Hey Nostr,
I need your help. Divine.video as you might have seen is a new video nostr app that i've been working on for the last 3 months.
It got MUCH more attention than I was expecting. Hundreds of millions of people viewed, liked, or shared videos about it. I've got some of the biggest original Viners in my DM's begging to get back on it. The TestFlight hit it's 10k limit in a few hours.
I'm excited but also really stessed out. We've had lots of bugs and Apple and google have been their usual black boxes when it comes to app review.
A bunch of folks have stepped up to help, @nprofile…9kky got the android build working for example.
Lots of things have broken, nobody really knows how survive a flash flood. I'm sharing this because I need help. We've got a chance to really grow nostr, the idea of a video app that's not got AI slop and does focus on something more human is resonating. People hate what's happening to tiktok, instagram, and youtube shorts where algorithms and the platforms love of AI generated content going viral is taking over. Instead of fighting back we see AI only platforms like MetaAI and Sora. This is an assault on the very idea that people are central to social media. I think big companies see the shine of AI generated content and dream of a world without all these pesky rabble making demands of platforms. If only they could replace the creators with bots.
This call to action felt right to me, but holy shit I had no idea it'd go so viral.
The app has lots of bugs, and we need appstore approval, but at the moment the biggest problem I have is relays. I need you, the nostr community's help. I started out with strfry which we know scales but lacks search. So i started using nosflare, https://github.com/Spl0itable/nosflare , by @nprofile…4nss which worked pretty good when we had dozens of users but has had scaling issues and has been hard to debug. But Nosflare is cool. I was able to easily add nip-50 search support, and because it runs on cloudlfare i hoped would scale horizontally. When I told @nprofile…4nss I was using nosflare, he said i should have told him... but again I didn't think this would escalate so quickly. So then we tried using the ditto relay https://github.com/andotherstuff/otherstuff-relay by @nprofile…t7fy and put a bunch of really beefy servers behind it. Even then it's struggling to keep up.
The thing is, we're pre-launch, we have 10k users in testflight and a mostly read only site at divine.video which is a react app.
I'm a really terrible sysadmin. Yes I've helped run my own mail server since the 90's but I hate it and i'm not good at it. I know my way around my command line, I've compiled my own kernel from source, but fuck i hate it. And now i've got to setup and scale servers to realize the dream of something i've worked on for the last 8 years. I need your help, but maybe i'll digress...
In 2017 I decided to learn crypto, i joined a startup, quantstamp, and built their testnet, a SAT solver to verify smart contracts. I quit because I came to see how scamy the world of ICO's and tokens were. I'm not the only Nostr dev to have explored the 'darkside'. I started my company to build decentralized social, initially trying to take secure scuttlebutt to the mainstream. I built planetary.social, and worked with amazing dev's like @nprofile…w4p8 and others we saw Nostr arrive and we pivoted! We built Nos.social, which i'm really proud of but it never took off.
A few months ago I was in talks to help start andotherstuff, but i was also very frustrated with running a company, I wanted to build stuff myself. So I stopped managing people, started a podcast, and really dove in to building with agentic programming. I built a bunch of things I threw away. A lot of bad experiments. In the course of the revolution.social podcast i kept hearing about Vine. I listed to the "Vine 6 seconds that changed the world" podcast: https://vine-six-seconds-that.captivate.fm/ and I talked to people about this social media platform that was shutdown when @nprofile…zx6m was trying to save Twitter when he returned as CEO.
I thought, well Vine is cool, I know folks like @nprofile…srrg and others have build nostr video apps, how hard could it be to make a nostrvine app. I started coding, that's why the repo is still called nostrvine: https://github.com/rabble/nostrvine Turns out that it wasn't that had to make something that sort of worked.
Then I thought, it'd be cool to dig up some old vines. I searched the internet, found some on youtube, some on the way back machine, and I thought oh cool, i found a couple hundred popular old vines. Then I hit the motherlode, a community internet preservation project called archiveteam had run crawlers to archive the site: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Vine they had about 2.7 TB of vine data, but in these very hard to work with WARC files that are 40GB each! I spent a month or more learning to parse and extract the files. I realized i had the meta data for most vine users, millions of comments, and hundreds of thousands of actual vine videos! It was a nightmare to parse because of the size of the files, the messiness of the data, and the like. But it was a consuming fun project, a puzzle.
At the same time, I was learning about flutter, I've had to rewrite the nostrvine codebase many times as i learned about riverpod, figured out how to get the UI to update smoothly while interacting with nostr. Getting the app to run fast and smooth was really hard. I also had to figure out how to host the damned videos in a way that works. I tried google cloud, cloudflare, and bunny. I made TONS of workers to run all of these services to make the system working. I also was seeing how much people, myself included are frustrated by AI slop, taking over social media. I have an old friend who runs a non-profit tech org, The Guardian Project, they'd make a tool for verifying videos are real for documenting human rights abuses. I thought, hell i could use this proofmode thing they've got to verify that videos are real. People like realness.
Over the last few weeks the pieces came together, I was scheduled to speak at WebSummit with @nprofile…5cp7 and also to interview @nprofile…9grd on the main stage talking about enshittification of the internet, and how we can resist it, by building things like Divine.
I talked to a reporter from Tech Crunch who'd written a positive article about AndOtherStuff, and she was excited to write an in-depth piece about my vine clone. Once the date was set, I had no choice to go forward. Was the app ready, NO NOT AT ALL. I was literally coding up releases on the plane while flying to Web Summit in Lisbon. I started submitting the app, and getting rejected. It got much better really fast, and basically works.
On the stage at WebSummit when I introduced diVine, the audience clapped politely. I showed the app to people and they sometimes said "oh this will be big" and wanted to play with it. But if you've ever made software, and you show it to people, everybody always finds something nice to say about it.
I had so little faith in diVine taking off that I was planning on taking a few days off to explore Morocco before heading to a non-profit software dev meetup in SF. It was only the last minute that I decided I might need be near a computer and internet connection post launch to see how things are going. Until diVine launched I thought the highlight of my trip and WebSummit would be that a podcast network wanted to pick up revolution.social and help me build an audience around the podcast.
I have never seen anything like this excitement. Just look at tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=divine there is a wave of people excited about it. There's a wave of news about it: https://news.google.com/search?q=divine%20vine&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen Folks are saying that I'm taking on TikTok, and it's been on the evening TV news all over the place.
This is a dream. More excitement than I ever could have dreamed of. Creating a social media app that reflects all the values I laid out in rights.social . Building something people love and are excited about. When the app's been up, the new videos are amazing, so funny, so creative. When Jack launched Twttr, we didn't get this reaction. It took a lot of time for twitter to emerge as a star. The scaling issues didn't even show up until a year after twitter launched. When Kevin launched Instagram it got 150K signups in the first few days, and I was blown away at how fast it was growing.
If it hadn't been for my messing up getting in to the appStore, and having my relays collapse under the traffic, diVine would have grown much faster. Somehow it hits a nerve.
This is where I need your help, the Nostr community. I've already got help from a ton of folks like the folks from @nprofile…mrhy and @nprofile…pa8a and others i'm forgetting right now... But we need more help. Let's do this as a community.
We're building a permissionless, open future that can't be shutdown by corporate owners. But we only get there if the tech works. We don't get to integrate cashu and show users how there's another business model for social media if we don't make an experience that people enjoy using.
Here's where we are. We've got the new nip for replaceable video events, which is supported by divine and amethyst... https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/2072/files we've got the proofmode verification spec i proposed: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/2109 and my weird fork of nosflare which adds the ability to do filter requests that sort on things other than timestamp, it lets us find the most popular old vines: https://github.com/rabble/nosflare
The blossom server for media running on cloudflare mostly works, bunny is mostly working to scale serving the content. But fuck our relays are having trouble. Partially it's because divine doesn't optimize how many relay connections it does, so help with that would be appreciated.. but mostly it's we need to scale the relays, we need to work fast, and reliably. I'm trying to not talk much about Nostr and not make users understand anything about how nostr or keys or relays work.
We need a network of relays, we can dedicate for this, scale horizontally, which respond quickly, and support search. We could have search relays + normal content ones, but doing that requires updates to the released app, which is hard to do because we've got a delay of a day or more per release. So it's best if we can put this all behind relay.divine.video.
In terms of content moderation, my tactic is to provide a pretty heavily moderated experience on the primary relay and media server. But users own their keys, and the app lets users change or add relays and switch media servers. That way we can provide both freedom and the curated experience of users we're enticing away from centralized corporate social. And all of this is open source.
So help! I need nostr sysadmins and scaling folks. Please help. We don't have much time to catch this wave, and I'm in over my head. If you can help, reach out,
[email protected] or send me a DM, i'll add you to a slack room, and we'll figure it out.
Join me and we'll make a social media revolution to make revolution possible.