19: Romantically Shitting on Paywalls w/ Pablo

"I need to build something to test the thing."

Pablo & Gigi take a walk. Recorded December 2025.

Projects & tech mentioned:

• TENEX (multi-agent coordination on Nostr)
• Agora (Nostr client for local communities, by Pablo & Leopoldo Lopez)
• NDK Swift & NDK Kotlin (native ports of NDK)
• nostrdb (embedded Nostr database)
• NIP-60 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
• Podcasting 2.0 (open podcast ecosystem)
• #DeMu (decentralized music on Nostr)
• Olas (rebuilt with TENEX agents)
• castr.me (Nostr-to-RSS podcast feed)
• ants (Nostr search)
• Boris (reading and highlighting)
• Pyramid (fiatjaf's invite-tree relay)
• Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans

In this dialogue:

• Agents tried to fix world hunger: made a Google Doc and a React app, nothing worked, world hunger still not fixed
• "We're behaving like LLM agents: never learn"
• Everything Pablo builds is a way to test TENEX: "I need to build something to test the thing"
• Agora: a Nostr client starting from the premise that you only care about your immediate surroundings
• Invitation-based trust networks: cryptographic proof of who invited whom into a relay, similar to fiatjaf's Pyramid
• Citizen journalism use case: pseudonymous publishing where a known figure vouches for a source without revealing identity
• NIP-60 wallet baked into Agora: your key is no longer just identity, it's also money
• Social key recovery via Shamir secret sharing: select people you can reach (not necessarily trust), hidden behind follow events
• Identity migration for stolen keys vs. key loss recovery: two different problems, solvable with similar tools
• "Fiatjaf had the right ideas around community-based backup and recovery"
• Romantically shitting on paywalls: you cannot box content in, no matter how hard you try
• What you can monetize is not the content itself but the relationship, the access, the live interaction
• Twitch figured it out: everything is free, everywhere, always. People pay for something else entirely.
• Substack's unfixable problem: it's a function of size, always Pareto, 20 people making a killing out of millions
• "You're prostituting yourself for nothing because you're playing in a winner-takes-most market where there is already a winner"
• The Matthew principle: to those who have everything, more will be given
• All content types competing under the same lens: why every platform turns into TikTok
• "Scaling Nostr is hard, so it will always fragment" -- and that's the feature
• Nostr's promise: many small markets strictly superior to one big centrally planned instance
• Digital fast food: platforms serve maximally engaging slop, like lucid dreams generated on the fly
• The health food analogy: McDonald's still exists, but a whole industry grew around health-conscious people. Digital health is next.
• Young people craving real connections over influencer slop, drawn to vinyl and gramophones for the same reason
• Walking the Roman path: 3,000-year-old cart tracks still visible, "look at the UX of that thing"
• "I switched my whole online identity to Nostr because this thing has legs and will still work 30 years from now"
• Email marketers already know: own the list, everything else is a funnel
• Relays as magazines: you don't quit magazines because one magazine is bad
• Most people perceive Nostr as "the crypto app" -- we're not at the "email is a protocol" stage yet
• Special-purpose clients: a posting-only client with an empty text field, ants for search, Boris for highlights
• "I'm amazed at how well things work. Blossom every day without thinking about it."
• "We've been on this professionalizing mode for the past six to nine months. Technically, we're in very good shape."