Welcome Curated Feeds: https://feeds.nostr.band/

Many people believe Nostr needs some new feeds.

Here is one: wss://feeds.nostr.band/popular - all notes with 10+ interactions.

Or another: wss://feeds.nostr.band/meme - some memes, as you might expect (curated by @Tony ).

Add a feed URL to your relay list. Then, if your app allows that (Damus), you can go to Global, switch off other relays, and enjoy the nice filtered feed.

There are also feeds with pictures, video or audio.

And you know what?

You can create your own curated feed, and let others subscribe to it!

It’s built around labels, NIP-32. You add some labels to some notes, and our custom relay will then serve the notes you’ve curated.

Here a deeper overview by @Tony https://lnshort.it/feeds/

There are many approaches to curation, algorithms and filtering. Hopefully, this new tool could help Nostr become more engaging, welcoming, diverse and safe.

One way we could make relays more user friendly is to call them something - a label. Then in the app reference them by label and some other short identifier or icon.

At that point you don’t need to show all the intimidating web socket formats and just show the label + icon.

The image feed would be a good default feed for any client where the user is not logged in. Or combine with video too.

wss://feeds.nostr.band/pics

A bit basic and boring atm with many placeholders

Id probably theme them to “luna”

Here is a list of badge achievements I randomly came up with, you can add your own ideas too. You could even create “trees” where there are multiple levels of badges for the same task (for example # of people zapped, or # of total zaps, or number of notes)

1. Add name / image to profile
2. Added additional profile info
3. Watched an intro video (45 sec)
4. Backed up login keys (no keys on login)
5. Learned about relays
6. Added a relay
7. Discovered zaps (learned)
8. Set up a wallet
9. Zapped someone (once, 10 times, 100, 500, 1000+)
10. Got zapped (once, 10, 100, etc…)
11. Was helpful to someone (honor system) once, 10 times, 50 etc…
12. Referred others (affiliate linking) — 1, 10, 100, 500, 1000 etc…
13. Set up a translator
14. Translated the client (major contributor, casual contributor)
15. Client developer (Lead, major, casual)
16. Client designer (lead, major contributor, casual)
17. Client tester (helped report bugs)
18. Client visionary (contributed feature ideas)
19. Open source hero - generally super helpful across multiple open source projects (like Christoph)
20. IRL Nostrich - met with the team at a conference booth
21. Merch collector - purchased something from the client Merchant store
22. Seller (tinkerer, merchant, power seller) marketplace user who places or sells x number of products
23. Advisor - advised the client development or direction in some way
24. Media uploader (notes contain media), 100, 1000 etc…
25. Supporter subscriber (Basic, Hardcore, monthly, annual)
26. Zap supporter - tips (tiers, 25%, 50%, 100%)
27. Badge collector - collected # of badges (10, 25, 50, 75, 100) - no idea if there will be that many.. just guessing
28. Badge Hunter (acquired x number of badges in x amount of time)
29. Power user (x number of notes exceeded)
30. Power zapper (100k, 250k, 500k, 1m 5m 10m, etc.. all the way to 1 bitcoin zapped)
31. Zap king (1 btc zapped)
32. Topic follower (following a hashtag)

What else?

Badges are kind of useless if any random person issues it, but they are kinda cool if a client is the issuer. 

As client dev, you could issue badges for completing onboarding, for exploring various nostr concepts at your own pace, for referring other users to the network (basic affiliate linking), for achieving certain objectives like zap count, zap number, total interactions, number of comments, number of times you’ve been thanked by someone (would need some sort of a reporting system that just works on honor). 

These are just some ideas, but badges could be good tools to incentivize all sorts of things. Of course, some incentives might not be great or could have adverse effects, but they are worth playing around with.

Certain badge achievements could even translate into real world benefits (yes, like fking NFTs.. bite me).

Hire an illustrator, (or create a badge of achievement for helping your client create these - have some very high standards…) 

You could also issue one of a kind badge for certain helpful things like helping with translations, for developers, for designers .. go wild.

The point is, these come from reputable source - the client in question. 

Just saying…

What do you think of the idea of zap faucet for newcomers who fill out their profile / connect a wallet and or complete some other task - just so they have some sats to play with?

Or could we add an intro flow to post about yourself and anyone reading those can just zap voluntarily?

Here is what I envision for a nostr-email client:

- Write on Nostr - publish to nostr

• Ability to build a mailing list from the web interface (think simple email collection form)
• Option to email your mailing list at the time of publishing
• Ability to onboard users into a nostr client from email (user reacts -> asked to sign up)
• Web interface for your content specifically and the ability to manage your email list.
• Zap and or Stripe payment integration. I think users should be able to choose.

Happy to help design all of this. Grant would be very helpful.

We need more educators writing about the benefits of nostr in various niches. And publishing them on other platforms besides nostr.

One of the things I just realized that may be an issue for long form publishing platforms is migration from other platforms.

Say a user wants to migrate from Medium. How do they port their content? It’s easy to say, just leave it alone and start fresh, but I suspect people will not like that.

I have my own writing tool app and customers requested to have their content ported over.

Couple things we can do that I’ve proposed several times:

1. Legacy labels next to new ones eg. (username = npub). Then rename username in app.

2. Remove key gen entirely and generate it for them. It’ll be a slight surprise in how that works but nothing that can’t be explained.

I’ve provided designs and more details on each concept. Dunno if anyone listened.

Having collected some feedback, combined with some personal ideas, here are what seem to be the areas for most improvement in Nostr / clients:

Discovery is an issue, people don’t know who to follow. Since the are not that many diverse profiles that are easy to discover, it might be easier to recommend topics (hashtags).

We could also add profile descriptions on other clients (I think Damus already has this).

Spammy global is a turn off. Could be solved by recommending Hash tags to follow. What if we create a list of common hash tags (kind of like subreddits) and show those to people? To help populate them, we could (if technically possible) create a client-side list that can be autosuggested as you type in a hashtag. For example, if I typed #p - it could suggest Photography, Plants, Parenting, Philosophy, Programming, etc… This way people who are using hashtags to tag would have an easier time picking something that already exists instead of making totally random ones that nobody is going to discover unless they see it in a note.

Grownostr (IMO) is not a useful hashtag as it is too generic and mixes too many subjects into one. If it were up to me, I’d ditch this one and use auto-recommended ones if/when implemente.d

Crypto talk is a turn off. Can’t stop people from talking about what they are passionate about, so I think the best strategy is to find topics to follow.

Global could become a list of topics you follow instead of actual global notes. Once you follow a few topics, it would become much more useful.

Some (nobody?) understands NIP5 without reading into it. Personally I think this is a terrible name to begin with. Either rename it, or get rid of verification entirely. Since impersonation is likely to affect a smaller number of accounts, we could add paid verification for people who only exceed a certain number of followers. Not sure how you’d enforce this across clients though.. ideas welcome.

People are very confused about keys. nsec, npub, what to enter into a website, what not to… totally understandable. I propose we add small explainers and use old terminology within labels to help people understand these concepts. For example, an input field could be Username (npub) Password (nsec). Of course, I can already hear people shouting at me “But this is not what they are!” Rightfully so. Perhaps, then have tiny explainers, visual, video or just text to plainly explain the concepts right within signup.

Relays - hard to understand. No onboarding process talks about relays now. Idea I have here is to automatically connect people to top X relays while showing this screen in onboarding AND giving a quick explanation of what’s a really. Use fun, engaging copywriting combined with an image or a video to increase the odds of people reading / watching it.

People have a very hard time in profile setup. I think Damus is leading the way on this. Personally, I would stop immediately all development of other features and focus 100% on profile UX. This is a critical step IMO and needs to be absolutely nailed. We can’t expect people to use 3rd party image services to add a profile picture. It needs to be as easy as every other social platform.

People don’t know what zaps are, or how to find a wallet. Steep learning curve. Ideas here: Add old school terminology along side in labels. For example: Zaps (payments). 

For wallets, create a section within the client that explains wallets and recommends a few options (are there a few options, perhaps WoW, Alby).

Overall people are not familiar with many of the concepts of Nostr. Solution here would be to create an educational area in a client that covers terminology / concepts and has fun ways to explain what things are. Perhaps even a game or an interactive quiz. I know… a lot of work! 

One idea floated was having no signup process at all and generating a key on Post. I am not sure if this would be a good UX given people might get confused why there’s no way to signup or may not take their key seriously and misplace / ignore it. But, it would be cool to test this idea with some client.