PCR115 - Books that Can't Burn with Stella, Liminal, Emma & Chip - Plebchain Radio

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Pleb Chain Radio, a live show brought to you by Plebs for Plebs, which focuses

(00:08):
on the intersection of NOSTER and Bitcoin protocols.
Join QW and Avi as they run down the weekly news and developments, breaking down the current
thing and the future frontier with the foundation of decentralization, the builders, thinkers,
doers, and plebs.
All right, we are live.

(00:30):
Welcome, gentle plebs, to episode number 115 of Pleb Chain Radio.
Today is Thursday, or it's not, today is Friday, the 6th of June, 2025,
and it is 12.42 p.m. on the east coast of the United States.
At the time of recording, we have a fun show, a packed house.

(00:53):
Stella, Emma,
Liminal, and Chip
from the Med Scholar,
Alexandria, and Gitz Citadel
team are here with us.
And if that was confusing,
I have some good news for you.
Was that English, Javi?
If that was confusing, QW,
the good news is they are right here

(01:13):
with us to explain
exactly how that shakes out.
And a reminder, folks,
if you are listening to this show on
Apple or Spotify, first of all,
Thank you for listening, but I would urge you to switch over to the Fountain Podcasting app, where you can support the Value for Value revolution and earn some sats.

(01:36):
And by the way, you can also subscribe there to support the show, and you will get early access to this episode and exclusive access to our bonus episodes.
This is all, this is a new stuff for us, QW.
So I'm slipping on my lines, this whole subscription thing.

(01:57):
But in any event, this show is streamed live on zap.stream
and any other Noster client that supports streaming
such as Amethyst and Noster and QW.
You know, there is no second best Bitcoin conference
because BTC Prague is it.
It is taking place between June 19th and June 21st
in, you guessed it, Prague this year.

(02:18):
that's just under two weeks away.
And you can save some sats
by using discount code NOSTR,
N-O-S-T-R, 15% off.
If you're paying in sats, 10% off
if you're paying in dirty old fiat.
And for our meme readout today,
Bobby, are you single-handedly
just brute-forcing plebs to Prague

(02:42):
with that promo code?
You know, I will say
there is not that much NOSTR content
in Prague this year,
which is unfortunate. But yes, hopefully this brute forcing effort will pay some dividend.
Don't get rugged over there with no Nostra content. Any side events or anything,
you might have to just brute force that as well. That is true. That is true. For our meme readout

(03:07):
today, KW, it is a single frame meme with a picture of our dear leader in the United States,
President Trump shaking hands with a very robotic and wooden-looking tech CEO, Mark Zuckerberg,
and he's saying to him, your name is Elon now. And QW, you have been paying attention to Bitcoin

(03:32):
and Nostoculture in the last week, although you have been on vacation, so I don't know how much
attention you could have been paying. That said, yeah, I'll be honest, Avi, Montana, Western Montana,
Glacier National Park, all the rivers, the lakes, the trees, the nature. I've never seen more deer
just wandering around in my life. It really, it's a different experience when you kind of

(04:00):
take a week off of tapping into the everyday, you know, because obviously Nostra moves fast.
We always have some kind of cultural event to meme about.
It just, I did not expect to come back to what seemed to be kind of the most polarizing
breakup of all billionaires in the world, right?

(04:23):
That Elon and Trump deal.
It seems to be kind of overtaking the socials.
I'm just like, man, I kind of want to do another week in Montana until that dies out, right?
Oh, yeah.
So, yeah, another thing that happened while I was gone, which I think is I went and checked it out.

(04:43):
Obviously, we're on ZapDot stream, but Scardust, the prog metal band that we had on a couple weeks ago, a few weeks ago, they've gone full Noster.
They're doing a 24-7 live stream now.
And if you look at it, it's really well done.
I got to think that maybe LeHavre had something to do with it.

(05:05):
but their new album, because we didn't know during our show when that album was going to drop.
It's dropping July 18th. But not only are they doing 24-7 live stream on Zap.Stream,
you have all the links. I mean, it's almost like an advertisement as well.
You know, here's our content. Here's some great videography. And here's all our albums,

(05:30):
or all our socials.
It's interesting.
It's like a billboard in a way,
a visual billboard that you can zap.
I don't know.
I'm not explaining it well enough,
but I recommend anybody go to zap.stream,
check out that 24-7 live stream.
It's pretty neat.
And even if you're not a huge prog metal person,

(05:54):
you can see the potential beyond all of that.
I love it.
And I like their music.
I think it's a unique experiment in direct band-to-fan interactions.
I'm actually excited.
I don't think we've even scratched the surface
in what this 24-hour live stream can even mean.

(06:17):
So we'll see.
And for a specific band, not, let's say, no good radio
or something where they're constantly just playing
different songs from different soundtracks.
This is a specific official live stream, which is neat.
The next thing we got coming up, Avi, Nostrebama.

(06:39):
Looks like momentum's moving that way.
I think I'm in a signal chat group where they're talking about all the specifics.
But Nostrebama, Mobile, Alabama, July 14th through the 17th.
I think that's another grassroots deal.
Hopefully there's going to be some sort of a Toonster event or some sort of a live stream that comes out of there for all the global plebs.

(07:01):
And lastly, something I'm excited about because it's kind of a pet project for me, uniting the solo miners, that alliance project that I'm kind of spearheading.
We're up to 82 miners, so 82 workers in our pool, over 800 terahashes second.

(07:23):
So don't be surprised, Avi, if Nostrich is minor block.
So I'm going to do a show on that in a couple weeks, or we will.
And more to come on that.
But that's kind of my hobby right now, and I'm really into it, decentralizing the hash.
I am looking forward to your merry band of anarchist or rebellious hashers taking on Antpool and via BTC and all those other dangerously centralizing forces.

(07:59):
I don't know what it is about me.
I'm channeling my Zapathon days of storming the walls of the wallet of Satoshi.
So it's kind of the same energy in myself.
So it's something I, and I can build a community around it or we can.
So it's perfect.
I'm very much enjoying it.

(08:21):
So who was our top zapper, Avi?
Our top zapper is a legal entity, QW.
A legal entity which presumably has a tax ID and goes by the name of Lightning Store.
So I believe you are doing the honors and dissolving those legal walls and going straight to the source.

(08:43):
You must be talking about my local friend and pleb, Sam.
Sam's the only guy who looked at the entire music industry and thought, needs more math.
He built lightning stores so punk kids could buy merch with fractions of pennies.
Then cranked out Wavelake so indie drummers can finally earn enough sats to buy earplugs.
Legend has it he can open a lightning channel faster than most people can find the Wi-Fi password.

(09:09):
Yet he still can't open a jar of pickles without asking for multi-sig.
Give him a guitar, a keyboard, or a Raspberry Pi and he'll automate the applause,
route the tips, and invoice your mom before the encore.
All hail Sam.
Proof that you can be both GarageBand grungy and nerdy stack nerdy while somehow making it look cool.

(09:30):
Sam, I love you buddy.
Let's do lunch soon.
Thanks for the zap.
Thanks for always supporting Pleb Chain Radio.
Avi and I truly appreciate you.
And anybody listening, hashtag Pleb Chain gets you 20% off the store.
And also, there's still a couple Pleb Chain Radio shirts left if you're in the market.

(09:54):
So I had to plug that.
Might as well.
And Sam is a value for value legend in his own right.
Pure though
Right
And for our sermon today, KW
It is pages that
Outrun flames
Ideas are wild creatures

(10:14):
Try to cage them
And they gnaw through the bars
Multiply in the rafters
Then hitch a ride on the next
Gust of Wi-Fi
Somewhere in the mesh
A band of quiet scribes
has learned to crack every scroll into fireflies,
tiny packets of text that slip through the fists of any would-be censor.

(10:40):
A chapter becomes a constellation of events,
metadata sparkling like dew,
each fragment carrying the author's scent
and a spark for tipping them in gratitude.
The old empire built walls around papyrus.
We build relays.
Where one careless blaze once erased a civilization,

(11:04):
a single paragraph, now multiplies across nodes
faster than a librarian can shout, quiet.
Index cards bloom with summaries and ISBNs,
but no turnstiles, no overdue finds,
only lightning arcs of appreciation,

(11:25):
crackling like distant summer storms. Remember, water finds a way and code moves
quicker still Knowledge yearns to be free not from ideology but from pure impatience Every zap you send is a vote for that impatience an electric wink that says

(11:49):
run, little datum, run.
So keep your relays open, your mind unlocked,
your sat stack ready.
The torch that once smoldered on a Mediterranean shore
now flickers in every pocket.
Let's make sure it never meets another matchbook, only more mirrors.

(12:12):
And with that, it is time to bring on our guests, Stella, Emma, Chip, and Liminal.
Welcome to Plep Chain Radio.
Hello.
It's great to be here.
Thanks for having us.
Excellent.
Well, we typically start these guest segments with a burning question, a hypothetical.

(12:37):
And Stella, we will direct this one to you.
GitCitadel gets a $1 million OpenSats grant,
and you start getting invited to all the influencer podcasts right after that.
What do you do?
Keep coding.
I just want to code.

(12:59):
I don't really want to go on to all of the conferences and stuff.
I'm already going to do little meetups with Purple Connective.
But I would just keep coding.
There's so much work to do, and conferences suck up a lot of time.
I don't know if that's a bad answer.

(13:20):
There is no bad answer.
Thank you.
Avi, are we an influencer podcast?
Well, we're not because she's here, right?
She just said she wouldn't go on one, but she's here, which thankfully means...
No, you guys are plebs. You guys are plebs.
Total plebs here.
All right, so why don't we start...
I guess, Stella, since you're speaking, we'll start with you.

(13:43):
Tell us a little bit about yourself for folks who are not familiar with you.
How did you find Noster? What brought you here?
And then we'll go around the horn.
okay um i actually was on twitter back then it was called twitter and i was mostly talking with
germans about political topics or homeschooling or the economy and every once in a while i had

(14:11):
some contact with some bitcoiners and i kept getting locked out because i have relatively
conservative use and there were some ban trolls who would just go around and report people for
saying things to get them temporarily locked. I always get unlocked but you know the process is
the punishment. So it was constantly applying to get my account unlocked, applying to get unlocked

(14:36):
again and again and I kept complaining about it and then Immunoso and a couple of others
said why don't you just switch to Noster. We've all gone to Noster because a Noster nobody
can ban you and nobody can troll you with reports and that kind of thing so i i got banned again or
not banned but you know locked and then i got returned but shadow banned because i've been

(15:01):
locked so many times that i was on the list and that just was the last straw and i moved over to
and i haven't gone back to now x since then and so i have i have more personally at stake than
Most of the people moved to Noster.
They all kind of moved just to keep chatting.
But I really, I couldn't chat on the other one.

(15:22):
I didn't have the option to stay there.
So that was a really pivotal experience for me to really feel like I was being censored.
And I was saying like really boring, dull things.
It wasn't even anything edgy.
It was just I was talking with somebody they didn't like.
And everyone in that whole conversation would just get reported, reported.

(15:45):
They just go down the whole list and report everybody.
And it's one of the reasons I'm so gung-ho on the whole concept.
And I think it's a beautiful system because it's such a thin tech stack,
so easy to manage, so easy to launch and to develop for.

(16:06):
I've developed for much more complex tech stacks,
and this one is very, very user and dev-friendly.
So.
Excellent.
We will double click more into what you've been doing with that thin and easy tech stack in a bit, Stella.

(16:28):
But Emma, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Yeah.
First, thank you so much for having me on the show here.
So I am a public health professor at a local university in Canada.
And I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole probably around 2020 for real.

(16:49):
And for many of us, Twitter is a resource where you learn more about Bitcoin.
And after that, I learned more about, essentially, Noster.
And during this time when I was going down the rabbit hole,
I'm directing a public health program at a very heightened time during the pandemic and just seeing the fall of just like open discourse in front of me.

(17:22):
And also, you know, students also were not having objective conversations as well in the classroom.
So I think in the back of my mind, I was really looking for ways in which real conversations can happen and kind of like an algorithmic free in some sense platform where people could get information.

(17:47):
And I think when I first came across Noster, it kind of clicked for me.
I didn't know exactly kind of what I would do with it.
But it's led me to a really great place now where I'm clamoring with the Get Sit a Little team.

(18:07):
And, yeah, that's a bit about me.
Great.
Chip, how about you?
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, of course. And I had mentioned before we kind of started
this stream where my kind of name came from. ChipTuner was kind of a chip tuning. It was

(18:32):
kind of known in like the 90s, early 2000s for modifying vehicle firmware. And that's
kind of what I did for the past seven years before I came to Noster. A friend and I kind
along with one of his friends started business.
We modified calibrations by reverse engineering the firmware on boxes from the 90s and early 2000s.

(18:54):
That software was written in like the late 80s.
And we were working on diesel-powered engines for light-duty pickup trucks.
And, you know, along with the convention of everybody else here,
we got into some trouble with the Environmental Protection Agency,
along with other federal agencies.
And we got off pretty easily, and I've been fairly public about my portion of the history,

(19:19):
but I do respect everybody that's involved, so I can't say everything.
But they came, you know, when they come, they come hard.
And with some of our friends in the business, they were looking at everybody's social medias,
and they had been kicking in doors, and they were arresting people left and right,
and they had shut down basically every business nearby us,
and they had been going after lots of companies in our field.

(19:41):
And we got lucky to only have to go through a civil trial and be able to end that somewhat peacefully.
And we just kind of dissolved and went our own ways.
And throughout that process, which was a multi-year process, I just didn't like the idea of knowing that I was under surveillance all the time.
And so I kind of got paranoid about how I was talking to my friends and family and, you know, seeing all the censorship happening everywhere.

(20:05):
And I'd start getting more into software over, you know, hardware and firmware.
and then I think I just was into finance and and other podcasts and I think I came across one of
Marty's or Odell's podcasts and they had talked about Noster you know started talking about it
regularly so I finally took the dive you know just searched around on the internet and and came

(20:27):
across and and eventually found some really cool people here hmm Marty or Odell they must be new
Avi. I've never heard of him. That's right. And finally, Liminal. Yes, Liminal. Please share your
story. Yeah. So I first came across Noster from a Reason TV interview with Will, JB55, the developer

(20:57):
of Damus and NVK on just Noster and the future of the decentralized internet. And I was just
just got me really excited. I searched online trying to like just learn more. And I kind of
went to some website that actually had some JavaScript code and just press run and, you know,

(21:19):
get your private key and send out your first note. And I'm like, wow, this is actually really
easy compared to any other type of, you know, quote unquote, decentralized platform. And that was
that really drew me in. I saw on Noster.com
a list of different

(21:40):
web apps like Coracle and I
ended up using Amethyst and
from there that's where I really became orange pilled and just got really
excited and wanted to see where we can go
and how else I can contribute.
that's interesting liminal so you came in presumably by the libertarian slant if you were

(22:08):
watching reason tv you saw a nostra episode with will i think i remember that one that was from
two or three years ago and then you got onto nostra and then you got orange build is that a fair
summary yeah pretty much like i was you know bitcoin has been in my periphery for a while

(22:29):
but i never it didn't really click until i started understanding nostr and around that time that's
when uh zaps actually started uh like that was the first implementation of zaps and it just like
everything just kind of my mind was blown and i'm like yes this is i'm really excited about this

(22:51):
i got a little bit of a flashback avi of uh zach zach weissmuller uh when we we had him on i think
it was episode seven yeah he works works at reason reason's been a big supporter i i love it
at least in the early days i don't know if i have have they been following along have you

(23:13):
read anything or anybody seen anything from reason lately i saw zach pop up a couple of
weeks back but he on and off maybe takes a few months off pops up every now and then to post something Yeah So there are three things that I mentioned at the top that probably need clarification

(23:34):
There's Git Citadel, there's Alexandria, and there's Met Scholar.
I'm assuming we're starting from the largest to the narrowest, just in terms of scope.
So Liminal, maybe start with you here.
Do you want to talk about Git Citadel?
I think Stella and Chip Tuner would be actually best suited to talk about this.

(24:02):
Okay.
Well, Stella, then, do you want to talk about Git Citadel?
I'm assuming we're going down the funnel here with the broader scope, Alexandria, the next broadest, and then Metzcola with its narrow healthcare scope.
Yeah.
Yeah, Git Citadel is actually like a cooperative of different developers and power users.

(24:27):
And it's become a sort of safe haven for everybody who really wants to build something high quality and complex with Nostr,
which when I first got to Nostr sounded like a joke because everyone was just trying to build a Twitter clone or maybe some sort of widget.
And I said, well, can't we use this to build enterprise-sized systems for replacing something like SharePoint and Teams?

(24:54):
And everyone just sort of stared at me like I was insane, and I got muted, mass muted.
But I am very confident that this is a possibility because it's my area of expertise, and I see what's out there,
what the industry is already now doing, how they are now already getting away from centralized

(25:16):
databases, moving to distributed events and relay architecture. And this is just leapfrogging over
that and going to the next level right away, skipping the lower levels and not waiting to get
a really expensive version from Microsoft or from Google, but rather everyone can make their own.

(25:37):
and I just kept complaining about this and saying this is what we should be building
and so should be building and then I was in a chat a private chat with Michael and Finrod and
a couple of others and Liberty Gal and Beef and we were just like yeah it would be nice to build
something like this and then Michael had the suggestion that we actually just start building

(26:01):
So he was just sort of threw it out, but we decided to go ahead and run with it.
I immediately started a Slack group and invited everybody in, and we just started plotting and planning and thinking what to do.
And originally we were going to start off with a GitHub clone, also because we're all either developers or people very tech-affin, and that was something we could all identify with.

(26:28):
And then Liminal was pushing this idea of this knowledge base.
And he asked me to look at his idea, his proof of concept.
And I did.
And he was talking about knowledge base, knowledge base.
And I said, do you know what that looks like?
To me, when I see that, that looks like an e-book.

(26:50):
That's a book.
And he said, it's a knowledge base.
And I said, it's knowledge base and it's a book.
Or it could be a magazine or it could be a research journal.
or a scientific paper, or documentation for a computer system, technical spec.
It could be any kind of longer document,

(27:11):
which is something that no one was thinking of building with Noster.
There was a whole long-form article,
but you would have to have a whole bunch of them,
and there was no way to string them together.
And I said, but you've invented a way to string these things together.
That's what the index is.
And we took Liminal on board.

(27:32):
Let us take over his stuff and build it out.
And now we have more and more products we're working on in parallel.
And it's actually getting pretty exciting.
Yeah, it's getting bigger and bigger.
More and more people and more and more products.
And things are actually being delivered.

(27:52):
So, Stella, if I understand the – so we'll stick with Git Citadel.
for a moment. It sounds like an amorphous collective of developers building or maybe
pooling resources or time, picking pet projects like a GitHub replacement, for instance,
or something else, right? So there's no fixed charter as such, right? It's loosely knit

(28:18):
organization. I can't say that. There is a fixed charter and there is a hierarchical
organization structure. And I don't want to give away too much. Maybe you'll have me back on the
show if something happens that makes it even more fixed. We'll see. But we definitely have a hardcore

(28:40):
that works for free, basically. And we hire on help. And sometimes we actually have money to pay
them but because we don't have any big funding we we have to to earn the money with work
got it and chip when did you join uh get citadel and how would you characterize your work there

(29:07):
yeah um i think i'm well okay so i guess it's been over a year probably closer to two years now
um Stella had been posting she's like I'm a developer now and I was like what are you working
on and she had just tagged Michael and uh he was working on uh I forget exactly what we called at

(29:28):
the time but it's currently Project Eidyl and uh which is a C++ SDK and I'm probably the second to
uh will uh C developer on Noster probably the only two and I was like man this is a cool project
would you be interested in using my library for it?
I developed a library called Noscript,

(29:48):
which is just kind of meant to do all the cryptography stuff
in an easy little library.
And, you know, hopefully make that easily distributable
alongside something like iDial.
And Finrod and Michael had really been plugging away on it at the time.
And so that was one of the big projects
that we kind of have on hold right now to focus on Alexandria.

(30:10):
But that's kind of when I stepped in.
and they took me in as a pretty large part of our organization now, which is awesome.
And, you know, so now I end up doing most of the sysadmin work,
getting servers up and deployed and kind of our development work,
and then just contribute where I can for backend knowledge.

(30:30):
You know, one of the big projects which we advertise and is currently in production
is a Nostra Git remote, which is just kind of one step towards our GitHub replacement,
just that, you know, at minimum, one of the best things to help distribute is remote, right?
Because a lot of the other Git functionality is kind of there, you know, with Git stuff on Noster.

(30:51):
Other people have contributed to that project.
And, you know, we kind of have issues and we have proposals.
And, you know, we kind of have that functionality across relays right now, despite, you know, WebUIs maybe not being the greatest.
So another step toward actually decentralizing that is getting a remote up.
whereas right now it just kind of focuses on using other remotes such as GitHub or Codeberg, etc.

(31:15):
Some of your big hosting providers and so being an alternative to that is something we're focusing on as well.
So QW, if I were to summarize what I heard.
I was just going to ask for that.
Kind of give me the, I'm telling my 10-year-old what I'm doing.
It sounds like Git Citadel has a secret charter, which Stella doesn't want to share just yet.

(31:41):
But it's a lot of really cool projects and a lot of cool developers who are working on these things.
Yeah, it's always kind of, I mean, just a simple Nostra user.
I've seen the terms, I've seen the, you know, I was never a GitHub person to begin with.
So when I see Git Citadel, I think, oh, it must be something like that.

(32:04):
But it's just, it's highly complex.
And as developers, I feel like, you know, there's a different understanding of how important something like these projects may be.
But for just a layman like myself, until I actually can use something or fiddle around, I don't fully grasp it.

(32:25):
So, what do you feel, maybe Chip can answer this, what do you think this is going to solve?
So, I guess to more answer your question of what is GitCitadel, and I'm probably not the best to answer fully what GitCitadel as a company is, you know, as a collective.
But what we're trying to do is what really nobody else can do, which is develop consistent enterprise ready software, right?

(32:52):
To actually compete in a market where we're kind of just surrounded by pleb software, right?
That sometimes works and sometimes has issues and oftentimes has regression and most of the time doesn't have testing.
And, you know, they just don't have the teams or the funding or whatever you want to call it to get there, right?
And so the reason we kind of got together was this sort of idea of let's actually get something out, right?

(33:15):
And while it's slow, right, something like Alexandria has been our focus because, well, that's something you can get your hands on, right?
Whereas our other products hopefully will.
But the idea is that, you know, it's going to be consistent.
We're going to follow correct software development principles.
And we're going to actually get things out, right?
Whether it be putting together other people's software.
But what we often realize is that we end up having to build most of it ourselves if we want it to work and work consistently with the products we want to build.

(33:44):
And building this on Noster is, like Stella was saying, is something that's just a much simpler foundation to build on.
How much does that help in this?
I mean, I guess the idea being that relays are of the most powerful and we don't really have to build backends.
I mean, at the moment, Alexandria doesn't really have a back end that has been published yet.

(34:11):
So most of it is across relays, which is pretty easy.
They're pretty black box in that they're portable at the moment.
And so you don't really have to build a lot of closed back end infrastructure that's all custom.
I don't have to set up databases and I don't have to set up back end APIs.
For the most part, its clients, for now, can talk to Relay, and that is a universal interface.

(34:37):
So it doesn't have to be any particular piece of software or anything we build ourselves.
I think that's probably...
It's just powerful when you say it like that.
It's really the essence of Noster, whether it's communication protocol,
But you know when you storing little bits of data decentralized everywhere and using that as a database that or a server I would say that that powerful stuff If I could say Yes please Stella This is the thing that motivated me the most Because when I started in the late 90s working in software development and software testing

(35:21):
we were originally, my first job was in a hospital in Texas.
And it was working on their mainframes in the server basement.
and we had the endless paper with the little needlepoint printers and terminals.
And it was very, very expensive and difficult for a hospital to get a good record-keeping system.

(35:47):
Universities often only had microcomputers.
They couldn't afford servers because the servers were humongous servers.
They were entire rooms with wire floors just to send email.
and I've been watching this tech stack you know I was I went from working in the hospital
with these record-keeping systems to working in bioinformatics where it was all about genomics

(36:11):
research that was the thing that got me me interested in what Liminal was doing is because
I worked on a project testing software that basically scanned all sorts of scientific
research journals and created visual maps of the topics and the relationship between the journals
at topic level. And he was also talking about doing something like that with Noster data,

(36:36):
which really struck with me. And it's just with that software we built, it was again,
you needed a big server, you needed a whole team of specialists building it, and it took years
to finish. And now with Noster, it's just we're rebuilding the same thing that I've built before
over a period of two or three years

(36:57):
in one year over relays with a web app.
And it's just awesome that you can do that nowadays.
It's so thin, but you need good software architects
who understand how to build it
so that it works as well as the things
that we were building before
with the massive hardware stack.
And like Chip said,

(37:19):
I think we're the only team with the know-how
and the personnel to build something of that complexity,
especially a whole suite of such products that interact really well.
Well said.
So Nostra is just not a Twitter replacement is what you're saying?
Nostra is a protocol and Twitter is a widget.

(37:40):
I love shows like this because we can break down the complexity
that is built on simplicity.
So let's talk about Alexandria.
and whoever feels like their best fit for it, shoot away.
Liminal.
Yeah, so I've been actually very interested in kind of education

(38:03):
because I think that is the metagame to win.
If we all can learn as effectively as possible,
like everyone is elevated,
whether that is the individual that wants to just go from straight learning what addition is and then, you know, somehow climbing up the ladder all the way to, you know, astrophysics and chemistry.

(38:28):
I mean, it happens. It's clearly possible. That's how education happens. But the direct path is not something that is so clear. And even with just how do you navigate from your own interest and you see these kind of careers all the way in the distance and you just want to see how did they get there.

(38:56):
And this is just something I've been really interested since about, I'd say, 2017, 2018.
And when I came across Noster, I realized that this is an awesome platform protocol for a decentralized wiki.

(39:18):
And I had to look into the different specs and figure out how would this happen.
It has to be more than just wiki but decentralized.
There's been projects that essentially cloned Wikipedia,
and then the projects just died because they didn't really have anything else to contribute.

(39:43):
And with my own kind of experience and learning about personal knowledge management,
I made a connection that if you can take these little atomic notes inspired by Zetel Kasten,
and you can link them together, whether that is sentences or paragraphs, chapters, etc.

(40:10):
If you link them all together linearly, that looks exactly like an article or book.
And you can also take those lists and put them in more lists.
So instead of just an article that is composed out of lists, you can have a full course where individual articles compose together.
So you have a list of lists that kind of sprawls out.

(40:32):
And the atomicness of the individual notes help with searching and isolation.
Because you can have a library of 100 textbooks on physics.
but maybe the authors don't write in a way that is actually resonant to you

(40:54):
because you have your own context and your own background.
But maybe there's one chapter within those 100 textbooks
that are actually, it's gold for you.
Or even spread across those 100 textbooks,
maybe there's one page or a chapter that's different for all of them.
You shouldn't have to read through all of them just to find the gold.

(41:15):
and essentially when you start working with these atomic notes you can link them together
you get you get references if you want to quote something you don't need to kind of leave your
existing reading you can just you can just slot it in and as opposed to i say you know

(41:36):
talk about it and say look at this you have to go to this other journal and then dive in while
trying to unpack the density within certain types of knowledge.
You can just, you don't have to go searching around
and trying to figure out where did this piece of knowledge come from
and how is it relevant by just unpacking multiple papers

(42:02):
and, yeah, unpacking multiple papers and forgetting where you started.
And here it all just mixes in together, and you don't need to get distracted.
Liminal, could I ask, you're talking about atomic nodes.

(42:23):
On the one hand, my mind is wandering to what the large language model does,
which is it decomposes or deconstructs things into tokens, right,
which eventually end up going to tensors
and embeddings and what have you.
But it sounds a bit like that on the one hand,
but the way you described it,

(42:46):
it sounded like an atomic note could be a sentence
or a group of sentences
that then roll up into something bigger,
an article which then rolls up into something bigger,
an entire book or a manuscript.
But in thinking through that decomposition,
What if there is a, is it truly an atomic note is what I'm trying to get at, meaning can it be decomposed further than that sort of base that you're starting with?

(43:18):
well that that's interesting because if you think about like
organisms that are made out of cells and then those cells are made out of
different biofilms that also have learned that we've also discovered that biofilms and viruses
also have agencies and are also kind of alive in themselves so there's in the sense of like the

(43:43):
natural world, there's almost like no bottom. There's measurements of where things stop making
sense, but knowledge is kind of like that as well. The authors can decide on what their most atomic
level is to even just the Anki, the note-taking system, where it's like a flash card. You have a

(44:09):
a specific word or phrase,
and then on the back of it,
it unravels the definition and its applicability.
So you can essentially do that for every single word,
and it just keeps sprawling out.
The issue that you can run into is like,
okay, well, if there's no end,
then how do you learn anything

(44:30):
without unraveling the whole thing?
And the important thing is that it's all contextual.
You don't need to completely unravel it.
you can dive in as much as you need just so that way you can learn for the problem that you're
trying to solve immediately. But for anyone else that needs that extra context, then they can start
really digging in and seeing the different types of knowledge that is packed into something that

(44:56):
can be dense, like massively packed together and almost impenetrable. So let's bring it from the
abstract to something more concrete and especially for you know non-technical folks in the in the
audience who are saying okay alexandria sounds cool but how do i use it right uh what so how does
this this concept of the atomic note rolling into something larger rolling into something larger

(45:20):
how does that translate into real user experience well at the base level the
you can just write in plain text. We use a specific type of text syntax, but the text editor
is like any other text editor that you would work with. You can bold, italicize, you just write it

(45:44):
normally. But what Alexandria does is that it takes everything at the heading or the title of
your chapter or your section, and it separates them into the atomic notes. So that way,
when you're reading, it looks exactly like a regular book or an article that you know,

(46:05):
but underneath, hidden between, and if you wanted to dive in and explore more,
it's essentially a chain of sections that combine together. But just for reading and writing,
there is essentially no difference.
You don't need to really be thinking about that
when you're engaging it at that level.

(46:28):
So if I'm a user and I go to Alexandria,
presumably I sign in with a NIPO 7 extension,
and then I can read a book.
Is that the simplest way of thinking about it?
I can search for a book that I want.
If it's there, I find it and I read it.
Yeah, exactly.
We have essentially transformed many open source public

(46:52):
domain works into Noster events. We have the Bible, we have academic papers, and we also have
other books from Project Gutenberg, like Dracula. And they're all underneath. It's these chain of,
I call them index cards. But when you read it on Alexandria, it just looks like a regular,

(47:17):
just a plain article that you would read.
And what else can the user do other than...
Because, I mean, presumably, right,
the average user doesn't have this,
the technical background to say,
well, let me think in terms of fundamental units
or atomic units and decomposability and what have you.

(47:37):
They have a specific need,
which is, let's just say,
they want to read something, right,
a specific article.
They go to Alexandria, they search for it,
they find it.
and they read it, is there anything else at that sort of user experience level that they can do?
Yeah. So because you have this higher resolution behind more than just chapters or sections,

(48:03):
you can look at any piece of text and it can work for writing and exploring different types
of knowledge. So if you are reading an academic paper, or if you're reading Dracula, and you want
to find other ideas or similar genres, similar narratives in some sense, then because it's all

(48:33):
linked together through the data that is contained underneath the individual text notes,
You can start sprawling out, and you don't even need to read the full text.
You can essentially just bring in the pieces of the full text that are most relevant to the thing that you're reading.

(48:55):
And when it comes to writing, you can take inspiration and have your little stack of references that you can look through that are not full books.
It helps you focus the things that you're looking at so that way you can go on and start writing the ideas that you already have.

(49:19):
Another thing you can do if you're more of a casual reader is that if you are, for instance, reading Dracula and you see a passage where you think, wow, I'd love to share this with my friends.
you can highlight that with a literal highlight the highlight event and share that on your social
media feed just that paragraph or just um or if you look reading a research paper you can

(49:42):
basically make a snapshot of um a chart that you think is interesting maybe it's about inflation
in the federal reserve or something you want to share it with all of your bitcoin or friends
then you can just highlight it or you can comment underneath it and at your friend like look at this
check this one out and it would then show up in Alexandria next to or directly below this article

(50:09):
or book so you have the the social interaction inside of these these Noster event chains and
the difference between this and a lot of other things is that you can actually take that section
and embed it into a kind one note it's not a copy of that section it's literally that section

(50:34):
because that section is a note and you can embed a note and this gives us this um i can't remember
the word for it, Liminal probably knows it, this ability to have references that are the object.
So you don't have like with a URL, an address that you would go to to find that. Rather,

(50:55):
you have that actual event can be copied as many times as you want, embedded everywhere,
spread onto as many different relays as you want. But it's always the same event. It always has the
same signature it always has the same event id and i think this is this is what nasta really
brings to the whole knowledge base thing is that you can have an infinite number of copies
and share them around comment on them and each one can live in isolation from the original source

(51:21):
you don't need to even have the source but if you have that address you can search on
alexandria and find the source so nothing is ever um orphaned you there is a and i wonder
of this ties in, Stella, into the concept of NKBIPs that I've seen on Alexandria, these

(51:42):
events that you're talking about.
Right.
So actually, do you want to talk a little bit about that, what NKBIPs are?
Yeah, actually, I got the term from Liminal.
The first spec he wrote was Noster Knowledge Base 01.
so nkb that's noster knowledge base implementation proposal 01 that's where the nkbip comes from it

(52:11):
actually stands for something so instead of a nip it was a nk i nkbip nkbip that's how i would say it
nkbip and we're now i think at number six and they're just the specs that we came up with
that have never become NIPs.
Some of them have applied to become NIPs
and haven't become them.

(52:33):
Not because they're not interesting,
but just because they don't fit into the scheme
or the scope of what they want shown there.
A lot of our stuff is maybe also too advanced
for your average Nostra dev.
So I don't know how many other people
would be interested in it.
Stella, could I pause you there
on the NIPs not being accepted

(52:55):
I mean, this is permissionless, right?
Yes, it might not get merged into the main NIP repo,
but you can have it on a branch and just use it, right?
That's the beauty of NOSTER.
Well, that's what we've done, right?
The NKBIP, we give it our own numbering system
so that we can find our own stuff really easily.
We keep it on the NOSTER wiki.

(53:15):
We don't use Git for that.
It's on NOSTER, our specifications.
You can view them in Alexandria.
that's why Alexandria is very soon going to have a wiki and it's going to be an awesome wiki it's
gonna be the best wiki ever and you'll be able to search for all the different specs there including
the nips and the NKBIPs because our stuff this is the difference with Noster we don't need permission

(53:40):
to post on Noster and we also don't need permission to copy other people's stuff and put it on Noster
so it's all going on Noster
I've seen Alex Gleason I think
recently also put some more nips on Noster
we already have some
in the wiki
and we're taking everything permissionless
and taking it on a Noster
we don't have to ask anyone for permission

(54:02):
we can just post our stuff
anyone who wants to see it can go to our app
and look at it and comment on it
and suggest a fork
and zap it
if I were to
and I'm not a particularly serious developer here.
I used to write code a long time ago.
So forgive the basic question,

(54:22):
but if I were to build out a standard kind one type client,
right, the Twitter clone,
where I said, you know what?
I want these Alexandria snippets.
It would be fairly straight.
I would just look at the NKBIPs and implement them
and my client would be able to show anything
that came out of Alexandria.

(54:43):
Yes.
Okay.
There's already other clients,
and there's a Flutter library from Neil,
and there's the Chachi client that can also display these,
and NJump contains them,
and I'm going to be offering a suggestion to their repo

(55:06):
so that they can show it in a way you could actually read it like a book.
Right now you see the event data,
but it's going to be displayed more like an article or a book
and yeah, it's actually really easy to implement
but the concept is really complex to come up with
but the implementation is very clear.

(55:27):
It's just an index card listing the parts in order
and it's hierarchical.
So you can have index cards that reference lower level index cards.
And that's a really complex idea, actually.
So kudos to Liminald for coming up with it.

(55:47):
But once you've seen it and seen how it works, you realize it works in a very simple manner.
And that's why I think it fits to Noster.
Because Noster is extremely elegant, simple solutions to complex problems.
And I think Alexandria is just taking it to a new level.
the way i think about the spec is that if the regular micro blogging clients have a kind zero

(56:13):
which is the data or the metadata for the user and then they have kind one which are these short
note tweets and you can see that as the feed that kind of they they just chain down you have a top
level comment and then comments underneath that and i took inspiration from that where there is a

(56:33):
the index kind, 300, 4, 0.
And that is, you can think of that as the metadata for the article,
which contains all the hashtags and other descriptive level of the full article.
And then contained within that are the equivalent to the short notes

(56:55):
or the content events, 300, 4, 1, which that's where the sections will lie.
And you can essentially take articles and embed them into other articles.
So that way you can start building them out of almost like Legos into something much larger.

(57:16):
And, you know, Liminald, if I were to apply this, the index card analogy and everything you're talking about, right, to books of fiction, it doesn't make that much sense.
I mean, sure, someone could try and do it.
However, there seems to be a use case where it makes a lot of sense for.

(57:38):
And I think for that, we will turn to Emma to talk about MedScholar.
Yes.
So MedScholar draws on the idea that learning knowledge and evidence is crucial for health care.

(57:58):
It helps to inform decision-making, understanding our bodies, treatments, and so there's various
types of evidence, as we know, in health care.
So you have guidelines for example that provide information around how to treat and prevent disease There systematic reviews and meta which essentially take a research question on a health topic

(58:26):
and pool statistical data
and essentially tries to find associations.
There's protocols, clinical trials,
and I would also add there's also wisdom and experience.
You know, there's historical documents, landmark documents that are just crucial for the understanding of health care and public health.

(58:54):
And Avi, as you said in your sermon at the beginning, knowledge yearns to be free.
And unfortunately, health and medical knowledge has not been fully free.
It's been censored, skewed as well by incentives, by corporations and different funding mechanisms, whether that be at the federal level or local level.

(59:22):
And all of this has, I would say, has unfortunately encouraged a lack of public trust, which has been documented in the health care and scientific literature.
and also because prevention in health care as well is not a big money maker we you could probably

(59:47):
argue that you may not see a lot of prevention focused studies as compared to intervention
studies and ultimately you know if we could focus on prevention you know stopping people from even
having to frequent the healthcare system, I think that would be ideal.
And I believe in a new knowledge-sharing system where individuals can mix and match information

(01:00:17):
to their specific needs, I think this would be revolutionary.
So with MedScholar, we really aim to change the way in which healthcare knowledge and
sharing occurs. We hope that it remains to be uncensorable. Noster provides us with the tools

(01:00:41):
to have that. And to also think about the publishing process, the academic publishing
processes, because there's tons of biases there, publication bias. If you have no results from a
study. I mean, that's still a finding, but typically in scientific literature, sometimes

(01:01:02):
reviewers will not accept it because they think there's nothing interesting there. And I think
that's a danger as well when we look at scientific evidence, especially when it's done on groups.
There's something called an ecological fallacy. And so that's applying group findings to individual
cases. And so, you know, as consumers of information, we look at, you know, some of these

(01:01:29):
articles, and you might hear like mainstream findings of X curing Y. But that might, that
is probably drawn maybe from a group data and may not apply to you. So imagine if you had more tools
at your disposal to find health information. And there's been some fascinating, I would say,

(01:01:54):
literature that has been curated on NOSTER itself. So I'm not sure if people know, but there's
runningapollo.com. And this is an effort that essentially came together with people that were
passionate about lower extremity health.

(01:02:16):
And following the Bitcoin ethos,
they developed a white paper centered around prevention.
And essentially, they have a GitHub dedicated to this effort.
And they're encouraging consensus,
kind of like we do that's done in Bitcoin.

(01:02:37):
And I really highlight this case because I think this could be a new way, and I think the Alexandra framework really could build a nice foundation for the way in which we try and come to consensus or review healthcare and peer-reviewed literature.

(01:02:57):
and I think we're really opening up potential new doors here, how clinicians, researchers,
health enthusiasts can interact with health information that really empowers the individual
and then also allows for open discussion and, you know, down the line we hope MedScholar

(01:03:20):
can have additional AI features,
and there could be real-time kind of crowdfunded discourse as well.
So you as a user could also see,
what is the most current information?
Does this apply to me, for example?
So that's kind of like a general overview,

(01:03:42):
and we're really trying to build out MedScholar in the months ahead.
So let's talk about a simple user journey here, Emma.
A user goes to MedScholar and wants to use it.
First of all, what is their persona?
Are they a clinician?
Are they more likely to be a clinician or a patient or whatever it is?

(01:04:07):
And then depending on who they are, what can they do on the MedScholar website?
Yeah, so right now we have a closed relay.
and we are working through badging so that we can have a small user base at

(01:04:28):
the start of people who are familiar with like the scientific literature
getting into the sausage making of peer-reviewed evidence and so
So essentially that user group would be that type of persona.
And basically, I think one idea would be they can view literature.

(01:04:54):
They'll be able to comment on it and kind of just play around to see how we could move this forward for a larger kind of peer review.
So potentially in the future, maybe you can have journals using or subscribing to MedScholar and using the infrastructure to guide their peer-reviewed processes potentially.

(01:05:16):
And then hopefully also, but also now, you could also be a reader as well.
And so readers also could follow the content that they're interested in.
How do these journals get onto MedScholar in the first place?
Especially today, right?
What if they're paywalled behind one of those publications?

(01:05:40):
How does one get them out of there and get them into MedScholar?
So at this time, we've been uploading,
I'll say particularly, Manol has been uploading articles.
So, for example, for peer-reviewed articles,
we have like external DOIs that you can access the full article.

(01:06:03):
And there's a few historical documents on there as well, too.
So right now, it's just a small team of people.
But hopefully in the future, especially when we can get the badging process going,
then other people can upload as well.
And who will be the...

(01:06:24):
Oh, yeah.
Just a quick question there.
Who is the badge issuer?
Yeah, maybe, Lin-Manuel, I'll swing that one to you.
Yeah, so in terms of badging, MedScholar as an organization is,
they will determine what type of content and hierarchy that they want within this community.

(01:06:52):
There will be medical professionals or just content communicators.
They will have their own roles.
And then the public that isn't credentialed, if they're curious, they can go into MedScholar, ask questions,
and be directly in communication with those who have the background and the knowledge of – and have that medical knowledge.

(01:07:20):
Yeah.
gotcha
and the other
part that I wanted to say is that
for paywalled content specifically
what we
did is that we're not going
to take paywalled content
and host it on

(01:07:41):
whether it's Alexandria
or MedScholar but what you can do
is you can take
the structure of the events that
we have where the
title of that article and the link to where it originally comes from, but underneath it are
placeholders. You can have the introduction, the methods, et cetera, all the sections of that paper,

(01:08:05):
and they can be completely blank. But what happens is that users and professionals can comment on
those specific sections. So that way, instead of actually having the full content there,
the papers and the knowledge can still be talked about
and engaged with both professionals and the public.

(01:08:31):
Makes sense.
I want to move to another topic.
I think this is a really comprehensive overview
of the umbrella, Get Citadel,
then the focused Alexandria,
then the even more focused application
of the Alexandria framework.
if you don't mind saying so, Libinal, in Med Scholar.

(01:08:53):
I think that was very helpful for folks.
But it does appear to me, and maybe Chip, I'll turn this to you,
the Git Citadel team seems to be working in a vacuum,
or not in a vacuum, on an island by themselves.
There is sort of this, at least as someone who's logging onto NOSTA

(01:09:16):
and you see that you have your standard influencers
who are everywhere.
And then every now and then you see, you know,
Liminal or Stella or someone post something
about what's happening.
And from the outside, it appears like it's happening
on an island.
So Chip, would you agree with that characterization?
And if you do, why do you think that is?

(01:09:38):
In a way, I think it has become that.
I don know if you remember over how many times over the years on Nostra we talk about kind one being dead and how um you know how development chat happens here and most of the time we kind of the
the rabble rousers of of what are we using Nostra for if we're not going to be developing

(01:10:00):
using Nostra right but I mean is most of the conversation about how Nostra is built happens
still on a GitHub discussions page, right?
And our kind of, you know,
what we make the most noise about
is getting off of that
and actually using this decentralized protocol
that we built to build itself, right?
To maintain itself, to chat, to speak.

(01:10:20):
And we often have had that kind of discussion
out in the public.
Most of our dev chat was,
but it turns out threading's not great.
Just overall conversations happening on Noster
with the clients and tools we have now
aren't fantastic.
And we have had to fall back multiple times
to different tools, whether it's Slack or, you know, Signal Chats or, you know, SimpleX Chats,

(01:10:42):
et cetera. They just kind of scatter all over the place. And so we've kind of moved to, well,
Git, right? Stella was just kind of like, guys, we need to get this done. So now most of our
dev chat, if it's not public, which most oftentimes it is when we're brainstorming,
just out on Noster, but it ends up happening to be on our own internal Git servers, right?
So that's where most of our discussion in terms of our projects happen.

(01:11:06):
However, all of, say, Project Alexander is completely public right now on mirrors such as GitHub, right?
And at one point it was heavily published on Noster, but that, you know, certain tools that we were using, you know, don't really allow for that to happen right now.
But that is kind of the plan where we expect, you know, we're going to have internal chats about how Git Citadel is going to function and how, you know, we're going to be developing products.

(01:11:31):
but as far as how the development process of a particular product goes,
more than likely we end up being public when it can be.
That said, I think Git Citadel is kind of in a position,
and I think I can speak for the whole team on this when I say
we put ourselves between sort of like the legacy world
and what this kind of idea of the Nostra kind of utopia is, right?

(01:11:55):
Which happens to be, you know, I think oftentimes a little too much of a,
not particularly grounded in where we're trying to go.
We need to be able to get these legacy institutions
onto a more usable platform for them
without them losing everything,
like trying to avoid as much loss aversion as we can
where we have these publications,

(01:12:15):
but we need to be able to control who writes them.
And we need to have some sort of chain of trust
and some type of legacy infrastructure
bridged to the world of Nostra
because we have these tools.
we often joke about
say our 9 to 5s of man why am I
building this database or why am I building this tool
when it could easily be replaced with the tools

(01:12:37):
we have on Noster
so the idea is getting those tools in
place where legacy systems kind of don't really
understand need or want
the tools that Noster kind of provides
so trying to bridge
that gap I think is one of our
biggest goals as
an organization
yeah
I think that that has been

(01:12:59):
I'll go ahead still
keep butting in sorry
no that's good
please interject
I think that's
something that
you touched on
that has made it a bit
isolating for us because our
target market is not
anything like what the target market

(01:13:21):
is for almost all other Nostra products
most Nostra products are business
to consumer or consumer to consumer products.
And we are very much targeting, like Chip said, organizations that are using legacy systems
to move them on to more modern communication channels, which means we're more in the business

(01:13:43):
to business market, which is probably the reason why we haven't been as, how do I say,
persistent in pursuing something like an OpenSats grant or something, because we're looking to,
first of all, stay extremely independent and also to have our own management, to manage ourselves,

(01:14:09):
to be seen as not part of somebody else's organization, but our own, because we want
to be able to talk at the same level as our customers. And our customers are professors
at universities, our customers are people who are working at the Department of Education,
picking out curriculum for the schools, people who work at large churches that are spread around

(01:14:31):
and need a way to communicate with all the people in the Bible study, people working at hospitals,
people working at, you know, Fortune 500 companies. I have no problem talking with them. I'm used to
them. But it means that a lot of what we're building is not really part of the original

(01:14:53):
sort of nostril focus. And that has been a bit isolating. And we don't notice or mind that
anymore, because we're just so many people in Gidsaville itself, that we can have really long,
lively conversations with 10 people or whatever for hours, off in our own corner. And so we forget
that we are off in a corner.

(01:15:15):
And I see it then sometimes in the Kind1 threads.
If I post something, I'm well aware of the fact
that I have maybe 6,000 followers.
And most of the other people posting about their software
have more like 60,000 or 200,000 followers
because it's just, there's so many more people interested
in a Kind1 thread app than in a knowledge base

(01:15:39):
for scientific research papers.
It's just a level of abstraction and complexity higher than almost anything else out there because it has a different target group.
But I think that's okay.
Stella, could I ask, is that something you wish you'd like to change?
Be more integrated into the NOSTA ecosystem?

(01:16:04):
You know, I have to.
At a cultural level.
Sorry, that's what I meant to say.
At a cultural level, do you feel like you want to be more integrated into the NOSTA ecosystem?
I did at the beginning.
But again, you know, we weren't invited to the parties.
We started our own party.
And now we have this whole meetup culture.
And I feel really emotionally connected to those people because we sit together.

(01:16:29):
We go for walks.
We stay overnight in the house together out in the country and just talk about NOSTA or code together.
and we have these like multi-day house parties.
Maybe we were talking about maybe having one next year
near Prague conference
because we have some people in Czech Republic

(01:16:49):
who are really interested in joining our meetup
and the conference.
And it's like, can't you rent a house near the conference?
That kind of thing.
And it's, I feel really connected to Nasser,
but it's not necessary to the people everyone else knows.
I feel connected to the normal users,
to the small devs like us who don't have,

(01:17:10):
I mean, maybe we won't always be small devs,
but at the moment we're kind of just hacking away in our free time.
I feel very connected.
Do you feel, Stella, that there are gatekeepers in Noster culture?
Oh, it's getting political now.
Bring it on.
I think some of Noster has been politically captured, but I think that's normal.

(01:17:40):
It was like that with the internet.
It's like that with email.
Any new network is going to have bigger players who try to corner parts of the network, hire all the devs.
I can't even say I'm doing something different because I'm just trying to get my own little section of the network.
and work that.

(01:18:00):
And I think that's a good thing.
I think the problem Nasser was having for a while
is that there was only one player.
And now there's multiple players.
I think there are going to be more players coming in.
And I think in German we say,
Konkurrenz, Belieb des Geschäft.
So the competition's good for business.
When there's more than one community of developers

(01:18:23):
and they're all competing
and they're all targeting different markets,
that's when NOSTER is going to really grow is when it's harder to become famous it's harder
to sell your product it's harder to get a scholarship or a grant or funding because
there's just so much competition that's really when things are alive because being alive means

(01:18:47):
fighting means means struggling and until now there was a little bit too little of that it was
too much hand-holding. And I feel like maybe it's my insatiable libertarian side, but I feel like
we just needed more fight. We needed people who were in the mud, slugging it out, you know,
the best man to win. And of course, if you make the network big enough, everyone can win, right?

(01:19:11):
We need to expand the target market, which is what we're trying to do.
You know, it's interesting you put it that way, Stella, because maybe setting aside the B2B use
case, which I suppose you're focused on, right? But if you look at the more general publicly
accessible purple pill, which is mostly the kind one, and, you know, some of the related

(01:19:34):
social use cases like music, like whatever. I mean, there was a food one for a while,
right? And others. One of the selling points of NOSTA for those sort of more socially oriented
B2C use cases is it is the happiest place on the internet.

(01:19:56):
And I think the case you're making is there needs to be some rancor, you think, for growth
to happen.
Definitely.
I mean, what being happy and chill does is make everyone relaxed and everyone goes and
takes a nap and they cuddle.
But that's not activity, right?
That's sleeping.

(01:20:16):
And it's a great place to go and have a nap, but that doesn't keep people coming back.
and it doesn't feel like a tool, right?
Just being able to touch grass together is nice.
I love doing that.
But I also want to bring Noster into like real life,
like into the workplace, into the church,

(01:20:38):
into the hospitals, into schools, into homeschools.
I mean, homeschooling is a huge market
that Alexandria could be really interesting for.
But also engineering departments,
They have a lot of technical specifications they have to do peer reviews on.
It's not just a scientific thing, it's also an engineering topic.

(01:21:00):
There's so much out there that we could, so much market that we could expand into.
And as long as everyone just sharing cat pictures and hug emojis in kind one it not going to expand the market And what you see in other protocols that have come up which I don think are as good as Nostre
is what they got is they also got new applications,

(01:21:23):
new implementations, new markets.
I mean, at my work, they have a Mastodon instance
where people from the work post, you know,
when they go on vacation, they post their vacation pictures
and it shows up in the intranet.
And it's kind of like, you know, Noster could do that too, right?
Why aren't we aiming to get into the corporate internet scene?

(01:21:45):
That's a huge market too, right?
We're not, we have a better tech sack,
but we need people who are motivated to expand the market beyond the Twitter feed.
I love the Twitter feed.
I'm on there all the time.
But that's not everything.
I can't just be the end of it.
And I want to zap books.

(01:22:09):
I want to zap recipes.
I mean, one of the reasons I think the other recipe site had trouble staying is they didn't have our index.
So the recipes were just long form notes.
It was too complex.
They needed a different kind of kind.
But, you know, these are all things that we're going to work on.

(01:22:30):
And I also I feel like that's not adversarial.
or maybe I'm used to being in professional environment and heavy industry and logistics
medicine where there is competition in the market. You know, which hospital gives you the
best service? Which engineering company builds the best toaster? Which logistics company gets

(01:22:50):
that truck there on time to deliver the goods right when you need it for your production chain?
I'm used to that motivation and I think it's a healthy one. And I think too much of Nostra
was very down on the idea of competition.
But I'm a big believer in competition
being very good for humanity

(01:23:12):
because it gives us innovation
and it gives us motivation.
Can I ask where Alexandria, the name, came from?
I think that came from me, right?
Yes, that came from Stella.
well because i said you could use this to write any book and then i said and then we could have

(01:23:35):
put all the books in one place and it'd be like a library and i said you could have limitless books
because of the distributed library so there's no limit to the number of books you could have
you'd only be limited in the amount of time you'd wait to find a book when you search for one but
that's it and it could be like the new world library and then i think we call it alexandria

(01:23:57):
the other one burnt down, but this one can't be burnt down
because it's digital.
I hope you caught the reference in my sermon there, Stella.
To Alexandria.
Yeah, that's great.
I was going to point out the original Alexandria burnt down,
but to your point, this is digital.

(01:24:19):
The data can be mirrored and live on forever.
I think even before Alexandria was Bible stir, right?
And that's where I kind of got involved.
Well, Bible stir was our promise and we haven't forgotten it to some of the
people who were chipping in to the development costs of running the servers

(01:24:41):
and things for Alexandria, that the first big rollout that we would host,
because Alexandria is like the like you said the framework and you can have as many instances of
Alexandria and they can all have a different name they can all have a different website different
relay behind them and we have MedScholar now and in the future there will also be a Bible stir

(01:25:05):
which will be focused in the Bible and we thought this would be a really great
test instance for Alexandria's tech stack because the Bible has over 30,000 verses
and we've broken the Bible down into all of those 30,000 verses and chained them together into a
book and since the Bible is a library that's what it means it means library we decide that

(01:25:32):
would be the first library we would publish in full on Alexandria and we've done that in two
different versions the King James and the Dewey Rhymes version and that's that was really important
to me and to a lot of the other people who are working on the project or have been funding the
project because a lot of us started out in Noster and it's sort of like a Christian chat.

(01:25:56):
So we were always talking about we need to get the Bible on Noster so that we can quote verses
when we are writing kind one notes. And that's the next thing we can do is that we can take all
these, the stuff that you read in full in Alexandria, and then you can go into your
your Noster Kind One app
or your daily driver

(01:26:17):
or whatever you want to call it
and embed the verse directly.
And when people click on it,
they will then go to the full chapter
in the Bible.
And if they use the table of contents,
which is being developed right now
and looks pretty awesome so far,
they can then read other chapters
or they could read other translations
of the same chapter.
Because with Alexander,

(01:26:37):
you can navigate in depth
and in height.
So you can go both directions.
You can go deeper into a medical journal and find out more about the same topic in other papers, or you can go up and down inside of the same journal, right?
You always have the first, second, and third dimension on Alexandria to the information.

(01:27:01):
And once you put a library inside a library, there can be a case to be made that you are approaching the fourth dimension.
well that said
this is a great chat folks
QW do you have anything
nice nice Avi I like that
I like the fourth dimension 4D

(01:27:22):
anything else for our guests
QW
no
no that's it I mean if maybe we just
want to run down any last words
well why don't we do that
Liminal we'll start with you any closing thoughts
yeah so
So I was thinking about one of the, it was the first article that Stella wrote that named Alexandria.

(01:27:51):
And the last paragraph, I think, is just so beautiful.
It says, we're making a big, beautiful library, and you're going to build it for us.
Anyone, anywhere can therefore publish or republish any document they wish with Noster and store it wherever they have a relay and view it on any client willing to display it.

(01:28:12):
You will own something and be happy.
Love it.
Chip, any closing thoughts from you?
Yeah, well, I mean, first, of course, thank you for having us.
And the second is I think it's important to acknowledge where we're at from the people that have donated to us.

(01:28:33):
Right. Get Citadel has been sort of our time and effort running it.
And, of course, still involved a lot with that, has been funding directly from the public.
Right. So just plebs sending zaps and referencing our geyser fund for some of our projects.
They've been funding us directly for Project Alexandria, along with some of the other things we've been working on as well.

(01:28:58):
So I just want a big thank you to all the plebs in the Noster Space that has been pushing us forward and going to fund us in the future.
I'd be happy to put that geyser in the show notes, so I'll follow up with that afterwards.
And then Emma, any last thoughts?
Yeah, no, I really thought this was an enriching discussion.

(01:29:22):
And what I'm really excited for is just getting students involved.
I mentioned this at the NOS Fabrica Challenge call earlier today.
And, you know, we're really proud and thankful that we came in third place.
And, you know, the funds that we'll receive will go to new minds who I think will really contribute to MedScholar in particular.

(01:29:48):
And hopefully they catch the Noster bug and, you know, use it and see other use cases in the health and health care space and other ones.
So, yeah, I'm just really I'm really excited.
And again, thank you for having me here.
and congratulations on the third prize

(01:30:08):
for Med Scholar
on the Nosfabrica challenge
and Liminal
of course
Stella
closing thoughts
I was just
taken away
by what Liminal quoted

(01:30:29):
I'd forgotten that I'd written that
but it's exactly what motivates
me every day
because I want people to be free to speak their mind,
to share information, to associate with people
they want to speak with and communicate with
in real life and online and in documentation.
I want the free exchange of information.

(01:30:51):
I think that's so important for humanity more than ever.
And I'm just really grateful to be able to work on this project
and also to Emma that she added us
and asked as a helper because that's really an application totally up my alley.
It's really something I can really identify with.

(01:31:14):
And I'm having so much fun.
And I'm just grateful to be working on this stuff.
I think it's a beautiful project.
Thank you for having us.
I think one big takeaway is that you can get so many like-minded people
from different backgrounds
kind of come together

(01:31:34):
in a protocol like Noster.
And we see it time and time again
where we're in multiple time zones
and we're all working for the same common goal.
And that's freedom for the most part.
Anything else, Avi?
No, this is a great chat.

(01:31:54):
I want to thank our guests,
Stella, Liminal, Emma, and Chip.
for enlightening us,
exciting times with Alexandria,
Metzcala,
looking forward to what's ahead.
And to anyone listening,
it's too late now
because we've gotten to the end of the episode.

(01:32:18):
But maybe for the next episode,
you'd consider subscribing
so that you could get early access
and help support the show.
Thank you all for listening.
yes until next week uh we appreciate you all uh love you goodbye

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PCR115 - Books that Can't Burn with Stella, Liminal, Emma & Chip

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}PCR115 - Books that Can't Burn with Stella, Liminal, Emma & Chip