names.
and I would say that in the big picture probably all of those apps got better some of them a lot
better during 2025 and you know we've seen several features integrated live streaming is kind of a
one that I've seen more ubiquitous across some of the apps and that's a big thing online especially
when it comes to content, content creation, live streaming is huge. So, but just, you know,
the stability of the apps, the, the kind of polish on some of the features that maybe were
a little rough before, you know, they continue to get better. But, but I think in general,
the apps have all gotten a lot better. I mean, especially compared to, you know, two and three
years ago when some were non-existent, you know, some were just starting out, but, but I think this
year, we've seen some just solidifying of Noster's usability. So I'm just going to, you
dovetail into one of the points I had, Korn, especially around live streaming. I really think
2025 was the year live streaming stood on its own on Noster and really shown in many cases. Now,
Kieran, the creator of Zap.Stream, might disagree. The poor man has been huddled in a bunker
valiantly fighting off denial-of-service attacks for weeks on end.
I think his phone is even getting hit now, you know, his home phone.
His voicemails, he's under a barrage, and God bless him.
But out of that rather unfortunate set of events came resilience.
There is Zap.StreamCore that anyone can self-host and run if they so choose.
Now there are multiple mirrors to Zap.stream.
And we've seen so many apps and clients that have integrated NIP 53 live streaming, which, by the way, we have the author of NIP 53 with us, Vitor.
Sorry about that.
But so many of them.
No, but that's what, I mean, it's, so just as an example, I was at BitFest at the music event in Manchester about two or three weeks ago.
And that was one event where Nostor worked flawlessly, where all of the music was streaming.
And we were testing multiple clients.
There were five clients.
There was Primal, Amethyst, Nostor, Fountain, and Nostria.
These are the five clients that we tested there.
And there were multiple people zapping from each of these clients remotely as well.
And that was remarkable to watch, right?
It's a show towards the end of the year that demonstrated this culmination of live streaming.
Despite, yes, I understand Karen went through a lot of difficulty with the denial of service attacks.
But despite that, I thought live streaming is one that stood out.
But Vitor, any comments on Codalorian's general point?
Yeah, live streaming was on my list as well of things that just worked this year.
even though we did have some issues here and there on our own streams But it has been there and it has been working not only as a provider of content into Zapstream
but the clients themselves are able to display streaming with chat, with Zaps, with everything we need
in a way that they all interoperate with one another.
And we did see a few bugs here and there, but frankly, it works.
And it's actually, as a software engineer, it surprises me that it actually works.
Because no one is using a common library for anything.
We're all coding from scratch.
And yet, it just works.
There's no Bitcoin core on Nostrum.
So it's like people are just coming together somehow via code.
And the thing just works.
and we figure out the language and we have our nips.
So that is actually quite impressive to see.
Those of us who have been out in product land for a while,
we know how hard is interoperability,
especially in the corporate world.
And here we are in the open source without much money
and things just seem to work fine.
In the last year, Avi, during our show,
I mean, I think I almost wanted to say, I said it the year before, I wanted to see that cohesion, that the interoperability of these live streams.
When we go live and you can be on five different clients, doesn't matter, and you can see it live.
I just think that that harnesses the power of Noster.
And it's one of those things where people coming from a legacy sites, they can't grasp that concept, but they can actually see it.
And it's powerful.
And also the stuff that Fountain's doing.
I mean, if you go to fountain.fm now, their UI, their UX, everything is just really clean.
It looks like you should be paying to subscribe to this.
It's just a well-done website.
But it's also in the background, a Nostra client.
So I love to see the bridge, the merge of all these services come together.
and the fact that you can just broadcast to all of them.
It's one of those wish list things that come true
and you're still kind of like, wow.
And I want to add to this too.
What else would you want to see from live streaming
now that we're on the topic?
If you can add some maybe functionality
or something else in 2026, where do you go from here,
short of bug fixes and things like that?
Is there anything specific, any feature, anything?
I'll jump in.
I would like to see the ability to go live from your mobile client.
That's going to be up to each app developer to decide
if they want to support that feature or not.
But I think that would be helpful, especially for some of the more popular clients, if you could just go live directly from your app.
I think that would be pretty huge.
I thought you were going to say that you want the gift button.
Oh, that was number two.
That reminds me, Corinne, if you can do that, that whole idea of what was it?
Either way.
If you're like, let's say, according to Lauren, if you're in this magical place where you actually played guitar and you sang, you know, you can just prop your phone up live stream right there.
And you're your own personal, you know, broadcasting musician.
I think that'd be pretty sweet.
I think it would be pretty awesome.
You know, there there is the one app.
I haven't tried it.
I think I called it Street Seat.
It was what I wanted to see.
Street Seat or something like that.
Like basically you're sitting on the street watching someone perform as they're broadcasting on Noster.
No, I was thinking of, I like that name.
I was thinking of, I think it's called Shosho.
I don't know if I'm saying that right.
But I haven't tried that one just because I'm very apprehensive about putting my key into any new apps.
I'm sure it's fine.
Maybe it's not.
But I'm sure it is.
A lot of people seem to use it.
It has a nice interface.
I tried it with just a throwaway key.
But that kind of goes back to the earlier conversation about signers and key management and everything.
But yeah, being able to go live from the app that you're already using, that you've already given your key, if it supported that feature, would be very helpful.
and I think both
Kiran and Hazard I believe
are working on ways to go
live without having to
have the infrastructure we have behind
Zap.stream today meaning you know
their own servers and so on
so you would just upload
segments of your live stream
to a Blossom server and
a little file that links them all together
for the receiver. There are proposals
out there, it's coming, it's going to be
hard to make it work
But if we can do that, man, we are into something really powerful.
And then a GIF button.
At least on the chat, right?
Come on.
Well, was 2025 a big success with Blossom servers in general?
Vitor?
Yeah, so Blossom is also in my list because it seems to just work.
And I haven't heard anything breaking in the servers themselves.
There were, in the beginning, some images disappearing here and there.
But I think that all got fixed.
And nowadays, it's just refining the protocol and making sure people can mirror images from one side to another.
But that alone is a big win.
Take a moment and give me some layman description of a Blossom server for people listening.
So a Blossom server essentially stores files, any file you want.
It can be a public file, like a public picture that you want to show to everybody on your Twitter clone kind of thing,
or a private file that is encrypted and you want to send to your friend on a DM, for instance.
So the server itself just holds the file.
It doesn't have the password for the file in those cases.
And the password goes in the message.
So the client on the other side can take the password from the GM
and then use it to decrypt the image.
But the image itself cannot be saved on relays because it's too big.
So we have this extra infrastructure for Noster
that just allows us to post any content, pictures, videos, PDFs,
whatever you want to put there.
And in a way that the link to the name of the file
refers to the hash of all the contents.
So if the file changes,
meaning if the server is playing some tricks on us,
we will figure that out
because we can just check against the hash
and we can make sure nobody is fooling with us
from the server perspective.
Because as you might know,
as soon as you send a file to any server,
out there and you don't trust that server,
they might, I don't know, put an ad
before they show you your own image, right?
So they can convert things around
and they can do a few things
that are not really nice to be done,
but because it's their image,
you send it to them, they could in the end.
So Blossom has some checks and balances on that side
that truly make it unique to us.
And it's super easy to find,
it's super easy to display on Noster.
And if we can add ZapStream, which is just this live stream capability to it, that would be a game changing not only for Nostrad, but for everybody else.
Because as you might be aware, it's hard to stream on the web from a desktop.
You have to have a server.
You have to have some infrastructure in place to do this well.
If Blossom works, we don't need any of that.
as
irony would have it
Vitor
was that layman
are we offline
my grandma is listening
her eyes just crossed
well done though
it works except when it doesn't
yeah
exactly
I think this is a good point
talking about things that don't work
to go to the first item on the list.
And maybe we start with you, Korn.
What could have gone better in 2025?
He's going to say gifts.
No, that's my looking forward to 2026.
Always.
What could have gone better?
So I'll just go in the order I have it here.
The first item I wrote was just user growth in general.
felt stagnant, maybe even a little bit of decline, losing some existing users.
And, you know, that's the severity of how bad that is, I guess, depends on the perspective you take.
I liked what you mentioned at the beginning, Avi, that, how did you say, you're not interested in,
you're not interested in, oh, I even quoted it, can't find it right now.
Basically, you're not interested in more user growth, but true user growth,
something along those lines.
And so I think that's a good perspective to keep, that we want real growth, not just numbers.
But I do feel like my timeline has kind of stagnated a bit And I try to follow new users as I come across them or as we interact with each other I try to clean out you know in pubs that are no longer active you know or just overly noisy
But I kind of feel like there's a little bit of stagnation in the user growth side of things.
All right.
Victor, do you want to respond to what Khan just said?
yeah we have seen a drop on user um user ratios and so on i don't think that too too seriously um
i do think a lot of the people that were here in the earlier years were just experimenting around
anyway so they're still trying to figure out if nostor is their home or not and so on so dropping
off is kind of normal for a product at our stage. But I also want to make sure we don't
dismiss that as something that is happening. We still have a lot of work to do, and we
still have to get our apps to actually do what our users want them to do. And this has
been harder than what I thought it would be. But we are getting there. And like I said in
the intro, we are working on the pipes,
and this year was all about our infrastructure behind the scenes.
And I think this year we have seen a new emphasis
on the other stuff that Nostor could do.
And so it's not only about Twitter clients anymore.
And I'm very happy about it,
even though I'm the biggest Twitter clone clients out there.
it's just very good to see that Noster can be more than just like a Twitter interface.
I was thinking about that like two days ago, and it just always blows me away
because you just always want to cling on to Noster as just a social app.
You know, it's something where and it's almost got to the point like, you know, you look at all the disruption in society, even in the Bitcoin culture where we were talking about, you know, knots versus core.
And I mean, just a lot of there's a lot of division, I would say, in the past like six months.
But you start to kind of see, you know, Nostra was always kind of that safe space on the social side.
And you kind of see it kind of overpour.
But, you know, obviously it's whatever's happening on the other social sites is far worse than the conversations that are happening on Noster.
So it's kind of like, I don't know, it just it's amazing.
I was looking at Noster yesterday and the conversations that developers are having now is in that web of trust.
It's in that blossom. It's in these databases or these like high level developer tools.
whereas like three years ago it was, oh, we just got zaps.
We just got, you know, we can now, I mean, we don't have GIFs yet,
but it's something where we're looking at these features as a social aspect,
a social app aspect, whereas now we're starting to see it as this bigger picture,
more back-end type of Noster.
Do you agree with that?
Yeah, and it builds a different social network than just what Twitter clients could do.
I think we all know from Twitter itself and the other networks that the layout of a Twitter client can only go so far.
I said this multiple times in the past.
Among the social networks we have from Big Tech today, Twitter is the smallest one.
And it's for a reason.
The type of people that it attracts is heavily influenced by their abilities to become an influencer in the platform or their abilities to get enough followers to make their voices heard and so on.
So for most of the normal folks out there that just want something to have fun of and spend some time in something fun, that's not the case.
Maybe a chat platform or chat layout is better.
Maybe something close to Facebook or to Instagram or to TikTok is better.
And we need to develop those clients because the social web that each client will develop will strengthen Nostrad itself.
And our keys will be more powerful because of this, you know, inter-social layer connections that we will see on Nostrad.
And that's extremely powerful for all of us.
until now, like the Twitter like clients were the backbone,
the social backbone of Noster.
And gladly that is not the case anymore.
Avi, you're a backend guy.
You got anything to add to that?
No, I don't.
I don't, but I do have,
I'm just looking at the list of things that could have gone better.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Can I just chime in real quick to piggyback on Vitor?
Because I was kind of thinking too, not just the app design,
but Noster, I mean, maybe it is the app design.
I don't know.
But I have found in my own experience that the types of social interactions
the types of content interactions that are incentivized on Noster are a little bit different.
There's a different angle than the ad-driven, algo-driven social medias.
And I think that there's some psychology in there that is beyond what I can put into words.
But the design of Noster itself as a protocol, I think, and the apps, the way that they implement it, people come here with, come to Noster with a set of expectations that has been shaped by years of these other social platforms.
And Noster does not incentivize those same types of interactions and the same type of content.
And, you know, I don't know if that explains some of the fluctuation in user growth.
People come with one set of expectations.
They find something different.
They leave.
Or they come and they love it and they stay.
So I think there's some relationship there.
You know, one thing that is still surprising to me is how do we still don't have an ad-powered client?
because at this point it should have arised.
Like somebody should have thought about doing the same thing Amethyst does
with a few ads in between.
And I know a little about the ad revenue side of things
to know that whoever does this will make some money
because the ads, you can complain as much as you want,
but they do pay, right?
So if you get a developer that is interested in just money,
it could have happened or it should have happened already.
And it didn't for reasons that I cannot come towards.
But this is what we have.
I think this is the power of Nostro.
It keeps these types of, I don't want to call them dishonest platforms,
but less convenient platforms for users in check.
And hopefully we can keep that movement going.
well i think it's a reflection on the nasty user base right i think we developers are probably
scared of launching yeah anyone who's even had the thought uh is going to think twice before
launching an ad power platform most likely because of the pushback they're going to receive from the
Well, we have a Puritan, whether it's the culture of the value for value or open source FOSS, it's very contra to an ad powered thing that everyone's running from, I suppose.
And understand that it's just not the best way to do it.
So why start there when you're in this new frontier?
I don't know.
Yeah, my surprise is like, yeah, I understand that, but like no one?
Not a single one?
Yeah.
Like we have 300 clients.
Like it should have happened already and maybe still will.
Who knows?
And I frankly like I wish it did because I need to see somebody else
challenging us with the money that an ad-powered platform would bring that person.
You know what I mean?
If somebody can come in and get in revenues, in nostril revenues, about, you know, five
to ten million a year, that's a big team.
And they can crush us on just development side.
And if that kills the rest of us, you know, why are we even working here?
If that is what ends us all, we need to know it right away.
I think it will never kill us, but we need the test.
We need the challenge in our face to actually prove that an ad-based platform for Noster is a bad idea.
It's very similar to how the initial Bitcoin fork, the blockchain wars, block size wars happened in Bitcoin.
We had to have this other thing that proved to us that the block size is important.
And one of them won.
But, you know, now we have evidence to say that, you know, that that worked and this other thing did not work.
And we can move forward with the thing that actually worked.
Until we have that challenge, we're not really safe on us today.
I want to see that challenge happening and happening to the best they can to kind of kill us all, to see if we can actually survive.
well and and even having the option to turn ads on uh whereas you you you know we have micro
payments we have wallets set up to where you can actually receive a you know a micro payment for
even seeing that ad uh it's just something i mean i've seen that in other uh other apps or other
you know on the internet or you know you you just click through enough of them or i think even like
I don't know, Coinbase or something.
God forbid Coinbase.
But if you watch certain videos, they'd give you shit coins.
So it's just something that it seems like there's something there.
And having that ability to turn on and off is part of the big,
big core competency I think we have in Noster.
But yeah, I mean, it seems like there's definitely opportunity
and it doesn't have to be forced.
so next generation amethyst are we we ready no no no no no ads with us i see where we're going here
yeah yeah he's he's he's warming us up grease in the pipes yeah yeah one of the one of the items
actually uh put together in my list was on the jumbles side i don't know if you guys noticed but
Jumbo, this client for web, has a lot of forks.
And this is amazing to see to me, because I wanted that to happen to Amethyst,
and it never actually did.
We got like three or four forks on our lifetime.
But if forking is good, so if we can get that client,
if people are using forks of that client to add their own features to Noster
in such a way that they just end up experimenting with more things,
And I have seen some of those things now being merged back into the main Jumbo as a client.
That's an awesome movement because we want to see more of those forks.
We want to see more people testing and feeling confident enough that they can get a regular client out there and just fork it.
They change to their own liking.
And if it works, they succeed.
If it doesn't, they shut it off.
But they can actually do that.
They get some traction.
and Jumbo is such a cool project
that allows them to do in such an easy way
that it becomes a movement of testing new things
and experimenting and developing plugins and so on.
So I want to see more of that as well.
That could be interesting for the years to come.
Yeah, the Jumbo, I've heard so much about it
and I haven't used it.
I think it's something to jump into and take a look at.
For sure. Let's go back to something that worked in 2025, something that worked well.
Corn, what's the next item on your list?
Let's see. Next item on my list.
White noise.
So I have noticed, you know, coming at it from kind of just an end user scrolling on my feed, social, cultural kind of viewpoint.
I seem to see more appeal to musicians this year compared to previous years.
Not that it wasn't appealing, but it just seems like Noster has found a fit among musicians in addition to the other uses.
But that really excites me as a musician myself to see that.
We see more people posting signups, talking about posting their music on Wavelake, Fountain.
I know that, I think it was this year at the, what was it, the Nos Vegas after party.
There was a live stream stage.
Toonster has been, you know, streaming their stuff.
I keep seeing posts from Open Mic, you know, throughout the year, musicians.
I just think that's a great, I think it's a perfect fit, honestly.
Noster, Bitcoin, and music.
It's a match made in heaven.
but it's it's one of the aspects that has a ground game right it's it's one of those that uh you know
there's it's always a physical part of these events um you know we it's it's strong in nashville
from the costello family and open mic from the venues in uh minnesota i mean it's it's something
that it's the one facet that has like an actual ground game where you can uh feel it in real life
um Noster in real life and by the way the UK as well right I was impressed with the ground game
they have going there well me you know music is so there's a lesson we learned there sorry
you know music is so universal um
it connects us all in different ways you know we all have our types of music that we like but
music in general is pretty universally enjoyed no matter where you are.
And so having a way to openly connect musicians with their audiences,
with people that might want to discover new music,
and then to have a way just to instantly share your appreciation through a zap
back to that musician and knowing that it's going directly to them
and they're getting 100% of those proceeds,
it's an amazing thing to have available to us.
And so I hope that that trend continues.
But it seems like 2025 saw good support for that.
Victor, as a man who's probably added every NIP
that is in existence to Amethyst,
any music NIPs on your radar?
oh yeah we are finishing up one uh so i'm not sure if you guys know yak box from dark
they are these are little voice recordings that you can reply to each other and so on
these have are receiving now a new um new implementation um from one of our devs david
and that will redesign the player for music which we had trouble since the beginning because
for reasons beyond me,
you can't really find a good
music player for
Android libraries
that is native. So we had
to design it from scratch, and it
took us a while. But that
will open the door to more
music feeds
and more integrations with Amethyst
for sure. What I do
want to see, though, is
the use
of Nostrad and Shoals and
places where people are together and finding a way to do that do new things to help the concerts
to help you know people connect with each other help singing whatever needs to be done there i
want to see more clients focused on like this in-person activity that um that you can maybe
you can only find in a concert and and how to you know integrate with the musician go back and forth
you know play some games maybe you know have a huge display somewhere that people can participate
I think there is a blue ocean for tools to help people have a better experience or get a more digital experience while listening to the show, while being there with their friends and so on.
We were talking this morning with the other devs how there is a new nip now for Bluetooth communication, which BChat has been using and seems to be working kind of fine when people are at these numbers in a venue.
and maybe that's the way to go.
We just need to design an app that truly uses those technologies
and creates something new, something we have not seen,
not even in big tech, something that is just ours to cheer for.
And maybe the way to work is just doubling down in the concept
and these types of activities on the lack of other ones.
And we've seen that a little bit with the zap board or zappers boost.
Zap this and the disco ball turns.
Yeah.
And there's like little quirky things like that.
And the funny thing is like those things are so simple to code.
Maybe AI can even code this.
I don't even know.
But how much more of that can we do to enhance whatever that –
the feeling that the musician wants to provide to their audience?
Avi, how much traction
I mean, just
how much of the traction
that music has kind of gotten on Noster
could be
maybe
I don't know
do you think any of it coincides
with Richard Greaser's album
Drop, Doomsday DJ?
Well, he is a pioneer. He's a true pioneer.
Do we owe it all to him?
A lot of it.
Yeah. A lot of it. I do want to talk about, and I might seed this part to start with. I want to talk about what I'm looking forward to, one item I'm looking forward to in 2026.
And that is maybe building of a bridge between the RSS world and the NOSTA world It felt oddly and unnecessarily competitive up until now
There have been attempts to build bridges in the past.
Adam Curry in Open Mic did the show in Austin a year ago.
Unfortunately, I don't think that...
I mean, the show itself, I heard, was great, but the knock-on effect of the full Kumbaya between the worlds didn't quite materialize.
But I do see ways in which the value for value podcasting 2.0 and RSS crowd can work in a complementary way with NOSTA.
And I think part of it is for a lot of NOSTA folks to get away from this idea that everything has to be on NOSTA, like every layer of all stacks.
I think we can recognize that there are elements, especially if there are open protocols like RSS out there that are taking care of things like distribution, music distribution itself,
itself, that Gnoster can then sit on top of that, sit on top of RSS by first providing an identity
and reputation layer. And more importantly, I think, a contextual web of trust layer that allows
people to curate and discover music. And that's lacking, right? Just with our show in the last
couple of weeks, trying to find independent music to play has been a nightmare. There's Podcast
index, which has hundreds and thousands of songs, independent songs that are out there,
how do I find the one that I like? I need to go and find some person's recommendation who I may
or may not like, I mean, their taste of music. And it's a long process. With contextual web of
trust, I think a lot of that can be solved. So I'm hopeful that 2026, we will see a convergence,
maybe not a full-blown kumbaya, but a convergence, maybe even a truce between these two schisms.
The other aspect of key send versus Ellen URL needs to be bridged somehow. But that's actually
one of the things I'm looking forward to coming down the pike in 26. In theory, if you can get
that web of trust and you can get that, you know, the people you follow, this is what they listen to,
or this is, you know, this genre or this,
you can almost get kind of a Pandora type
value for value product.
I agree.
You can go one step further than that.
These three, then I'll give you these six type of thing.
Yeah.
But I think you could go even one step beyond
what Pandora could have possibly offered, Kedabi,
which is because of just the Nostra's portable identity
across apps, portable reputation as well across apps, right?
You can even segment your web of trust
to the ones whose musical taste you trust, right?
So you trust someone's taste in music,
you might not trust their taste in food or vice versa, right?
So I think Nostra offers you that.
So I think broader or sorry, more specific than,
hey, my friends are listening to this,
so let me listen to this.
it's actually going to be, hey, my friends whose musical taste I actually respect
are listening to this. So it probably means that I will actually like this.
The first time I thought about that was during our show with Sam. We were talking about Wave Lake
or maybe it was just my show with Sam. I don't know, but I was just, you know, you can, that
discoverability through web of trust is just a powerful one. But, you know, getting that web of
trust done right to where it's a universal approach is another aspect of it or angle.
Where do you think web of trust is at right now in regards to that?
Oh, let's ask Vitor.
In layman terms.
So the fun fact is that until this year, I believe, we really didn't have enough data
for web of trust to mean anything.
Because there's not enough, you know, no user users and there's not enough posts and there's not enough other stuff.
There's not a kind of client out there.
I think 2026 will be about Web of Trust because we now have the data.
We now have enough posts from a lot of different keys, enough different types of interactions.
You might think about, you know, just reactions and emojis and GIF button and the replies.
and so on, those are the base layer for Web of Trust.
But now we are starting to have labels and bots that are doing other things,
and they are trying to assign value to tweets, to posts, to calendar events, to everything on Oster.
And at some point, and I totally think right now we already have the data
to start making some of the smarter algorithmic marketplace
that we have dreamed about for so long.
For instance, Primal has a 24-hour trending algorithm.
If you go there and you ask for the feed,
your feed will be the same as mine on Primal.
And that is not how it's supposed to do it.
If I go to Primal, I should get the feed just for myself,
with my interests, and I don't want to see a global thing
that everybody is also seeing, right?
And I think we're getting to the point now that we do have the data
to get to that point, to actually do two or three different feeds
that truly match the customization that each user deserves on Noster
instead of just being this global thing that everybody will see.
But it's closer than ever.
you tell me you don't you you don't want my good morning post where i zap everyone uh 10 sats for
saying good morning back trending on the 24-hour primal i only like those on saturdays
that was a fun time huh dark nostrick it i believe dark nostrick uh but uh i think this
is a good time. We're just around the hour mark to go to our song segment. And folks, I hope your
speakers can handle some low end because we're taking a hard left turn into the 90s underground
or certainly something that sounds like it. If you grew up listening to Stone Temple Pilots
or Alice in Chains, if you missed that era where rock felt dangerous and sludgy,
you are going to lose your mind over this next track.
It's called Death Crown, and it's by a band,
by a Finnish grunge band called Polanski.
It's got that driving relentless bass line
and a vocal performance that feels like it's being broadcast
through a megaphone from a bunker.
It sounds like Seattle in 1993, but it's happening right now.
So let's go.
I
job right inside your
little mouth
a lesson
you get to see
you're going
nowhere
you
are not burning
bad
I never wanted
Any of that
Crospiring through
Not saying yet
I'm unable to
Shake this one off
How
There's a red moon
Rising
Mothers be deciding
Ooh yeah
You still need
These path crows
Cry
Mold at a time
Journey rocked and high
Collar
Take people lying
Wall
Push itself
And given a chance to fly
You were not burning bird
I never wanted any of that
Blood burning
Do not say, yeah, am I unable to shake this one up?
I'm hung up on your light, watching as you put us down.
Down
We be right back You
With a funny friend
Never wanted any of that
But funny blue that's sad
Am I unable to shake this one off?
I'm hung up on your life
We are hell
We'll lay us down
What's in half the days your
This said takes your crown
That was Death Crown by Polanski.
I mean, come on.
that vocal delivery is channeling Scott Whelan from the grave.
The way they put the distortion on the voice,
it sits right in the pocket of the mix
without getting buried by those guitars.
And the lyrics in the chorus, blood, money, lunatic.
If that isn't the perfect description of the central banking system,
I don't know what is.
It's heavy, it's angry,
and it's exactly the kind of energy we need
to bring back a massive shout out to Polanski for keeping that grit alive. I've got the 90%
split for the band set up in the chapter. So if you want to support blood money critics rather than
blood money printers, hit that rewind button, jump back a minute or two, and then hit that
boost button. Colin, you are a musician. What did you think? Oh, I loved it. It took me back to
when I was little, man, sitting in the car with my brother. I've got a brother that's like five
years older than me. And you mentioned Stone Temple Pilots and kind of that era. And man,
we were just riding around, cranking the music. And it was, I don't know, I just, I love that feel.
That was a great song.
Isn't it uncanny?
How they've channeled that?
Yeah, it was awesome.
Where'd you find that, Avi?
Well, it would have been so much easier
if I had contextual web of trust
already built and music curation and discovery.
This took me an hour to find,
just trolling through podcast index.
Just proof of search, they call it.
uh corn you ready for the acoustic version uh not to put you on the spot right now but
give the people what they want
yeah which are we need we need music duration and discovery i mean all i can think about this how do
i develop a client to get you to sing instead of just showing somebody else's music can we get that
can we make some a client that is that good yeah there is a there is a mereka which uh you can
clone your voice and it produces songs with your voice now we already has uh claude uh an interview
with himself so he's he's almost there just one step away so uh i think we were talking about one
thing the thing we're looking forward to so maybe con uh do you what is the item on your list what
are you looking forward to in 2026 um let's see here
well you know on the on the topic of music and just kind of zooming out a little bit from
there to content in general um you know i i'm looking forward to more features
that empower and enable artists, creators, musicians, writers, whatever it may be.
I think zap splits are huge.
It's something you were talking about with the boost splits.
With podcasts, that's kind of a thing.
But I think I would love to see that more integrated into Noster clients
where we could define a split between incoming Zaps.
And, you know, so maybe part of that could go to support a co-author
or a band member or an app developer, you know,
where we want to kind of divide out that support that's coming in
for the content that people are posting.
So Zap splits, you know, maybe a subscription option for creators.
maybe there's even some app teams that have the funds to sponsor some artists to to kind of create
and and bring in more users and and form form some kind of partnership there and but yeah i would
just love to see more features geared around creators artists content because i really think
that's where we're going to find
user growth,
that stickiness where people want to keep coming
back and engaging with
their favorite artists with each other
around that content.
Vitar,
how quickly can you
code that up? I don't know. Give me two weeks.
What are your thoughts on that?
Let me check
the calendar. We can do the release date here.
I would need some AI help, though.
which is on my list for things to watch in 2026.
I truly hope the AI that we are seeing right now evolves to a stage where,
and it fits the Nostra ecosystem so well,
that an AI colder can kill something like Amethyst,
can just make something way better than what we have ever done.
I don't think we are that far.
And if I had to bet, I think it will happen.
It's just a matter of time and if it is 2026 or not.
But if we can get to the point where...
Nostar is already a very...
It encourages you to develop small applications.
If we can get to the point where AI can just produce this for us,
and maybe the music app from Korn is one of the ideas,
we are going to be in a better place,
even if all of our current clients go bankrupt,
because it's going to be so much better.
And I hope we get to that future sooner rather than later.
So if we can get there, if we can just tune these models
and make sure they can output something compliant with the NIPs
that will work most of the time,
that doesn't have any of the issues we see today,
we are going to be gold.
we're going to pass anything else that is out there
because there is nothing that can interoperate like we do.
So all we need is to get the creativity from, frankly, users,
not only devs, and get them to actually output an app that they like,
that matches whatever they want to do.
And it doesn't have any of the egos or the background
that devs today have.
Has there been a breakout AI app
Fully vibe-coded app?
Because what I'm seeing is some interesting experiments
That inevitably become abandonedware
Yeah, that is the problem of today
It's just too many experiments and not enough products
Coming out from an AI kind of infrastructure
And I don't know if it's going to change in the short term
but I do hope it does change by the end of next year
that we can actually get something real,
that something that you can just deploy with one button
and people can use and not have any bugs
or have a minimal amount of bugs that at least makes it workable
and then you can fix the rest of it.
I don't think we're that far.
But it looks far just because we have seen so much crap coming in.
But, you know, I'm still hopeful.
I'm still hopeful that they're going to figure this out somehow.
And we're going to have, in a similar way that chess engines can play better than any human,
and your phone can beat the best chess players in the world kind of thing,
we're going to see the same for coding.
And if that happens, then I do think Noster wins.
Because the structure we have behind for AI to build is just so much better.
so the devs the devs just need to do something avi well the devs need some love you know
i i just had a just had an idea as he was saying that btor i think the way you solve that is if um
if to the the process to get an api key from any ai model right now all ai models would have to
including open source ones would have to somehow universally implement this But to get an API key you actually had to pass a coding test And only then you get the key to use the model
Maybe that might, that'll at least filter out a lot of the,
or it'll ensure that a large number of people who are Vibe coding are actually devs
or with some developer background.
Sort of bug fixability?
Yeah, something like that.
It's like a driving test in some sense, right?
You don't want someone who's never driven a car to suddenly get in and start driving a car.
So who is going to test the testing AI?
Well, that's...
The other problem is you need...
As I'm saying it, I'm realizing there's several holes here.
Every single AI model ever created, which provides API access, will have to enforce this.
Otherwise, someone's going to use one of those non-enforcing AIs to complete the coding test.
Yeah, there are problems there.
But the point is, I think...
A web of trust for these APIs, you know.
Uh-huh.
Some sort of experiment, some sort of, you know, you've accomplished a few things
before you can grant.
You leveled up until it unlocked,
like you're a role player or something.
Like if you're in a role-playing game,
you can't put a certain armor on
until you're a certain level, you know?
So maybe that's just it.
You gain your experience,
and one day you can reach this API
that you've always coveted.
All right.
So, Vitor, was that one of the things you were looking forward to in 26?
At least I'm hopeful that this will get there by the end of the next year.
We'll see.
And hopefully, like, if that works, then I'm not going to be here anymore.
So, you know, this is the last year.
I don't think.
I just think 2026, we should, I mean, I would like to see.
more just more cohesion just like we saw with the streaming just like we saw in Nostra in general
like I want to see better dms I want to see you know I don't want to have to leave to go to
telegram or you know signal or you know keet or what you know if I can just do everything in
one ecosystem that's in one interface and jump around that that's great I mean yeah I don't mind
having extra apps but you know if i'm truly gonna be present on nostr it's nice to just be present on
one interface in my opinion uh but you know that's it yeah and that dms was on my list of
the disappointing things of 2025 uh no let's talk about that same man this should have worked
already like last year,
but we are not fast enough to make this work.
The whole migration from NIPO 4 to NIP 17 was strange.
And I do think that we need to make DMs
like a first-class citizen on NOSTER
to truly give NOSTER the power it needs
to boost the social network we all want to have in there.
Like we need DMs.
There is no way Nostar can survive without DMs.
So we just need to actually come down to code and get this done
and make it so that people can actually receive DMs, send DMs,
and see images and it's all encrypted as it should be.
And at least the biggest clients don't have any issues with it,
but we are not there today.
gone since it was on your list as well your thoughts yeah i just simply wrote it down as
dms still suck and i just i can't use nostr dms you know occasionally i'll i'll get a message or
send a message here and there but it's not reliable you don't know if the person's going to see it
um and then the message is just kind of hanging out there you don't really know what to do with
Usually I use Nostradiems in order to connect with somebody on Signal or Telegram or something.
So I would love to see that get better.
I wrote a post on this just a couple weeks ago saying that on Android, actually, the NIP 17 kind of works.
Most of us talk in NIP 17.
but if I need to talk to anyone using desktop or iOS
then I need to use Signal
because nothing works on the other side
so that has been disappointing to see
and together with this DM need
there is a fraction of this space
which is this workspace kind of ecosystem
where you just want to get together in a private space
with your co-workers or their friends or their family and so on
and you kind of want to do something together
similar to the Slack model or Discord
or these apps that try to bring people together
to delivering goals and so on.
Very corporate, very focused on getting things done
kind of thing.
We haven't seen much development there too
and that will be important for us.
We cannot go back to using Slack and so on
just because we have a company now
and we need to communicate
and there is no way to use any nostril client
to do this well.
We need to figure that out.
It might not be part of the DM NIP per se,
like technically speaking is different,
but in my mind for users, it's the same interface.
It's the same thing.
Like we need to figure that out somehow.
Yeah, the user doesn't care what's happening behind the hood.
They just need DMs that work without leaking their privacy.
Yeah.
So there's obviously talk about the Marmood protocol
and then White Noise as the reference client,
the first reference client for that.
And we had Max Hillebrand on the show a couple of weeks back
or about a month back saying, look, just wait until June.
Each release is going to get slightly more stable,
but sometime in the summer next year is when we can expect
to see something reasonable.
Have you looked at that code base at all
or talk to that team at all?
I'm sure they've reached out to you
for integrating Marmot into Amethyst.
Yes.
The thing I don't like about this story
is that building a GM client,
even for groups,
shouldn't be this hard
to get something working.
And I don't know,
maybe the stack is too hard,
maybe MLS is too hard to code,
but it is taking too long
which is giving me the crypts.
Because if for them it's hard to code,
imagine integrating every single client out there.
It's not going to be easy.
So clients like Amethyst and maybe Demons and Primal
can try to do it.
But then what about all the others?
Like what about these upstreams of the world
that want DMs on their space?
Like how long will it take for them
to merge something like this?
You know, if you have smaller clients
that the developer doesn't have a lot of time,
because Nostar focuses so much on smaller clients,
or it should at least,
it's hard for me to imagine that being successful.
But the protocol itself is great.
The securities that it brings are great.
I'm just concerned that this might be one of those cases
that the spec or the protocol
or the combination of all factors becomes so complicated
that it's really hard to get interoperability to the point we want in Nostra
in such a way that people don't need to use white noise
to actually GM in the same standard, in the same interoperable interface.
Because that's what we want as Nostra, right?
We want multiple clients, hopefully hundreds of clients.
And I don't know how widespread can that be, you know?
And there's Marty Malmy working on the double ratchet at his end,
which was guaranteed not to interoperate with Marmot
because it's just a completely different encryption scheme.
And it's also kind of complicated.
It also requires you to,
I believe it requires you to move some other secrets
from one client to another.
So if you are on Amethyst and you want to stop using Amethyst
and start using Primo or Demos,
you kind of need to migrate your DMs to this new place somehow.
So, yeah, it works.
It's more secure.
They're definitely right about that.
But it also goes against the simplicity that we want to just have these applications be implemented very easily in a way that anyone can do it or the AI can do it.
Imagine AI coding in Marmot.
It's like this is going to go crazy in so many ways because it's so big.
And, you know, I think they have a good heart.
They're trying to do a library that anyone can just use and so on.
But libraries are tricky because then you create something like a Bitcoin core kind of thing that you have to use there.
That stuff to use Bitcoin, you can't have another client, you can't have other things.
And that centralization is not something I think in Nostra we want to see.
Maybe I'm wrong.
And I want them to succeed, don't get me wrong.
I want them to actually ship something that works and kind of amaze us all by how good this MLS protocol is.
But they haven't proven that yet.
And I'm concerned that it's taking way too long for them to prove something that should be simpler than that.
Gone.
I think you're fresh out of luck, my friend.
2026 is not looking too hot for DMs.
I think I'll survive.
Honestly, I would be happy, just as happy,
if the entire DM feature was removed from the apps
until something's figured out.
But, yeah, it's not a feature I like to use.
All right, Con.
So let's do one last one.
Maybe we do one last one on the negative side, which is maybe we pick culture.
What in Nostra culture could have gone better over 2025?
I don't know if you have anything on your list.
And then we'll just finish off on a positive note.
You're asking for me?
Yeah, for Yukon, yeah.
Okay, so let's see.
We talked about discoverability.
culture side. You know, I don't know if this is just a function of the people I follow,
or if it's, you know, kind of the general, I almost hate to use the word vibe. Vibe coding
has ruined the word vibe for me. But the general vibe, you know, I don't know. I felt like Noster
in 2025 became a bit
cliquish
and that may
be a result of
needing better discoverability
better ways to find
new people and new content to follow
but you know
it just seems like there's a few groups
that congregate
in the Noster sphere with each other
and if you're part of those groups
you are having a good time.
And if you're not, you're trying to find your place.
And maybe that's just a human thing too.
That's kind of how it ends up being in real life.
But Noster felt click-ish, if that makes sense, in 2025.
And I don't see that as a positive.
Yeah, like you don't think having a bunch of Noster High Councils out there is positive.
i don't know you know people i mean i will i will zoom out on that though because if if it could you
know i always i can't help it um because i'm looking at culture through the bitcoin lens
the pleb culture uh pioneer culture uh we've definitely evaded i felt like uh nostre was
definitely a safe space from the bitcoin twitter strategic reserve bitcoin treasury all the kind of
the things you can kind of see through as a,
someone that's been through the ups and downs of,
of cycles.
And,
and I don't know,
I felt like we kind of held strong on that and that we still are.
So in that way,
we kind of are a bigger,
we are a click in itself versus the Bitcoin Twitter type of mythology.
So I don't know.
I kind of like that aspect.
One of the things I noticed on the last,
I'd say months or so, is this notion of we're coming into the first round of I have to shuffle my follows kind of thing in Noster.
So this happened to me on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram as well.
But like after the third or fourth year, those people that were there with you are either not there anymore or they're not interesting anymore.
because you grew up out of that space or because something else happened,
but you were still looking at those same posts over and over again.
So it just phases out, and you have to kind of reconnect
and restart your circle of follows.
And I hope we can develop some tools to help people refresh
what they have been seeing on Oster and kind of discover new content,
find new friends, and find new interests.
because in the end, the main issue of platforms like Noster
is that we declare our follows early on.
And in the first three or four months or so,
we are discovering a lot of cool people that we engage with.
And after a while, we stop doing that
and we just use what we made on the follow list.
And then after two or three years, you yourself is going to change
And you need new friends, new follows, new interests, new things showing up.
And I think we are in the first wave of like now we need to transition people that have been with us for three years into some type of new follow structure.
And help them out, figure out new interests and new things and make them, you know, get them to build new things together with each other.
Either for fun or for work.
But that process is cyclical and will happen again.
So we need to enhance our tooling to get them to actually go through it nicely.
I think it would be cool if our apps, our client apps, instead of showing us how many followers we have, if there was a way to more easily navigate or see who we are interacting with, what content we are interacting with.
I mean, I kind of know from day to day who I see in my notifications or who I'm replying to on a regular basis.
But I think having a way to really see that in front of my face and create a list of those accounts, those people, because it's probably people that I'm not following.
But if I'm interacting with them all the time, I probably want to.
but it's just a little tedious and time-consuming to do that manually.
So I think if the focus could shift from followers
to who am I being social with on a regular basis,
if I could see that information, that would be awesome.
Web of Trust fixes this, Vito.
Yep, yeah.
And then you realize that you have been talking to a Japanese person all along, and they use Nostar very differently than what we use.
So you're going to start following them, and you don't understand anything that they're talking about because it's just half.
The context for their conversations is not on the tweet.
So you have to actually follow their structure to understand what they're saying.
That's a major issue there.
I will say on the topic of followers, this was probably the first year where, and this is around
the Nostra is dead stuff that was happening sometime in the summer. I actually did have to
kind of dig deep and get rid of clean up a lot of my followers a lot of the sorry rather the people I was following Clean that up and then follow several more fresh endpubs
Because the old ones, the stale ones, I think they just disappeared.
And then my timeline was largely empty.
So I had to actually make a very conscious effort to do that.
And it helped.
certainly helped
in at least
in repopulating my feed if nothing else
yeah and I think people that couldn't do that
end up just leaving Nostrum
if they didn't figure out how to do that
how to find new friends
they end up getting to the stage
where just like you said my feed is kind of stale
and or I don't care
about these things as much anymore
then
if you don't have the tools in front of you
to just press a button, kind of change things around.
You might just leave.
All right.
Let's do, maybe go back to you, Korn,
and maybe we'll do a quick one of what went well in 2025,
and if you have a related one, what you're looking forward to in 2026.
And if not, they could be two separate things.
Let's do that.
let's see, went well in 2025.
Okay, I already covered that one.
Well, I just had that, you know, we did, we had,
we still had several NOSTER focused events and meetups.
We saw NOS Vegas, which was the after party,
I believe at the Bitcoin conference.
NOSTER Asia, I remember seeing all over the feed.
Nostrebama I heard about quite a bit. And then probably a lot of others that I just don't have,
didn't come to mind. And I think looking forward into 2026, I would love to see more focus on
that kind of culture, artists, content creators. You know, we have a lot of really talented people,
even though we're a small user base
we do have a lot of really talented people
merchants, we have a ton
of small merchants making
and selling crafts or
soap or wine
all kinds of stuff
and so I would love to just
see kind of that focus
on
really enabling and empowering them
in those meetups
in those live settings
giving that connection
to the rest of Nostr.
But yeah, I would just love to see more of that.
Yeah, the meatspace convergence.
And I think that actually is something
I'm looking forward to as well.
And I've seen enough evidence of that.
Like, you know, with these Nostr storefronts
like Shopster, like Conduit,
like Plebeon, which is just being relaunched
and with NIP99, essentially.
I think we're going to see a lot more of those products and services
permeating at meetups and elsewhere.
I think a couple of the Meetspace meetups you missed, Korn,
there was Nostashire in Manchester.
There was Nostaville at Bitcoin Park.
I can't remember if you said Nostavalle.
There were a lot more, and I think we'll see.
I am looking forward to certainly physical embassies for Bitcoin and Nostra like PubKey,
like the Cyphermunk House in London, like Bitcoin Park, like the,
well, there's some things cooking in Austin as well. Maybe I'll just leave it at that for now.
And I suspect we will see a lot of that. And that is something to definitely look forward to,
right? These physical embassies, these meatspace locations where Nostrages can come together,
maybe even safe spaces to do exchanges or whatever it might be, right?
Sometimes you need walls for certain conversations and certain transactions.
And a lot more, just cultural gatherings, music events, and so on.
Certainly something to look forward to.
Vitor, something that went well this year.
and if you have a related one, something to look forward to or it could be unrelated.
Well, something we did that I'm extremely proud of from Amethyst
is that we shipped a version in the middle of the year
that moved the client from a static relay list to an outbox model.
But we did in such a way that allowed Amethyst to connect to thousands of relays in one session.
So if you log into Amethyst right now and you are following enough people, Amethyst will connect to up to 1,000 different relays to pick the events from each one of them.
And that was innovative enough to me because everybody told me that that couldn't work, that you can't get a phone to connect to 1,000 relays, 1,000 servers.
That doesn't work.
It's going to use too much data.
the android is going to kill you for that or you're going to use too much battery and there
are too many issues around it and it turns out we can actually do that so to me it enables a new
phase of Noster that I really want to see moving forward which is this more self-hosting things
especially for creators especially for say things like dms and in your own posts maybe a blossom
server, maybe self-hosting from the client itself.
We were talking just this morning on how Amethyst could help you set up.
Instead of helping you set up relays that already exist and just put the relay on your
list, we could actually have screens that in one or two buttons, we can deploy a server
for you with that fully set up that you can control your posts or DMs or files.
And I think that notion, that new level of, like, well, now we can actually talk to all of these personal servers out there, and apps would figure out how to make things work, is new.
And I want to explore more of that.
okay, let's see how far in the decentralization spectrum we can take Nostar from the centralized relays we have today,
which is decentralized enough, but we could do better,
and to a point where maybe each user has their own relays,
and they keep full control over their data.
There is nobody that's going to delete their results or create fake web of trust results for them
or sell ads based on that inference So I think the future is bright from that side And it always for from you know a myth that we all the devs all knew that we couldn make this work um before the middle of the year
i think the highest number of relays any client would connect to is 50 which is definitely not
enough for this level of decentralizations where where every person has a personal server or a
personal relay in the cloud.
And we could do this as a NIP.
We could have a client that helps you deploy servers,
and you don't need to have any computer knowledge for that.
You just have to have the willingness to pay.
It's very similar to what Albi and AlbiHub is doing these days,
but instead of doing just a hosting server that the company controls,
Noster clients that are fully decentralized
could get you an account at AWS or Google Cloud or Microsoft
or some of the other providers you would choose
and ship your own relay there.
Send all your data over there.
Set up your profile in that way.
And all of your other clients will look for your data in your server.
So if you're being attacked in any way,
or if you are being censored by anyone,
you can just put your own server up.
And it's going to be much better from a freedom perspective
than what we have until the middle of the year or so.
And one of those things could be like a web of trust service provider
that each person can deploy for themselves.
So they not only fully control the algorithm that this thing is running, because they can just speak into a different server, but they also control the operational capacity of that server.
Meaning there is no company that can get in between those two and start tracking people or, you know, having shady business practices with people's data.
And that's going to be like, I think, a new epoch for NOS as an ecosystem.
We're going to have a new age of decentralization if that works.
Love it.
So if I had to summarize this entire conversation,
2026 is going to be the year of web of trust.
It's going to be the year of curation and discovery.
It's going to be the year of music.
It's going to be the year of live streaming.
It's going to be the year of shopping
and the convergence of the physical and the digital.
but one thing it is not going to be is the year of the dm is that fair oh no i i have hopes i have
hopes you know i i'm a hopeful person that or or gif keyboard yeah
please the different the different keyboard definitely like you know forget about it
dms are easier than the gif keyboard
at least you came out with the you came out with the first interpretation though vitor i'll give
that you did you did add uh some sort of gif keyboard oh fabian did
vitar and fabian are the only ones who fabian with nostor
like every time i post a gif i have to go to nostor to do it and you know the funny thing is it's he
And he has had that in his app since, I think, like early 2023.
I mean, basically since he started putting the app out there.
So honestly, when it all first came up, I just thought, oh, okay, cool.
Fabian figured it out, and there's probably a couple other apps that might do it.
Hey, we need this.
And then it kind of took on a life of its own.
And I don't know.
I do love posting GIFs, but it's kind of more symbolic of just the user needs, user wants, whatever you want to call it, you know, versus whatever is on the developer's roadmap.
And, you know, where do those...
To be fair, I was surprised by the defensiveness of, like, we are not going to do this.
Or, like, we don't have time for this.
And I'm like, this is just a fucking button.
And it's like, what's the issue here?
Anyway.
Well, GIFs, don't you know, Vitor, unruggable GIFs.
That's what we need.
The scourge of GIF ruggings that the world has faced.
I did learn today, at least this is based on what AI told me,
that using GIFs on social media and in messaging apps
is apparently a very millennial thing.
And I don't typically identify as a millennial.
I'm kind of in that generation that's on the edge
between millennial and Gen X.
But apparently that's my millennial side coming through
that I want to have GIFs.
So I don't know if I'm okay with that or not.
Well, we created the memes.
Right, yeah.
We've got to own it.
So maybe, Con, that puts things in a new light.
Maybe these people were looking out for you.
They were trying to let you hold on to your honorable Gen X roots
rather than sliding into millennial decadence.
That's it. That's it.
I still want it, though.
I still want it.
I'm happy that Fabian's app gives it to me.
I would love to have it in every app, but there are.
Next year, AI is going to do that for you.
Hey, there you go.
Yeah.
It's just like they generate the gift from scratch.
It's like they don't need to use other people's pictures.
Avi, don't let me hijack if you're taking this in a different direction.
But Vitor, you mentioned AI,
and that's one of the things I actually meant to put on my list of looking forward to.
I would love to see more integration with AI into Nostre clients.
And I don't know exactly the right fit for that.
But I do still use X to follow news and certain political accounts and that kind of thing.
And the integration with Grok into X, I have found it useful.
whether it's researching a post or usually that's kind of how I use it.
But I have found it very useful.
And I would love to see something like that in a Noster client
where if there's a post that we want to dig into more on that topic,
we could do that with just the click of a button
and not having to switch to a new app.
Is that something that is a good idea people are working on?
Or what are your thoughts?
People are working on it I think some clients try to integrate these APIs The issue is that you know Grok is free right
Otherwise, for us, it will be paid.
So you get some value out of Twitter just because they're giving it away for free kind of thing.
The same as if you use Google on their system, on Google Search, for instance.
But if you use Google from a Nostar client, then you have to pay.
And then it becomes like, you know, a $10 to $20 a month kind of thing.
And then the equation of is this useful to me or not at the cost of $10 a month changes things.
And I think people are not super happy about those price points.
And the flip side, I think people have been trying to do local AIs as well.
So download the model and run it locally or run it in the relay.
and then you have more interesting data to go through.
But they are not good.
These AIs are lacking so much.
And you ask basic questions and they do not know how to respond to it.
So I don't know exactly what's missing there.
Personally, what I hate, I actually don't like the chat interface for AI.
For all the things I have used AI for, the chat is my least interesting option.
You know, when I'm coding and that is AI integrated on my editor, AI would just give something to me.
It's like I'm coding something and then suddenly there is a button that says, oh, you're doing this wrong.
Do this in this other way.
Or, you know, maybe rephrase this line to mean something else because your code is not matching the variable name kind of thing.
so it's kind of like running in the background automated and it just pops in when it feels like
it can help me to me that is a way more interesting use of ai than having to ask and having to reply
and have to review your prompt because you didn't really get enough information you need you didn't
really give enough information to the ai in the first place so it's it's i don't like that back
and fourth of the chat.
If we can make it work with like integrated in our interfaces
with more context in some tweets, for instance,
or I think Brock does this with some extra information
for tweets, for instance,
but it should work with pictures, with videos,
with everybody else, right?
Like translations, for instance, is a big one
that we do with a model that now is like 15 years old
to translate text.
and it works okay-ish.
The new models that are LLM-based work so much better,
but they all need a server to work.
And that means that your, say, your DMs,
if your client has DMs and you need translation,
the tax on your DMs is going to the server and back.
And that, to me, is a big no-no.
Like, you cannot leak that information to other folks.
So to me, personally, it has to run locally.
And that is a challenge because phones just do not have the power right now to run those AI models.
But maybe someday it works and we can find a way to integrate it really well or in a way that is free like Twitter does.
I think that does sound like the challenge though, right?
How can you do it in a way that's free and private?
On X, it's neither, right?
it's yes grok is convenient but you're being completely harvested um and you know it's free
in the sense that actually is grok free with the non-premium x accounts code i think you need a
blue check to use grok no i don't think i don't think if you're just asking like if you're looking
at an individual post on the app at least there's a little grok button and you can hit it and it'll
Kind of give you extra context.
I don't know at what point.
I have to use the Plist Grok without having an account.
It works and it replies great.
It replies like Gemini.
So they have the full model running there.
I'm not sure how to afford that from a client's perspective.
Yeah.
That is a challenge.
All right, folks.
We are approaching getting close to the two-hour mark.
I think it's been a great conversation.
and I think we ended on a positive note
even though I had to use the words X in grok,
but that's okay.
It's Twitter.
It's not X.
I refuse to say X.
Agreed.
It is hard.
QW, any closing thoughts?
Closing thoughts is every year,
last year, the year before,
year next year year after i see the news i see the stuff going on right now and the only
the big solution to everything is more surveillance more uh censorship uh remember while we're here
freedom tech uh for the next generation uh my son is playing the guitar in the background so uh
Build him some tools to play his guitar on.
Well, if he zapped that, 90% of the boosts will go to him.
If he boosts that.
Say, keep building.
Yeah, there you go, buddy.
Keep building for them.
That's it.
Excellent.
Well, the show will continue.
The show will go on.
This is not the last show of the year.
There will be a show next year.
Unfortunately, QW will be back.
to his hiatus.
At some point, that hiatus will end
and it'll be back to regularly scheduled programming.
But there will be a show next Friday
and a show the Friday after that on the 2nd of January.
Korn and Vitor, thank you for joining.
Thank you for sharing all your list of items,
what went well, what could have gone better
and what you're looking forward to.
I think there is overwhelmingly a lot to look forward to in 2026.
Thanks for having us, and we will keep coding until morale improves.
Yes, thank you very much, Avi and QW.
And Korn will keep memeing until morale improves.
Or until I need those.
Hopefully it improves morale.
I think I have the opposite effect sometimes.
I might have to come after you again sometime soon.
And thank you all for listening to this episode.
I hope you're doing it on a value for value podcasting 2.0 app such as Fountain.
And if you are on Fountain, we would appreciate it.
if you hit that subscribe button.
Your support goes a long way
in keeping this show sovereign.
That is all.
Until next week, goodbye.
Goodbye.