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Three new projects were released recently - Wayman, Filestr and Zapworthy, all relying on new data types (kinds). So we now have music, files and highlights data formats (nostr events), all queryable over a common API (nostr protocol). I don't know who needs to hear this, maybe it's just me, but I finally realized it's the true potential of Nostr. We used to just have "information" on the internet - a presentation-layer (html+css) and custom APIs behind it on every website. Now with Nostr we can access "data" - all data types can have a standardized representation as nostr events and a standardized API to store/query this data from a decentralized swarm of relays. We already have people, notes, posts, highlights, stalls, products, music, files. All the other stuff will follow - companies, drugs, recipes, cars, TVs, games, excel tables, you name it... All visible to any new app, all addressable, composable into new experiences. I thought that portable identity was what Nostr added to the internet. Now I realized it's also a data layer. This is mind blowing! Need to rethink it all over again.

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I see this and want to ask.... Why tho There seems to be a misallocation of resources in a misguided desire to push various data types through a text protocol. Sure, you can take anything and encode it and even document a standard for how it's encoded that others can make use of. This is not innovative and has been done decades ago. But this doesn't make it scale. Data will either get encoded and centralized through relays where costs have been pushed on others and performance for end users suffers... Or data owners should just stand up their own servers, and it should be obvious that natural data formats, and specialized data structures like databases are going to be far superior to layers of encoding. It's like we're repeating mistakes in an effort to just do stuff because we can rather then considering the impacts. #[0]