liminal 🦠 on Nostr: Here's my take that has evolved and helped me make peace on the direction of nostr, ...

Here's my take that has evolved and helped me make peace on the direction of nostr, funding, governance and community discourse.

Nostr, by design is the worst commons. You're thrown into a pool of servers where there's no leader, no hierarchy, and no one can be kicked off. But that's the point. If it can work here, it can work even better with stronger restrictions. Alex's nostrhub is the perfect environment for everyone that cares to participate, and so they will. Anyone else can make make their own version, and that's the beauty of it.

Yes, there will be divergence. And yes there will be institutions, because hierarchies will naturally form one way or another. The fundamental point is that there will never, or at least shouldn't be "The Institution" that governs nostr.

This doesn't mean no structure, it means anyone can do whatever they want and freely associate on an infinite land where they can claim a small part of. It means that you work with your tribe and your prefered signal to formalize the mechanics you want to share. Whoever doesn't want to use your spec isn't in your tribe for that use case.

A pluralist nostr degrades nothing when developers who care to work with each other do and those who don't, don't. You can just stop working with people who degrade your signal.

Physical Commons deals with finite and degradable resources. Digital Knowledge Commons has infinite material, but attention and discourse are the finite resources and can be degraded. The Nostr acts as one end of the spectrum of signal control, while single relays stand on the opposite.

If you're throwing your stuff into the most adversarial conditions, expect to be met with the most adversarial responses. If that's not what you want, there's no problem in finding a smaller circle of users and developers where you can build and discuss in peace.