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This will likely be the last year of damus. Will try my best to make this thing sustainable, but nostr clients donโ€™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 โœŒ๏ธ

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@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 ๐Ÿคฃ. 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 arenโ€™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 doesnโ€™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, ObjCโ€ฆ 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, practiceโ€ฆ 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 appโ€ฆ) - gather funds in any way possible (create project on geyser.fund, reach out to opensats, hrf, jackโ€ฆ), 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".
@jb55 earned my hard respect when I learned what he has built to make this community what it is. He deserves the utmost accolades and awards, and probably a few #bitcoin for all his work. This year will see some radical evolutions in the #nostrvrse, and I hope the OG, @Damus and @jb55 get credit where credit is due. Thanks for all the fish! (And #zaps and #npubs, and more!! ) LFG ๐Ÿ™Œ๐Ÿผ View quoted note โ†’