Welcome to PlebChain Radio, a live show brought to you by Plebs for Plebs, which focuses on
the intersection of Nostra and Bitcoin protocols.
Join QW and Avi as they run down the weekly news and developments, breaking down the current
thing in the future frontier with the foundation of decentralization, the builders, thinkers,
doers and plebs.
Alright we are live!
Welcome gentle plebs to episode number 25 of PlebChain Radio.
Today is Friday, August 25th, it is 6.30pm on the east coast, 5.30pm Central time where
I am today, Austin, Bed Block Boom.
And we have a great show ahead of you today.
We have the folks from the Stemster team, not Henry, Rock, Roberto and Ben joining us
to talk about all things Stemster and perhaps Nostra and Bitcoin as well.
But first, for our weekly sermon, QW, take us away.
Yeah well first of all, how is BitBlock Boom?
You've been to a few events, can you just contrast it a little bit?
Yeah, it is a very different conference from the bigger ones, like Miami or even Prague
for that matter, which is Miami this year was around 10,000 people, the previous year
was 30,000, Prague was closer to 10,000 I think.
So Bed Block Boom is about 5 or 600, something along those lines, very different conference,
but in a good way.
It feels intimate, you could talk to people, there are about 10 or 15 different stalls,
so it's not overwhelming, within three or four minutes you can just walk around all
the stalls, talk to the different folks who are here.
And then it's a nice seating area, it's not a traditional auditorium style seating where
it's all lined up, it's actually tables, almost like a wedding banquet hall.
And you can sit at a table with four or five people and then there's several such tables
and then you listen to the speaker.
So I've liked it, this is the first Bed Block Boom I've been to, everything I've heard
about past versions of this has been glowing and today was the first proper day of the
conference, some really good talks.
Guy Swan had a fantastic one to kick us off this morning on AI and Bitcoin, a match made
in cyberspace where he really hopped on how open source AI is winning, is going to take
us into the future there.
And some other really good talks, there's one on beef and regenerative cattle farming,
beauty on how to, very interesting one on recontextualizing Bitcoin.
So it's been a great conference so far, KW.
Good, and that's the, isn't that the oldest, is that the oldest conference?
I think Baltic Honey Badger might be the oldest.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, great man, well I'm happy that you're here, I know these are always exhausting trips
for you so I'll try to keep up.
So in talking with like the theme of our show, Collaborative Communities, you know, just
zooming out and kind of how it's been for me looking at Nostar since December, just
looking at the open source projects, the competition from all the projects, all the clients, but
all have this, is it really competition if we all share the same goals, you know, and
that's really the freedom tech.
You know, it's amazing to see everything kind of being built because we're right here with
the devs.
Basically, we're seeing the communication, we might not see their off chats, but you
know, we have an open field of communication where, you know, the users and the devs and
everybody kind of working towards these goals can communicate together.
You know, we get some times where you're like, are people upset?
Did they have, did someone that chose, choose violence this morning?
You know, but that just leads to healthy debates.
And really it starts to establish consensus over time.
I know, you know, I've just never been a part of something like this.
And I think it's very inspiring as a whole when you can have contributors coming from
all over the world, sharing the same goal and building together.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, I think the contrast between this and the Fiat world couldn't be more stark.
Right.
In the Fiat world, everything feels completely zero sum, meaning if someone's winning,
it typically means someone else is losing as a result of that.
Right.
It's certainly not a positive sum game.
You're always winning at the, to the detriment of someone else.
Over here, it's, if we win, or if someone wins, right, if someone builds a fantastic product,
it grows and improves the protocol, which means other products and applications that
are being built on that protocol also benefit from that growth.
So there's a, this is a positive sum scenario we find ourselves in, and that just leads
to happier people, right?
And yes, we get into bigger debates, some like to your point, QW, someone wakes up and chooses
violence, cough, cough, corn, corn to lorry, on occasion.
But that said, it's, you know, it leads to, I mean, I'll give an example.
I think just over the last few days, we saw some healthy back and forth between folks
around primals, trending algorithm, right?
But at the end of the day, it was a healthy debate that came out of it.
I thought Milger and made some, some excellent arguments in favor, and then there were some
really good counterpoints against it.
So we see several such examples of that.
Yeah, and you're referring to the client wars 2.0, you know, and with that said, I mean,
we're all, we're all building, I mean, they're, they're, you know, Milgen's still building,
you know, we're over here picking apart the, you know, we're the inspectors while they're
framing the house, you know what I mean?
So we're going to, we're going to point to the thing that doesn't have a 90 degree angle.
You know, so maybe, maybe there's a bigger picture that we're missing, but you know, I
think it is important and it's beautiful in a way to be able to see this being built.
And we have our, our sale along the way.
You know, when you look at, and when I say client or 2.0, 1.0 was by tour and will, Domus
and Amethyst.
It was a beautiful thing.
And what did we see this week?
We saw, we saw Domus introduce your status.
So you're just putting something, you know, I'm, I'm live right now on PCR or I'm going
to get something to eat, whatever it is, it's in, it's in your profile and you can link
to something.
So let's say Lynn Alden selling a book, she can say, Hey, check out my new book and here's
the link to it.
So it's kind of a cool feature.
It was an, it was an amazing feature, but only Domus was having the fun.
So what did, what did Vitor do?
He, he, you know, Derek Ross says, Hey, can we get this?
And within two, he instantly says, I'm working on it now.
Within two days, they have it.
So it's something where if something is good for the community, eliminate the competition
in it and we grow together.
So it's, it's, it's, I think that's a very important part of this.
Cause when you get the fiat out of this, we're all going to the common goal.
At the end of the day, the more people that come to this protocol, the better we're all
going to be.
You know, community leads to culture, leads to adoption.
And that's ultimately what we want in this world is adoption because once adoption happens,
then, you know, all bets are off.
We have our freedom.
We have our way.
You know, I, I personally think value for value is only going to work with mass adoption.
It's going to have to be micro payments everywhere.
It's going to have to be, you know, you can't just lean on a few heavy bags and say, you
know, donate to this, donate to that.
It's got to be a decentralized effort of micro payments, you know,
There is an other angle to this QW and completely agree with everything you say, but value for
value and I'll give a specific example of something I've seen just today at BitBlockBoom
where it doesn't have to be sat in exchange for some other value, right?
It can be something intangible of value that can be exchanged.
So I was talking to the person who's TC, the person who's developed time chain calendar,
if you haven't seen it, you should definitely go and check it out.
Time chain calendar is a great rendering of different data points about that, about the
Bitcoin time chain, BlockHeight, certainly being one of them, but several other points,
right?
It's, it's rendered beautifully on the website.
And I was talking to TC and at the conference, he has, you know, on the screens as a speaker
is speaking, there's the time chain calendar website with the BitBlockBoom logo in the
middle, right?
Almost like, it's like advertising space, right?
But he has BitBlockBoom right in the middle there.
He didn't have to pay for that, as you would think in the traditional fiat world, right?
If there is, if you're getting your brand out there, you need to pay someone to do that.
But he's providing this beautiful rendering of the time chain and its data and in exchange,
he's getting this brand recognition.
So he didn't have to pay Sats, but or Gary, the organizer didn't have to pay him for,
you know, the art that he creates.
Instead, he got brand recognition and returns.
So we're seeing the beginnings of a flywheel effect form here.
Yeah.
And we've talked about this, you know, not to give anything away, but that's what the
article I've been, I've never written an article before.
I was going to post something to oblinews.news about kind of the flywheel effect.
And what we're going to call it is the pleb wheel, of course.
Really it's about kind of taking all these things that we have, giving to each other
without monetization to increase exposure as a whole.
So kind of bringing that culture in, you know, I'll leave it there because, but what really
got me was the Wave Lake episode where lightning store decided to drop a t-shirt on us.
So PlubChain Radio.
Well he decided, okay, well, you know, I'm going to do this, this t-shirt for our show
and we're going to do a limited run, but the, all the proceeds.
So the funds, not profit, but funds are going to go to PlubChain Radio.
Well I took the funds and I funded.
I'm looking to promote it on Fountain.
I'm looking to promote his brand.
But ultimately we start to see a wheel form of just advertising for each other, promoting
each other, becoming a community and keeping all the sats within.
Really a circular economy that, you know, the one thing that scares us and we're all
using it is time, but we're doing that for, for the better tomorrow.
So you know, we'll see how this all adds up, but there's going to be more about that coming.
Yep.
Watch the space for the PlubReal.
Anything else, QW?
That's it.
You know, I think it's time for corn to drop us some knowledge on the lightning round.
Hey, good evening.
Going to try to silence the children for the 10 minutes here.
The younglings.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
She's watching cartoons now.
I think she's good.
So the toothache went away with cartoons.
Yeah, I don't know what it was.
I didn't see anything in her mouth.
I'm hoping it's not, but we'll see.
So yeah, we had some, some news this week.
Some things happened on Noster as tends to be the case.
Block boom, Avi, you're there right now.
I haven't really seen much about that on Noster.
I know Gary is on Noster had promoted, you know, some speakers and a few announcements
leading up to it, but haven't really seen much posted about it.
I've been trying to find things to share.
So hopefully we can come across some, some information and posts.
Yeah, corn.
Real quick.
The interesting thing that happened yesterday was Parker Lewis, who has been a vocal Noster
skeptic until, until now has created his Noster account and has posted a few times convinced
by none other than Uncle Rockstar to do so.
Allegedly.
I was there.
I saw it happen.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'll trust, I'll trust you on that one.
But yeah, I'm not aware of too much.
I don't know if there's any Noster related panels or presentations happening that you've
seen or heard of.
But if not, we, we need to maybe work on that for next year.
See if we can get something going.
There've been several mentions of Noster, not in specific panels, not just specific panels,
right?
In broader panels, but zapping and value for value.
There have been a couple of panels that have stressed on that quite a bit.
Awesome.
Well, those apps, those are, that's our foot in the door.
So, another event coming up here in just a week or so is the Baltic Honey Badger Conference
and Riga called the OG Bitcoin Conference.
And so Marseille is actually on her way there.
We'll be covering, they are planning some Noster events, Noster presentations and panels.
And Marseille will be covering all of that.
And so we'll be reporting from her on the Noster report accounts.
Keep an eye out for that.
Rockstar and team are planning the Noster party at Riga.
And they have exceeded their funding fundraising goal on geyser.fund.
Over 10 million sats donated from plebs all across the world.
So amazing to see.
If you go to geyser.fund and look up their page, you can see what all that's going for,
covering drinks and foods and other great stuff.
So the Noster just can have a good party at Riga.
Tickets are still available BalticHoneyBadger.com if you are in the area or planning to do that.
Planning to go and haven't gotten those yet.
So are you going to that Avi?
I will be there.
Yes, it's going to be a packed week for me.
But I will be there.
Yeah, for sure.
You should probably look into a private jet Avi.
I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of that.
Marseille has always got some good interviews and content lined up for us.
So another announcement from Noster Report.
And then we'll get into the Noster News itself.
This week Noster Report has teamed up with Greg White.
So he's a pleb on Noster.
Greg had started publishing a weekly newsletter.
He did a couple runs of it.
We've seen a lot of requests for a more tech focused newsletter.
And Greg had started pulling some resources together for that.
So we've teamed up with him and we'll actually be publishing the report that he puts together
from Noster Report.
So it'll be a tech focused weekly newsletter.
Right now we have it coming out on Sundays.
So we'll be publishing that from Obla.News.
And of course if your client supports long form content, you'll see that directly in
your feed as well.
You mentioned user statuses.
So that's kind of the big news right now.
New feature.
It's fun when a new feature like this comes along that is truly fun and it just kind of
gets everybody excited.
It almost feels a little bit like when zaps were introduced.
Not quite as much.
I don't think anything can beat zaps.
But user statuses are a lot of fun so you can share a live status.
Could be music you're listening to.
Could be what you're doing at that moment.
And they're linkable.
It shows up right underneath your username on all of your posts.
And it's actually a Nip Nip 315.
The amethyst has already rolled out support.
I saw one of the devs for current.
Current will be rolling out support for it.
And I think I saw Fabian, the dev for the Noster app saying that he might be adding
support for that soon in Noster.
So looks like that one has caught on and is going to be there.
A lot of cool use cases as we've already seen.
Are you guys still hearing me?
Yep, we're here man.
All right good good.
Making sure my internet didn't drop here.
You never know here the drop is always high.
As you mentioned we had some debate going on earlier this week over trending algorithms
specifically came up due to Primal.
So Primal has their trending feed.
It shows right on the side.
If you're on the web client right on the side next to your feed.
And then they also have one of the custom feeds by default is the trending feed.
Some users began exposing how easily that the trending feed could be faked or manipulated
by zapping yourself or sending fake likes and so on.
And because of this some users ended up blacklisted from trending which raised some controversy.
The hashtag free Ralph.
So Ralph was caught up in the middle of this.
I think maybe unintentionally seemed for your listeners that don't know Ralph is one of
the legendary Zapathan Zappers.
He's also thrown some lightning bolts out that are just heavy hitting sat quantities.
So it was kind of interesting that he got stuck in that kind of purgatory.
So it created a movement in there just the ridiculousness of it.
And for anyone who's met Ralph in person he is the probably the least banable or shadow
banable person you'll meet.
He's an all round nice guy.
The irony was golden.
Yeah.
So it seems that Ralph has been unblacklisted.
I see I saw one of his post trending and I'm not sure about the rest.
I believe some of them still are blocked from trending.
So it's an ongoing debate.
It's a good debate.
It's important.
I think we do all have some I know I have some PTSD from coming from Twitter and X and
these other platforms where the algorithms they just control everything about what you
see in the conversations that are taking place.
And so it's good that we're debating even fighting about this.
It doesn't need to get too ugly of course but it's good that this debate's going on.
It does only affect the trending feed.
And so the users are not blocked from the client itself.
You can still find their profiles and they still show up in your feed.
If you follow them it's just from that that trending algorithm that they have kind of on
the side panel there.
And it would be interesting to see how they how they approach it again.
Or kind of just the building inspectors at this point.
Yeah.
And you know, Milgen in the in the debate that was going on did say that it was a very
simple algorithm.
He acknowledged that it was easy to manipulate easy to game and that they're they're working
on ways to make that better.
So we'll see what they put out.
You know, it's fun to watch all this grow in real time.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if data vending machine is incorporated at all with
some of this stuff.
Yeah, I did see Pablo chiming in with some of those suggestions.
And so, you know, that would give the user a lot more fine tune control to see, you
know, exactly what they want to see in their feed.
And that could be custom to each user, which would be pretty cool.
So we'll see.
Let's see some business news.
Nostra business business on Nostra.
We've got a new feature from Nostra dot build.
So it's actually kind of a return of an old feature.
So Nostra dot build is a media host that links into, you know, multiple Nostra apps and clients
where you can upload your photos, your videos, your gifts.
And they had for a while, their public gallery was free to view.
They had restricted that due to excessive amounts of data usage and stuff, but they've
been able to come up with a way to offer it again now.
So it's called free view.
And they're able to allow anyone, even if you don't have an account to view, I think
it's like the most recent 200 uploads for free.
And so you don't need an account.
So that's really cool.
But if you use them a lot, obviously sign up for an account, support them and my daughter
just walked in.
Busted.
Yeah, busted, busted.
Yeah, I think the Nostra dot build, it's important feature.
It's a way for us to keep keep these clients light.
So it's kind of something we really, we really need and keeping just a little hint.
We might have Nostra build coming on soon in the weeks ahead.
Yeah, exciting.
While we're on the topic of Nostra build, Domus also added Nip 98 support this week.
And so Nip 98 is HTTP auth, which allows you to basically it allows your Nostra app to
hook in and authorize an account on a third party service.
So for instance, when you upload an image from Domus, if you have a paid account with
Nostra build, it should automatically go into your account and into your storage space.
So it doesn't go into the public upload area, it goes into your dedicated uploads.
So that's pretty cool.
Amethyst has, I believe has Nip 98 support as well.
And Nostra check dot me, which is another media host announced this week that they now have
Nip 98 that support with Amethyst.
So Amethyst users, if you have a Nostra check account, your uploads will go to your account.
So pretty cool.
Given users a choice over various media hosts.
Let's see.
Let's talk about bounties for a second.
So last weekend, we had a resurgence of health threads.
And if you are new to Nostra and you have no idea what a health thread is, be thankful.
Because months ago, it was pretty common people would make sometimes not maliciously sometimes
maybe maliciously, I don't know, but would make these threads with dozens.
If not hundreds, I think there was even one that had 1000 or more users tagged in it.
And there was no way to escape from the notifications.
You couldn't mute threads at the time.
And so this has prompted over the months, different features to come along where you
can now mute threads.
You can mute the notifications.
And now the most recent update in in Dommas.
And I think maybe some other clients have this as well.
But you can mute threads everywhere.
And so that that came about because of a bounty.
And that's what I wanted to highlight here.
You know, devs are putting a lot of time into what they're building, and they like to get
paid, they like to pay their bills and bounties work.
You know, users can get the features that they're looking for and can get that value
for their time.
Yeah, it's important.
It's important.
Incentives work.
Dangle the carrots.
Yeah.
So I mean, in this one, it was really fast.
You know, the bounty went out and within a day or two, Will had taken up the bounty.
The fix was implemented in the next test flight update.
You know, it'll go into the next app store version whenever that's public, you know,
pushed through the app store.
So just kind of cool to see that see that whole process work from from beginning to end.
Let's see a couple other items.
We've got snort.social.
Snort has been a popular client since the beginning of the year.
And they just rolled out a major redesign of their web client.
Snort v2 snort version two.
So the visual updates are great.
Check it out.
And I really think it runs a lot faster.
Snort had kind of become pretty slow in my browser, but it seems to be running pretty
pretty good for me now.
Have you guys tried it?
I haven't.
I can guarantee Avi didn't.
He's been, you know, binge drinking and on the road.
So but yeah, no, I haven't, but I saw the screenshots.
It looks frickin smooth.
And I think is that the one with the zap.stream at the top too.
It's showing you kind of what's live on zap.stream.
Oh, it might be.
I have not seen that.
I have not seen that integration yet.
Yeah, I think that's going to be an interesting play once we start seeing that kind of.
I mean, this is all kind of just leveling up as we go.
Yeah.
I'm, yeah, I'm really excited that redesign.
I like snort and it just got way too slow for me to use.
So I'm actually able to start using snort.
I got that sounds funny, but snort.social a little bit more now.
Brugamon, the developer on that's Ethan.
Iphone.
No, Kieran Kieran, Kieran.
That's right.
My bad.
Yeah.
Who also developed the zap.stream.
So makes sense.
Yeah, that does make sense.
Okay.
We've got an announcement today from Brugamon, so Brugamon develops Noster.band, which is
a great resource if you've never used it.
He has been working on a Noster browser.
And so I have not had a chance to use it.
He released an initial Android APK for testing.
So I've got to dig out my Android phone and install that.
I'm building a browser dedicated and deeply integrated with Noster.
So it makes it much easier to use your apps and sign into your clients and services and
micro apps and stuff.
So that's a pretty cool thing to watch its development.
It looks great too.
He's gotten some help with the visual design on that.
Yeah, it looks amazing.
Was that with was Carnage working on that too?
I believe so.
Yeah, you know, Carnage does have a great eye for design.
And you do see a lot of consistency across the apps that he's worked on.
And they're nice.
They're pleasant.
I like what he does.
A lot of purple and neon.
Yeah, for sure.
But it fits.
And then the last thing I've got here, and then we'll give it back to you guys.
We've got Zeus has been rolling out invites to their new update so you can run a node
on your phone and utilize the Olympus Lightning Service provider for liquidity and opening
channels.
It's still in testing, but they are rolling out invitations.
If you have not gotten one, visit their profile on Noster.
And there's a way that you can sign up for the wait list with your with your in pub so
you don't need to give away your email or any other information.
And I just got my invitation yesterday.
So still working on getting that set up, but making self custody lightning easier and more
integrated with Noster.
So it's a great thing.
Yeah, I can't wait for that to roll out in in full production.
I mean, the beta is great, but I think it bodes really well for lightning.
Once we have that, it does.
And I saw Daniel, maybe Daniel, username was testing a self custodial lightning address
that something he had set up with Zeus.
And so he said it was manually set up, but it's something that he was helping them test.
And that that that that whole area of development is going to be great for Noster self custody
plus the ability to use lightning with Noster.
So indeed.
Well, thank you, corn for yet another comprehensive overview of the week's events with the lightning
ground.
And now it's time for our guest segment.
And I'm happy to invite the friends from Stamster, Rock, Ben, not Henry and Rob.
Welcome to plug chain radio.
Thanks for having us.
Sorry, thanks for having us.
Q dub.
Yeah.
And the spirit of collaborative communities.
You got for you up here.
So did you want to you kind of want to, I guess we'll start with you, Rock.
What's kind of your Bitcoin backstory and then kind of your role in Stamster?
Oh, man, I don't have that deep of a Bitcoin backstory.
It's actually a rather recent thing.
I think that's all good.
Yeah.
I think I learned about first learned about Bitcoin in like 2015 from at the time she was
my fiance.
Now my wife, her younger brother, he was telling me about it and I'm like, what is this, you
know, like funny kind of money that you're talking about.
And I bought some.
I mean, humorously, I think I bought some using cash app.
And like, I think I bought some and then the price went down and I sold.
And you know, thinking like, what the hell, what is this?
And then in 2019 started learning about it again and then actually understanding it.
And then like understanding, well, what is a blockchain?
How does it work?
What is cryptocurrency?
What are the different types of cryptocurrencies?
And at a time there was so much talk of Ethereum and NFTs and Bitcoin, you know, to somebody
coming in from the outside was like, oh, what's this like?
What's this boomer coin?
And then you start learning more and more and more.
And I don't know, I just got very enamored with it.
And so much so at the time I was working at Google and decided to leave Google to join
cash to lead their Bitcoin design team.
And you know, it's something that I don't know, it like, it changed my life.
It put me on a whole different path in so many different ways, like professionally and
personally and how I think about building wealth for my family and how I think about
building wealth for people.
And now with Stemster, like the tools that we're building and how Bitcoin intersects
passion areas that people had, you know, Habla, how it intersects passion of writing, all
the different social media clients, how it affects like, you know, freedom of expression
with Stemster, how it affects music.
And I think that's kind of how Stemster kind of came about was at the end of last year,
seeing Nostra emerge and thinking to myself like, well, what could we do here?
And I make music, been making music for a long time.
And I just thought it'd be awesome.
And I really, I primarily thought like, it was very much about Nostra and the relationship
between your ability to just share whatever, you know, without without any fear of censorship.
And with music, like censorship is a big topic, you know, because you share something that
you shouldn't be or you say things that you shouldn't be saying and depending upon where
you are, you know, the government could take that down or threaten your life, put you in
jail.
And I thought, oh man, this is a good platform for it.
And then when we bring Bitcoin into the story, it's like, wait a second, you can actually
start to get paid for doing things that you love to do.
And if you think about music today, people have to create music fully, produce full tracks,
rap over it, etc.
And then they put it on streaming and they get paid like a piton's, you know, and they
get paid at the end of this music making process.
And it's like the end, it's the slog of it all because at that point they're having to
rep it on social media, etc. but they're just in it for the music.
And we think stem through such a cool thing because they get to make music and earn Bitcoin
while doing so.
And it's the thing that they love to do.
And we're super hype about it.
That's great, Rock.
And we'll dig a little deeper into some of the points you raised.
But first, let's continue going around the horn with the backstory and how, what, what
the motivation was to find, but just to work on stem stem, maybe we'll go to Ben next.
Go ahead, Ben.
Hey.
Yeah, my Bitcoin backstory is somewhat similar.
I was first introduced at a party, I want to say around the rally of like 2014.
There was a guy there that just couldn't, could not tell people enough about Bitcoin.
And kind of forgot about it after that.
And then again, caught my eye in 2017.
Similar similar story to Rock there.
Like figured Bitcoin was, you know, I missed the boat, learned about Ethereum and all the
other shitcoins.
Bought a bit of everything.
And just kind of held that on the way down.
And then really just began learning through that process.
And then ultimately really understood what Bitcoin is, what it unlocks.
And so I'm kind of approaching it from the, from that angle.
And then, you know, I have a background in music as well.
And work as a programmer.
So when Nostra emerged for me at the end of last year, and I saw rock put out the bat
signal about building Stemster, you know, the stars is kind of aligned for me.
That's great, Ben.
Move on to not Henry.
Yeah.
So I first learned about Bitcoin back.
I was in high school back in like 2012, my brother showed it to me.
And he was always like, you know, he's always learning about the latest tech stuff.
So I was like, kind of like, that's when I found out about it.
I didn't really understand or really care what it was.
I was like, okay, it's like internet, like digital, Chuck E. Cheese token school.
Not long after I found out about Dogecoin.
I had to start mining some Dogecoins.
I actually found that, I actually found the computer I had from back in 2012 with like
Dogecoin on it.
I was like, oh, I should have so much money on it.
I had nothing.
So I'm a little bit of a disappointment.
But yeah, so, you know, 2012, 2013, I think.
After that, I just kind of forgot about it for eight years, maybe.
Now, I mean, like I heard about it every now and then, but like, I never really like learned
what it was, you know, besides the fact that it was digital money.
So it's like, that was kind of like my, like, I never cared about it because I didn't understand
it, you know, like, it was just like some tech thing that was like whatever.
And in 2020, that was really when I kind of learned what Bitcoin was.
I learned, you know, like about having the most like the most interesting thing to me
about Bitcoin, probably what sold me on the most is the fact that there's a fixed supply.
So I was, I mean, maybe I was extremely aware of, you know, how the Federal Reserve works
and how our money is constantly being devalued.
I was well aware of that.
I just didn't know there was a solution.
So when I really started to learn what Bitcoin was, it didn't take very long for me to get
sold on it.
So yeah, I really, my, really my introduction to Bitcoin was really like in like 2020.
I think kind of like the start of COVID and all the shut down, so that's, that stuff
also helped to trigger it.
Yes, that's my Bitcoin story.
As for Noster, I joined like so many people here back in December when, basically when
Jackson up the bat signal.
Yeah, I've also like that same thing.
Like I've been extremely, I guess you'd say like passionate about the fact that social
media is so messed up and wanting to find a solution to all the problems that it has.
But you know, there really wasn't, it really wasn't much solution until I, once I discovered
Noster, I was like, I could start to see like, oh wow.
This can fix, like this can actually fix so many of the problems in the social media.
And then not long after that, you know, I met Rock on here.
He sent up the post about Stemster.
I've been a musician for most of my life, about like five probably.
So I was like, wow, this is so cool.
Like the intersection of like everything I care about fixing social media, Bitcoin,
investing money and music.
So it was like, it was, you know, I was all in at that point.
Yeah.
So kind of what I see like, to me, like what interests me the most about Stemster is like
this idea that like you can create music.
But you're being incentivized, like that creation process, right?
Just being incentivized in real time, like you, you open up your DAW, you, you know,
make a little loop or whatever, you get instant feedback in the form of not just, you know,
communicate replies and bikes and all that, but also like you're getting paid.
And that's such like, that's such an incentive to really drive that creative process for
so many people.
Yeah.
And we'll, and the same thing I said to Rob, a lot of stuff to unpack there, Henry and
we'll, we'll dig into it once we pass the intros.
And finally, Rob, go ahead.
Hey, hey, hello everyone.
Yeah, I think my Bitcoin story I was telling to a friend, Adnostrika, that I started my
journey probably around 2012, learning a little bit about Bitcoin because I had, I was doing
Freelance in my part time.
And I had a client who was really interested in, in blockchain in general.
So he wanted me to learn a little bit more about blockchain.
So he gave me, I don't know, maybe $250, $250 worth of a coin called Lisk and another $250
of another coin called EOS.
So with that money, I started like learning about blockchain and coins and all this stuff.
And I've heard about Bitcoin and study a little bit about Bitcoin.
But yeah, I live in El Salvador, I'm from El Salvador.
So it's a third world country and it was really, really, really hard to get into blockchain
and to basically get information right and from a properly manner.
And to actually being able to buy Bitcoin, it was extremely hard.
We have back then this website called LocalBitcoins that I didn't trust because nobody knew at
that point if it was worth exploring around, but was the only way to have some Bitcoin.
And a bunch of people were like selling Bitcoin, whole coiners or things like that.
And back then I was just a student, I didn't have any money to buy a whole coin, a half
coin or something like that.
So yeah, I just decided to keep learning about Bitcoin, what is the meaning of Bitcoin and
what is really fixing.
And then at some point I sold the back that I have for Lisk and EOS and bought Polygon
Matic back then in the days.
So yeah, in 2019, probably 2020, I sold almost my entire back of Polygon Matic to be able
to buy Bitcoin through Binance because it was possible to do it in Binance.
And yeah, I think that's kind of the story I have for Bitcoin.
And since then I've been learning a little bit more and more and more and trying to orange
peel my family, my friends and some of the people in the community as well.
So trying to incentivize others to actually learn and join and it's a cool thing.
And as for Spencer, to be fair, I was trying to basically collaborate on things.
So I started on November of last year to explore projects.
I saw a screenshot from Jack on Twitter about a cool application called Damels that was new
and it was just a client, something different.
So I joined because of that.
And I started as a designer to see that all those clients had major issues with accessibility,
with the whole user experience, the user interface.
And in order to compete against other social media platforms, we had to make something
different.
It was a bunch of developers working full time on those things and I wanted to collaborate
and add a little bit of design on that and try to help the users that wanted to move from
Twitter or other social media over to Nostra and make their life a little bit easier.
So I tried to join, I tried to collaborate with Damels, I tried to collaborate with Nostra
Bill, Nostra Directory and a bunch of other clients.
I was just trying to collaborate and help and design things and improve the users, well,
the user's experience, trying to improve it a little bit more.
So I saw the screenshot from Rock.
I think Rock started everything, Rock started the fire.
So when I saw it, I think I will say that I'm the only one in the team that is not a
musician.
I like to listen to music, but I'm not a musician.
I'm not into music.
But I really wanted to work on this thing because it was so important for the community
and for the artists and to bring other people to this platform as well.
So I got really interested in that.
And after our first talk with Rock, I got more interested in working along with the other
guys in this cool project that we now call Stamper.
And it's been a blast.
I've been having such a great time working with them.
And yeah, I'm excited about that.
Great.
Well, thank you for that background, Rob.
So Rock, since all the fingers are pointing to you as the culprit, the one who started
the fire, who sent out the math signal for this, I'll direct the next question to you.
For folks in the audience who might not be familiar with Stamper or folks who are listening
to the recording later on, could you give a quick overview of what Stamper is and then
what your team structure is like?
Yeah, sure.
Stamper is a way to share sounds.
It can be something as simple as the sound of nature around you.
It could be something like you clapping or whistling.
It could be a drum loop that you're working on.
It could be a piano riff or a guitar riff or a vocal riff all the way to a beat or a full
track.
And the idea is that we don't say like, you could call it music, but it's not like clapping.
A single clap may not yet be music.
So we call it sounds.
We don't know what else to say.
Say stems, I guess, as well.
The people, you can share all of that and then anybody can freely download what you share.
We call that process the process of remixing.
So somebody downloads it and say it's a beat.
So somebody puts up a beat, a producer puts up a beat and then say there's a rapper that's
like, oh man, this sounds great.
I'd love to rap over it.
That rapper will download that beat, rap over it and you can do so in like really simple
tools that are on your smartphone and you can even rap or sing into like Apple's AirPods.
So you don't need a fancy like music studio or anything.
And then you remix it and you put that back up on Stemster.
And so then what you would have seen is the producer made the beat, a rapper rapped on
it and maybe another rapper wants to get on it and they download the one that the rapper
did.
And so it keeps kind of going.
They remix on remix on remix and somebody joined some time ago and they kind of coined the
hashtag like open source music.
That's really what this is.
It's about sharing sounds and being able to collaborate with others to create music in
a really permissionless way.
I tell people all the time, imagine that somebody like Taylor Swift or Jay-Z or any of your
favorite artists made a song and they said, hey, anybody can download this and do that
with us or sing with us or add to it or remix it and you put it back up and it will live
right next to my track on Spotify or Apple Music or Title.
And that's really what we're building here.
And so we're really trying to be something that lives in between the music that you would
make silently in your studio and the music that people listen to on streaming.
We want to be in between those two things and create collaboration and allow people to
earn Bitcoin while doing so.
I just want to say real fast, it's almost like the GitHub of music.
One way to think about it.
Yeah, that's a good analogy.
What I do like about it, one of the things is you lay it down a track and then you can
follow up and put every single raw layer on there.
So you might have that, let's say that verse for that track, but in three months' time,
someone can take your verse and put it over their own or they combine all of them and
master it at the end to a completely different song.
So it's just amazing.
The sound bank just continues to grow and it's not just sound, it's almost like a verse
bank.
It's just the amount of, the collection just grows day by day and I love to see the collaborative
community jumping on it to where they're all about it.
I think you can even comment notes and things on there.
Here's song one with one verse and a hook and then you'll just pass it off and wait
for someone else to jump on it.
Or you can probably even incentivize who wants to get on this all, I'll send you 100 sats
or whatever.
There's definitely a value for value system built in, not just from the listeners, but
maybe from the producers as well.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
That thing that you're talking about, we have been calling Legos and we think like every,
you can picture like, if it's like a single clap, like it's a tiny little blue Lego or
if it's something like a beat, like it's maybe a little bit more of like a structured few
piece Lego and that these Legos are there and they're on, they're like in the sea of
Nostra now and we allow people to grab those Legos and kind of reconfigure them into their
own creations and that's something we're super excited about and there is a lot of work to
do in terms of really understanding like what does it mean to create a service?
That honors those Lego blocks and allows people to explore them and use them and so we have
a lot of work ahead of us.
And when we talk about these collaborators, the collaboration in general, I mean, these
people are from communities from all over the world.
You know, whether it's men like Quacks, whether it's now GEK, I want to call them GEC, but
I know that's wrong.
It's like GEC or something like that.
Do you know how to say it?
GEC.
I know, forgive me because I butchered that.
DSIV, Elaine, Real Richard, these are people that are kind of jumping on it early, but
they're just the speed at which things are being produced when you're in that environment
of creativity.
It's just really encouraging and that's one of the reasons, one of the main reasons I
wanted to see you guys on our show was just because the energy is just there and it needs
to be kind of captured and more people need to know about it.
DSIV.
We thank you for that.
I'm very honored to be here.
But that global phenomenon where you can basically have three different people from three different
countries all put in work to one song and have it done in one day type of thing.
I really think that's just the coolest thing.
I'll wake up in the morning and check Stemster and there's new people collaborating and hearing
them on the same thing together.
It's really inspiring.
That really does it for me.
GEC.
Yeah, kind of like your turn, bro.
Wake up and you're already starting to write.
DSIV.
Yeah, there's a big difference between sitting down on your computer and working on music
by yourself versus I'm here with a bunch of other people.
It's almost like a digital studio.
You're just hanging out with your fellow musicians, just making stuff together.
GEC.
And how does, I guess, maybe this is not a fun question to ask in this open source community,
but how do digital rights and our intellectual property or copyright work in that type of
scenario?
DSIV.
Yeah, we talk a fair bit about this.
So I think it starts first with our community guidelines and our community guidelines say,
hey, for anything that you're going to share, some rules of the road, you have to be cool
with anybody being able to download it.
You have to have creatively contributed to it in a very real way and you have to have
the rights to share it.
And so what that has ended up with is the fact that all the stuff that's on Stemster
is unique.
It's new to the world.
And so the next thing is, okay, we've got these things that are all freely shareable,
freely downloadable.
And now when people begin to work on it, the next thing that we have to approach is like,
how do we provide attribution?
And how do we make it so that you can see that history of attribution so that if real
Richard makes a beat, man like Quex wraps on it, round cat sings over it, and Joe Coffee
plays guitar over it, that has that history of that track progresses, then you can see
the attribution.
And that one day, the last remix of it that has like the full, what you would call like
master, I guess, when you zap that, it gets split to all those artists.
A question that we don't have an answer to is, what if somebody, even an artist in that
chain of rights downloads it, and then uploads it to Spotify, or to Apple Music, or to Title.
And we haven't seen that yet.
We see it going to Wave Lake.
So that's normal and natural.
And we're like really excited about that.
But what happens when you put it up somewhere else outside of this ecosystem?
I don't know that we know the answer to that yet.
Right, or there are a bunch of songs that have been created by the community.
Someone puts them on an album and then takes them to Music Producer and gets that album
released.
What happens then?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know, we're going to find out.
It's all part of the process, right?
Our favorite term, we're so early.
We're so early.
Yeah.
So this is kind of a cool side effect of the fact that we're building on Nostra.
It's the fact that people are signing these, this track history is being signed with your
personal private keys.
So you've got cryptographic proof that you actually contributed to that.
So that might, at some point, maybe someone will use that in court to say, look, I can
prove that something that I made is on this track that we're stolen from you, basically.
Yeah, you're basically doing an inscription on the Nostra protocol.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's one of the really cool things about building on Nostra.
We get these really hard properties, like a digital signature that you hold a private
key for, for attribution, for free, essentially.
And these events reference each other.
So all this stuff is here.
So as Rock said, I think what we've built so far is there's more to do than what we've
already done.
We've just started.
It's pretty interesting.
How does Stemster make money?
Through the Stemster share pass.
So for anybody who wants to share, so for you to be able to share a sound or to comment
on another sound or even repost, you have to buy a share pass and you can do so for
like a day.
It's about 23 sets, maybe, in today's price, that thousand sets, I think.
Or you can do it for a week or you can do it for 30 days a month.
And so we created that and it's two properties, or at least it has two jobs for us.
One is it prevents spam.
And that's something that was really, really important to us, was to keep the quality of
the content unique and high.
And the second thing is that it allows us to operate sustainably because we all pay
the bills for all of our various services from Figma to Versailles to AWS.
And very excitingly, and Ben keeps us up to date on this on Discord with reports.
I think that we are close to breaking even this month on our expenses from that.
So we're super stoked by it.
And I think that, like I'm looking very carefully at with it though, is we're flipping a lot
of the models on their heads because today in the world of listening to music, like where
music gets played, you charge the listener.
So that's why you subscribe to Spotify and you subscribe to Apple Music and you subscribe
to Tidal.
Here, where music gets made, it's a tool for creators.
We're charging the creators.
And that's, I'm like really interested in how that will evolve and what will that mean.
And we observed something really interesting when we created the search feature recently
is if you search for people, you see all kinds of people and you're like, who are these people?
And they are just people who have joined us but have never subscribed to the share pass.
And so you don't see them on Stemister.
And it's like, well, what are they doing?
And why are they here and are we harming them in some way by having the share pass be something
that blocks the sharing?
And so it's experimental for us.
And I think we're really still trying to find our way.
But no matter what, like, you know, we're going to keep working towards that.
And the goals of always like value for value, keeping spam off the system, those will be
the principles around which, you know, whatever forms are monetization takes will be there.
That is a really interesting business model or just market structure shift that you're
effectuating here, right?
Just to reiterate what you said, the career, it's not the platform charging users for consuming
the content, the platforms charging the creators.
And then the creators in turn, at least in theory, gets zapped by the consumers of that
content.
That's right.
Yeah, exactly right.
Just to mention something, because we had Wave Lake on or Sam with Wave Lake a couple
weeks ago and he was talking about the streaming industry in general, it just broken.
But just kind of zooming out, could you do something like, let's say Wave Lake does best
of Stemister on theirs and they have their top charts, but any zap that goes from there
goes to there, goes to actual Stemster, you know, where we can have this kind of collective
community of all the music sections kind of combining together to kind of extend the exposure
for everyone.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
We're all for that.
You know, you said it when you guys were talking about the role of competition.
It's not really competition.
That when you just don't use that term and the cultural concept is something that's much
more like connectivity between these services.
It's like a tide that lifts all the boats.
So we love the idea of doing this and we love the idea of our 1808 notes showing up all over
the place to be consumed for free from listeners and also for, you know, like, 1808 is the
foundation, our kind.
We are the first client that is using that and using 1808 in a way to create like a collaborative
music service.
But anybody can create a new project or a new company and use 1808 in ways that we are
not yet creating new listening tools, creating new tools of creation.
And so we're really excited by this and that's why we're so focused on that kind and making
it as available as possible to both listeners and creators.
And how have you organized yourselves as a team, Rock?
Is it a loosely knit sort of open source ethos of we'll all play to our strengths and see
where we take it or do you have a slightly tighter organizational structure?
I think it's a slightly tighter organizational structure.
I'll let the guys answer and see and laughing.
And yeah, I would love to hear what team thinks about this.
That's highly structured.
I mean, I've done a lot of work in open source over the years and this feels very similar
with the added bonus that we are all in Discord together.
So we do have like a private communication area for more tactical stuff.
But aside from that, I would say that the development side of this is pretty classical
open source development.
Yeah, I'll just give you a quick rundown about kind of like our roles.
So I am primarily building the front end, the client.
Sam, Sam Schi's also helped for a short period.
He's actually with Wave Lake now.
Ben is doing all the back end stuff.
So he's doing the front end.
We have like a custom like he's modifying like a relay.
So he has kind of a custom relay.
He's doing like the like the DVD integration for accepting lightning payments.
And then Rob is doing most of, I would say, correct me if I'm wrong on this guy, is like
Rob's doing most of the design work.
And then Rock is kind of like, I don't know, I would almost call him like, like if I had
to give him like a title, he's kind of like the CEO.
Like he's just kind of, he's really kind of managing, you know, he's also contributing
like to the design and like UX as well.
And then of course he's a musician, a rapper along with Ben, I believe.
Yeah, these are facts.
I didn't even know Ben rapped.
That's what's crazy about the shit.
Is that yeah, it's solid too.
And Rock, you're like the hype man on Stemster too.
Come on, I'll get everybody.
Listen, man like Quex is in the audience.
He, he's literally like, he's, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like
he's the hype man.
He's like, we are here because of him.
Yeah.
And I'm, and he, he's a hit on Wave Lake too.
And I can't wait to hear some sound by some stems from the on top of Kilimanjaro tomorrow
or this week.
Yeah.
We're sending all the love.
And he deserves a salary at this point.
Marketing department.
Yeah, man.
We love, we love.
We love the folks that have been around with us from the, from the early days.
They, they, um, they matter a great deal to us.
And they're, they're like, they're, they're, they're the lifeblood of this.
And they, you know, when, when Stemster was getting built, they kept it going.
Like they saw, they saw something in it and they kept it going and they kept us going.
And I don't know that like they know that.
Um, but like that's real.
Their energy brought this thing to life.
And I feel like we try to keep a really positive energy and really focus on community and focus
on the culture of music and use the hashtag, you know, free the music and we care a great
deal.
And I just, I tell a team all the time, like bring that energy and put that back into the
product and put that back into our relationship with the, with contributors in the community.
And I feel like it's been something that has given Stemster something like an anti-gravity
that other products, I think struggle to find.
And I feel like we've all put our hearts into this and everybody who hits that plus button
and puts up any sound does the same thing.
And I swear, like there's some universal energy associated with it.
It's inspiring and it inspires people.
Let's, let's say I, I, I got an old dusty guitar, you know, maybe I want to blow it
off and get back into something where, you know, where music industry was broken.
Now all of a sudden you're inspired and you have new hope.
And maybe, you know, maybe you do want to take up the throw a few riffs out there.
I know corn, corn, I'm not sure if you, your, your mic's on, but, uh, uh, you know, Nostar,
he posted a few tracks on Nostar.
Just this, this new frontier where you feel like, uh, you know, all, all, everything's
possible.
Um, it's really kind of stroke people in a way that they're, they're, they're reinspired.
Uh, and I see, see Stemster, um, all these music creations are in any kind of creative
atmosphere, just kind of gasoline's on it now.
Yeah.
It's safe too.
It's interesting.
Like there's a, I don't know, you know, rapping or singing or putting any of your music
out there is like a really vulnerable act.
And it's really interesting to see how people navigate that vulnerability in the context
of the product and even out of it, like in, in the context of the social media sharing
that happens around it.
And it's beautiful, man, because it's like, you feel nervous about it, but you have all
this support and you know, it's, it's wild.
Something really special.
Maybe a small digression, but just off of that point, Rock, um, I thought it was interesting
that he said it is a vulnerable act.
Do you feel like putting, you know, someone putting their voice and, and their lyrics
out there, um, is versus some other content, right?
Like a blog post or a video or whatever it is.
It's a, it's a more vulnerable act, the music or the rap itself.
No, I don't know.
It's probably equivalently vulnerable for the creator.
I mean, I feel vulnerable to this podcast.
So yeah, it's, it's healthy.
Yeah.
It's a beautiful thing.
It really is.
And I don't know.
I think that's what makes Noster special is that like, I'll tell you, if we go back to
like, you know, everybody's talking about like the early moments, I used, I hadn't even,
I just remembered this now that we're talking about it.
I think that we are all direct descendants of like the Jack hug.
Like when Jack was there hugging all of the earliest people that joined, I think he set
a culture in motion and that culture was like a culture of like care and safety.
And that was something that like, you know, people think of Jack as like the head of block,
the founder of Twitter.
But like, I actually think that was like one of the most beautiful things to see somebody
like Jack, who has learned so much from his time running companies to understand that
like the role of welcoming somebody in a safe and like embracing way.
Look what that did for our culture and look what it did for all the builders here and
the designers here and the writers here.
It's like, it's like unbelievable.
So I'm looking at like the emojis that are part of Nostra Nest and I see the hug and
it's just like that set everything in motion.
Like that to me is like cements Jack's legacy as like a wonderful human being.
That was the whole inspiration when I began the plug chain hashtag plug chain was just
kind of the embodiment of the community itself.
And when we were so early there and everybody can have these conversations and we're contrasting
from a social dynamic that was completely algoed to the darkness, you know, and the
fact if you go on Domus and you hashtag plug chain, you get the purple and orange hug.
It's just such a beautiful thing.
And I think we're all in a place now where we're just over the crap.
And we really want a way forward together and establishing this open source community
can you know, collaborative community is just it's we're feeding off each other and you
and you make this a global movement.
And you realize there's just so many more people out there just like us that that that
have dreams and we just want to get there and in what better way than together.
And the hug would be the beginning.
Yeah, it's true.
It's true man.
It's true.
What do you say straight straight plug chain?
The straight plug chain.
Get them quacks.
Get them quacks straight, plug chain man in the mountain.
He's gonna he's gonna chop this whole interview up.
Oh man, it's so good.
By the way, his new track is sick.
That what we're on the top or what's the name of it?
We on top.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Quacks is inspiration.
Quacks is literally human embodied like the human embodiment of universal inspiration.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to perform at one of these Nostra conferences.
So as far as features features feature wise, what's kind of what are you kind of working
on now?
What kind of vision do you have moving forward on possibilities?
I mean, just where's your creativity flown as far as expansion?
Hermano, do you want to talk about what we're working on near term?
Oh yeah.
First of all, I think we are we have different phases in our roadmap.
To first of all, we need to fix or retain the way we do things or how we do things.
After the beta was released, we thought that following the social media structure for certain
things like threads, that a bunch of threads are broken.
We needed to rethink the way we treat our threads.
We are working on that.
We are thinking the way we have a structure that we need to also order these 10.
So if you remix something, if you share or remix something, you get the attributions to
others automatically.
So you didn't need to be tagging every single one who has participated in the sound or the
stem that you have shared or remixing.
So yeah, you as a user, you will be able, if you're listening to a track, you will be
able to see the whole history of that sound.
So if everything started with just a clap and then someone else adding a guitar or drums
and then someone else adding the vocals, so at the end you will be listening to something
that is really special and nice and great and whatever.
But what you will really see is like the building blocks of that really cool stuff.
So we are working on that right now in the design phase.
Soon that will be taken by Harry to actually build it.
And yeah, and we are also trying to add libraries so you will be able to just save everything
if you like something.
If you are exploring on Stenster but you don't have the time to download everything, you
can basically add it to the library and yeah, similar to how you do things on Spotify or
even Apple Music or something like that.
But it's something that is for you.
So yeah, that is basically what we have right now in our plate in design things.
But yeah, it's really exciting.
If you look at the breadth of the roadmap, Roberto is talking about general app improvements
that we have just learned.
We fashioned ourselves off of social media clients and that has been very interesting
and cool to see but I think there are elements of it that we are recognizing like we need
to adapt and evolve in different ways.
And so we are working on that.
Daily, Hermano is doing beautiful design work there.
If you zoom out and you look at the artist experience, the attribution is a very big deal.
Splits are going to be a very big deal.
And then the other aspect of it is how do you deal with search and discovery?
And so our first tip toe into that water is what we released with the search experience
for just profiles and hashtags.
But beyond that, what we are aspiring to create is something that's essentially curated by
the community where anybody, whether they're a creator or even just a listener.
And I think this is how we start to activate the folks who we don't see today, like the
dark passengers or stemster who are there and they're listening and they're participating,
but we don't see them creating, giving them tools to curate the music that they love.
And that could be somebody saying, you know what, I love all of real Richard's work whenever
he has AI rappers.
So I'm going to take the time to curate a collection of all of real Richard's stuff
that's based on AI rappers.
Others may say, you know what, I want to create a collection of sounds that are great for
producers who are looking to make Samba inspired hip hop, right?
And that these collections in our minds are things that they themselves can be zapped.
And so now we offer what functionally is curation and discovery tools from the community where
they get financially incentivized to do this and share it more broadly as little bundles
of things because in the feed based architecture, you don't have any kind of structure or consistency
to how you find information.
And in the absence of algorithms, digital algorithms, if you involve humans in the process, we think
that something really beautiful can emerge there.
And so that's something that is on our roadmap.
And as we move past the general app improvements, it's something that we really, really want
to work on and that we're really excited about.
And building on Nostar, is it kind of a breath of fresh air?
Is it something that's kind of a little bit more, I guess.
I don't know if it's simple, but it seems like a lot of things progress quickly.
Building on Nostar, is it fun?
I mean, in contrast to say someone's old code that you're trying to decipher.
Ben and not Henry.
You guys can tell a lot of stories there.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, Nostar development is so much fun.
Yeah, I mean, every time I like got like, when I code something, like I'm like, I'm
coding for Stemster.
And then like, like there's always this moment where I'm like, like, holy shit, like this
thing that I just coded, it's like, it's already working and like all these other apps, like
I didn't have to do anything.
I just, I wrote my code and I look like it's working everywhere.
That's so cool.
Yeah, that's powerful, man.
It's not just interoperability of, of in pubs, you know, that you're getting these users
on.
It's the entire ecosystem of mini apps.
Yeah, I totally agree.
The general model of like everything in this event, you know, that makes it really easy.
You can just read them.
They're not like binary blobs.
So a lot of that like lower level stuff is kind of taking care of for you.
I love like, again, this open protocol.
So we just get all these features for free basically.
I mean, Zaps are huge, right?
The fact that we literally have a built in like peer to peer money system, it just works.
It is Bitcoin.
I mean, that's, it's truly incredible, especially when you start mixing it with other things,
right?
Like music or writing or any of these other, these other apps.
So I mean, I love building on Nostra.
It's been really fun.
Yeah, another thing I want to give a shout out to Pablo and anyone else who's contributed
to NDK.
That's really that's the backbone of our client is that is a Nostra dev kit.
That's another cool thing is like, honestly, I've barely had to really touch the abstraction
layer that I have in NDK that other people are building for free.
And everyone in the community is benefiting from that.
That's another, so it's just like, you know, network effects just compounding constantly.
Yeah.
I'll say this.
I was surprised by something that happened where I commented on a track.
Forget who's it was commented on track and stemster.
And it showed up in Domus and then somebody commented in Domus or on snort maybe and it
showed up in stemster.
I was like, what?
Like how it what we never even designed that and it wasn't even the thing that happened
like I when we would talk about it, I couldn't even wrap my head around how we would deal
with this.
And, you know, Ben and Ben and not Henry are like, well, here, you know, they explain
what was going on in terms of the relays and how people are pulling the information and
writing back.
And it's just like, oh my gosh, it's amazing.
And it's like, it's turned out to be phenomenal.
It's like an unbelievable thing.
So it's like, at least for me, not being an engineer on our team, these things appear
as though they're magic sometimes.
And it's amazing.
And Zaps are definitely in that, it's in that bucket for me.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
Yeah.
That client satellite.Earth, it's kind of a Reddit rebuild or whatnot where you have
the groups.
I was talking to someone, someone posted some woodworking stuff and I'm like, you need to
make a group on satellite.Earth about woodworking.
He's like, I'm literally, that's what I'm commenting on.
You just don't even know when you're when you're in Domus or any of the other kind of
social side of the clients.
But it's just incredible.
I mean, it just sprinkles, there's just raining everywhere, raining notes everywhere.
Yeah.
So a lot of cross pollination.
They're on this topic of cross pollination and how, how you honor that.
We are working with the team from plasma.
And in that work, they've been, they've been just wonderful in to allow the 1808 notes
to get pulled in and streamed in their client.
We designed the thing that we hope to see everywhere called an app card or a nap card
master app card.
We're essentially like what, what the intention is, at least for, for, for stemster, but it's
extensible is that, you know, if you're in your client and you come across this card,
it has like a purple outline at the top of it.
It has our stemster logo and it has our little wave form inside of it and a call to action.
And so for stemsters, that call to action could be explore, it could be remix.
You could imagine one coming in from Habla, which is like read.
You could imagine one coming in from Wave Lake, listen.
And so the idea is that these app cards, whenever clients truly pull in something from a different
like app, like not like a different social client, not a kind one, but like unique kinds
that these new apps are creating, give that these app cards would acknowledge that and
that people would be able to start to see, wait a second, this is some kind of tapestry
of experiences that I can move between seamlessly.
I don't even have to like create a new username or password.
I just move over.
And it's like, you're listening to one thing and your client and then all of a sudden you're
like, wait, I can go and remix this in a place called stemster, like what?
And you're just there and you're doing it.
And I think that that's a really, from a design perspective, it's a really important thing
that we have not yet acknowledged is how clients reference other apps and other kinds of content
and how we continue to move that fabric through.
Keep weaving, keep weaving, keep weaving.
For sure, rock.
And this is how we create this interconnected lattice of collaboration and the blood wheel
continues to spin.
All right, folks.
I really want to thank Rock, Ben, not Henry and Rob for their time today.
It's a really enlightening conversation.
Thank you for all the amazing work that you're doing and looking forward to watching the genres
expand and see more and more creativity come out of the content creators who are joining
stemster.
And goodness, we appreciate it.
We are all honored to be here and thank you guys so much for all of your work every weekend
and week out and day in and day out.
You guys are like cultural beacons for everything that's going on.
And so like, mad love to you guys for what you're doing.
And all those content creators out there, check out stemster, they're climbing mountains
over there.
Alright.