Thread

🛡️
This will likely be the last year of damus. Will try my best to make this thing sustainable, but nostr clients don’t make money and I once funding runs dry its over as I can only burn saving for so long. Glad I was able to help play a small part in this regardless of what happens. Going to give it my all next year to try to keep the dream alive. Thanks for coming along for the ride ✌️

Replies (89)

Clients will come and go but if they don't solve the issue of regular income, many will end up being a memory with abandoned code on GitHub. Relying on grants and Bitcoin price appreciation to increase your runway can only take you so far, and with the user base still so small how many can be monetised through subscriptions or through ads that can make it worthwhile? This is going to be a tough problem to solve, considering clients fragment the user base, it makes it even harder than if you were just trying to compete with traditional social media for users View quoted note →
Here's a potential solution, albeit unpopular: You'll need to pay a 10 Sat fee for notes, while a single edit comes at 100 Sats. This not only cuts down on spam but also encourages more deliberate messages. The earnings would be divided equally: 50% for Damus development and 50% for personal stacking goals.
↩ replying to Orange🍊Man👤
I had a similar idea. Here's some bullet points I jotted down a while back: The value 4 value client 1. Every event/action should cost something, minimum of 1 sat. 2. Costs to post, like, boost, quote, reply, add relays 3. Could charge sats to See More on a note (first part would be like a sample or preview). 4. You receives stats every time your post is boosted or liked. 5. Zaps are split with the person who made the post, the developers, the client you're using, and relay operators.
One thought I had to fund apps was to take a small portion of total value zapped through it. Basically zap splits. Each time a zap is sent take X% for the dev team to pay its bills including salary. Haven't implemented but just a thought. Prism API may help with speed of transactions if alot. Sure Will has thought of this before. Why not feasible? Not enough value being moved via zaps to make it work?
@elsat @npub1h50p...rqev Happy to pay a subscription. I used to pay 17 bucks a month for shitflix until I canned it. It was crap. Damus and the protocol as a whole gives me way more value than shitflix ever did. Do the math and put the number out there. What have you got to lose. I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised. You guys are gonna make it 🧡🧡💜💜🤙🫂🫂🫂
↩ replying to Prisoner24601
Also, I don't know software development so please ignore this if I'm just an idiot or someone else commented on this (I didn't read EVERY note), but I see AI cutting the cost of that industry drastically. I'm sure you leverage AI as it is, but I envision an ever-increasing leverage of AI can spread and automate the development across more bodies in less time, ultimately toward the marginal cost of production, being so low that zaps in an increasingly valuable asset could easily compensate. This may serve as an area of focus, along with the many other things people have suggested. I have been impressed with the brain power of @Guy Swann on the off chance that you may have questions in this area. Just trying to be helpful. Keep rockin 🤘
Thanks so much sharing your thoughts on the future of #Damus. I appreciate your dedication to making this project sustainable. I completely understand the challenges you're facing, and I want to express my support for your efforts to keep Damus alive. A subscription-based model, I think it's a very good idea. I'm more than willing to subscribe and contribute to the sustainability of #Damus. I believe many others share this sentiment, and it could be a viable solution to ensure the continued success of the platform. Additionally, as you may all have noticed the success of the #Primal app, which integrates a lightning wallet to facilitate sat top-ups. I think implementing a similar feature for #Damus could be beneficial. I think the idea of receiving a reasonable share from top-up sales to contribute to the financial health of #Damus. Al the Best!
@jb55 Here are a few things that come to mind that may help! Getting sustainable/consistent income: 1. Have a dialogue that pops up once after installation, that allows users to opt-in to zap-splits, so that every time someone zaps a post, Damus gets a % 2. A "Damus+"/"Damus Pro" etc paid subscription tier with extra features 3. Turn amazon/walmart/etc links in posts into referral links, and have that be opt-in of course.
Not for everyone and so maybe take as a general tip, but one suggestion is to move countries to take advantage of the lower cost of living and extra runway you get while building a new business. Mexico? Thailand? El Salvador? Argentina? Lots of places. Latin American destinations have sinular time zones to US and are easy to get back to USA from... In Mexico I'd recommend Mexico City, Merida (carribbean side and safest city in Mex), Oaxaca City for a smaller city feel than Mexico City and San Miguel de Allende a nice mountain town and lotsa expats.
You played an enormous part. 0 to banned in China in 60 days 🤣. You write great software (and fast). You are brilliant and generous but you are terrible at incentives. You have disincentivized the birth of relay businesses by giving arguably one of the best relays away for free. This is bad. As your bank account proves, great relays aren’t free! Turn the Damus relay off IMMEDIATELY (or please stamp an industry leading premium entry fee on it). High volume relays are a huge money sink. If Damus client doesn’t work well without it, then you know what to work on: making Damus client great without subsidizing the traffic.
I think it's useful to talk about the skills and tools that are needed. While up until now the skills that you (probably?) needed were programming, memory optimization, UX, user requests and the tools were libraries, ChatGPT, Algorithms, ObjC… the next steps will require you to use different skills & tools. The needed skills are more towards leadership, planning&prioritization, raising funds, marketting and your tools will be people, connections, processes, coordination/partnerships with other businesses. And note here that learning skills requires effort, but also note that it essentially requires the same approach like learning a new programming language. Watch youtube videos, get a book, try&fail couple times, practice… Now just to brainstorm couple ideas for what could be done: - create a list of all potental ideas that could bring in money and sort those by "result/cost" (= bang-for-buck) - ask for donations once a month (post a note, do a popup in the app…) - gather funds in any way possible (create project on geyser.fund, reach out to opensats, hrf, jack…), make it clear to your friends that you need money for Damus. - create a complementary product targetted at businesses (not end customer) and sell them what they need. Handle the Nostr infra for them, etc. - get a part time job next to Damus - sign up for incubator, for new app competitions, etc. - you may be able to get a loan - freeze work on Damus for couple years until there's much bigger userbase - if you would want to go to the VC/Angel route, you can likely get couple bitcoiner angel investors (I think you could get $200k@5M pre-money fairly reasonably). With others we would be happy to support you this way even if we are unlikely see the money back. That said it's also fair to say no.
I don't sympathise. Bitcoin Maxis poo poo shitcoiners but they have something we don't: *they know what people want*. So it pays to clip our noses, dive in the sewer and backspat some shitcoiner types (explore-exploit). As to devs complaining FOSS doesn't pay i don't agree. i've seen one dev complain about their app which allowed users 10 torrents going at the same time on a free version. Why didn't they just make the free version 3 max, a pro-paid 10 and allow anyone, giving detailed, secure and working instructions, to build the pro without paying if they wanted to so keep the FOSS ethos? On #nostr why am i always context switching? Every time i context switch to upload a longer video to be hosted so i can link it here etc is a lost income for the dev. ** #contextswitching is lost money.** i've also spoken abou t #ti pQ without success. But supposedly "nostr doesn't pay".
Why should a nostr client need centralized hardware ? I thought the idea was a nostr client runs in client machine ( laptop or smartphone) ... web interface should be optional .. only if the developer is supported by web-bros ..