PCR121 - Wen And The Art of Nostr Cycle Maintenance with Miljan - 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 on the intersection of Nostra and Bitcoin protocols.

(00:11):
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.
Welcome, gentle plebs, to the Lightning-Laced Airwaves.

(00:33):
This is episode 121 of Pleb Chain Radio, 11 squared.
And today is Friday, the 18th of July, and it is 4.58 p.m.
on the east coast of the United States at the time of recording.
We have a fun show ahead of you today.
Our guest is Millian, the creator of Primal,

(00:56):
and he's here to talk about all things primal and beyond.
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 hit pause
and switch over to the Fountain Podcasting app
where you can earn some sats and support the value-for-value revolution as you listen.

(01:22):
and while you're there folks
if you could subscribe to our show
on Fountain
and support us
we would genuinely appreciate it
and it would unlock
full access
to bonus episodes for you
and QW
I normally at this point would say
the show is streamed live on

(01:43):
zap.stream and any other
Noster client that supports
streaming such as Amethyst
and Noster
Sure. Having said that, Zap.Stream has been getting vandalized with a denial of service attack over the last...
We will not be canceled, Avi. We will keep fighting back.

(02:05):
We are streaming to it right now with zero viewers. It's complete darkness.
But hey, you know, we're doing our part.
the signal is being transmitted.
Unclear if the recipient is there.
The tree, QW, has fallen in the forest.
There is no one to hear it.

(02:27):
But they will be listening, as I said, on the Fountain app.
And that said, QW, you've been paying attention
to Bitcoin and Nostoculture in the last week.
What have you noticed?
Speaking of UX, was the Scardust album
released today? Number one, was that being attacked? And number two, how was it, Avi?

(02:48):
So yes, our good friends and Bitcoin maximalists, and more importantly, incredible progressive metal
band, Scardust, had their new albums, Souls, which is released today, July 18th. And the release,

(03:09):
they did a live stream.
They tried to stream on Zap.Stream.
That didn't work.
Unfortunately, the stream itself,
so nothing to do with Zap.Stream,
their live stream or the venue, I believe,
had some audio issues.
So there were a few hiccups there on the live stream.
But all in all, an excellent show,

(03:29):
the live stream, which is a few hours ago today,
earlier this afternoon on Friday.
And I am looking forward to listening to the album.
I've started on a few songs, very, very promising, looking to dive in some more.
Avi, when you listen to an album for the first time, paint me that setting.

(03:50):
Because, you know, when you're looking forward to something like you have been with this Souls album,
do you kind of set aside some time, get a glass of wine and let the metal,
and let your head bang a little bit?
Tell me about how you set this up.
Because you want to ultimately listen to the album from front to back, right?

(04:14):
Or you just catch a song here, catch a song there.
I mean, giving it ultimate respect would kind of be setting aside that hour,
hour and a half to listen in the entirety.
Yeah, the first two or three listens of the album for me
are pretty much just scanning.

(04:34):
So I listen, so it doesn't matter where I am.
I just need some, you know, let's say however long the album is,
an hour or so, right?
I need an hour of alone time.
It needs to be a fairly inactive activity like driving.
I can't be writing or doing something else while I'm listening.

(04:54):
But the first few times I just listen to it to see if there's any one song,
there's some chords or some hook that catches my interest.
So then I note that song for later.
And then I come back to that.
So with any album like this, there's always two or three songs
that on the first couple of listens sort of catch my attention

(05:17):
for various reasons.
And I return to those.
And then by the 10th or 15th listen over the course of a week or two,
I know those songs pretty well
and then I can move on
expand that concentric circle
if you will until the whole album
is exhausted now that's not to say
that I'm going to like every single

(05:38):
song on every single album of my favorite
band that's a rarity
but yeah that's generally
how I approach it
just close your eyes
and listen to the dazzling darkness right
not when I'm driving
but yes
That was a pun to the ode to the, I think, track number four or five.
That's right.

(05:58):
But yeah, that's awesome.
And the way they've kind of adopted Noster and took on Zap.Stream, very forward leaning on the technology side, especially from the leaning away from the legacy media side.
Kudos to Scardust.
We will continue to shine a light on their work because it's damn good.

(06:20):
uh secondly you know i'll talk about this because it just wrapped up and it is now the 18th so all
those uh those those nostriges or plebs traveling from mobile alabama i hope you travel well uh
heard that was a good event i didn't get a lot of the updates i i don't think i don't know how
much there was but uh i was definitely in a signal chat uh and it seemed like it was a good time lots

(06:45):
of pleb-friendly events going on.
I saw some, you know, Sergio mentioned the VR.
And VR is just kind of funny to me, right?
That virtual reality, because, you know,
you're essentially in a room with another,
there was like three dudes in a room with headsets on,
just kind of shadow boxing or something.

(07:07):
It just kind of, it's got some Ethereum vibes to me.
I don't know about you, Avi.
Are you a VR guy?
Absolutely not.
But you're an AI guy.
I mean, you've got to watch it, change the acronym.
But no, it looked like a great time.
I want to hear about the skydiving too.
But yeah.
And then another thing happened this week, Avi, and it's kind of taking Nostra by storm.

(07:31):
Avi, I was wondering what you were going to do with your homelessness, I mean, retirement.
But I understand you're finding home.
And I think that goes along with homelessness, right?
That's right.
A homeless man needs to find a home.
I want to learn more because I love this journey.
I love the, and we talked about the kind of Bourdain-esque, Bitcoin-esque, you know, I think everyone loves food.

(08:01):
I think it's something that speaks to our heart.
But I love the fact that travel, I think that speaks to everyone's heart.
I like the combination of this all.
Tell me a little bit about it and then how it's been received.
Yeah, so for those who are wondering what we're talking about, I have been working for a long time on this idea.

(08:25):
It really was an idea until it's come to fruition very recently.
And it's a show called Finding Home.
And the idea is to, in an homage to Anthony Bourdain, but with a wink to Bitcoin, do the food, travel and culture show with Bitcoiners, especially Bitcoiners who are expats or immigrants living in a land, making that land or that country their home.

(08:55):
just as, and to draw the parallel with how,
with the two journeys that those folks have gone through.
One is to find their physical home,
and the other is to find their sovereign home in Bitcoin.
So the first episode, or the pilot, I should say,
that was filmed several months ago,

(09:16):
but for various reasons I had,
my fiat job was keeping me busy.
We couldn't release it.
And finally, you know, editing, all of that was done, and we released it on IndieHub, which is a lightning-enabled pay-per-view platform.

(09:37):
So you can go there, browse the catalog, see something you like, and then you can rent it and pay in sats to watch.
So that was out on IndieHub today.
And I have a couple more episodes in the hopper.
I filmed episode number two in Prague when I was at BTC Praga last month.

(09:58):
That's gone into post-production.
And we talked about Scardust, QW.
It is being edited and directed by Lahav and Noah from Scardust.
So that's something I'm looking forward to.
And then episode three is going to be in Paraguay in September.
And for that, I'm in the process of fundraising.

(10:20):
there is this really cool new Bitcoin
Bitcoin script and NOSTA
based protocol called Angor
I think that was launched a month ago
so I'm testing out their
fundraising
it's actually
really cool, it's fully self-custodial
because it's on
it uses time locks and Bitcoin script

(10:41):
and all of that and we'll get their CEO
on our show
next month
the Paraguay episode
is in pre-production
is set, the filming is set for mid-September
and I'm in the process of fundraising for that.
There's rumors that the season finale
of Finding Home is actually going to end

(11:02):
with you naked in the jungle at the Primal House
and you finally found your home.
I have been thinking about Costa Rica
more broadly for an episode.
There are some really cool expat stories
that end in Costa Rica.
So maybe KW.

(11:23):
It's going to end with a broken leg cliff diving.
No, that's awesome, man.
It's really cool to see that.
And you have time right now to really look inward
and start building things that you been passionate about whereas your Fiat lifestyle would actually just pretty much black hole that passion So good for you man I really looking forward to your

(11:49):
journey and you finding home. So finally, the last thing, upcoming August 1st through 3rd,
Lake Satoshi. If you're in the area, if you're in Michigan, it's a very pleb, grassroot
event. If you like camping like Avi does, absolutely look out for Lake Satoshi.

(12:15):
And that's it, Avi. What is our sermon today?
Our sermon today is Noster is Dead. I repeat, QW. Noster is Dead. Dearly beloved plebs,
we gather at the freshly dug grave of our favorite protocol.

(12:37):
The tombstone reads,
Noster died of irrelevance.
Signed, Anonymous Neckbeard and Armchair Twitter Philosopher
eight days ago.
Yet, QW, from six feet under,
we hear the unmistakable ping of a zap.

(12:59):
Apparently the corpse still pulls from the iPhone
Using Primal and Darmus
Fires up Amethyst on Android
Doom scrolls Iris
Swaps to Snort and Coracle
Slings GIFs on Nostur

(13:19):
And checks clout on Nostur.band
Meme-obsessed ghosts haunt the chronological feed
Group chatters riot in Chachi, and all this happens inside one of the 450-plus live apps running on 800 active relays we're told no longer exist.

(13:43):
Still skeptical of this rigor mortis?
World-renowned metal bands run 24-7 live streams on Zap.Stream because nothing says dead like real-time video.
Others flex Runster for fitness zaps
They roll out Yana's wallet plus Blossom Media server

(14:07):
And let Flotilla turn relays into Discord-style hangouts
This is an odd hobby for a cadaver, isn't it?
And while critics toss dirt, Primal is paving the graveyard with moving walkways
One-tap onboarding, lightning baked in
And, fresh from BTC Prague, the glistening Primal Studio, so creators can schedule, zap, and syndicate without ever touching the soil.

(14:38):
So the next time someone solemnly intones Noster is dead, remind them.
Zombies don't ship weekly releases, host conferences, or pay you in sats.
They just eat brains.
so critics might want to guard theirs to the extent those still exist and with that

(15:00):
go ahead qw yeah i i'm just laughing because zap.stream is down uh so anybody that like
thinks platform if you if you're still in that platform mindset just kind of like twitter's down
if you're listening to twitter spaces and then all of a sudden it crashes you're like twitter's down
someone's on zapdots stream they're like nostrils down it's like no it's just it's just one one

(15:24):
tentacle of nostril uh and it's impossible to take it down but yeah i just it's i don't know
it was uh zombies eat brains uh you had me there and with that i think it's time to bring on our
guest milian welcome back to the show good sir hey guys good to be with you

(15:45):
So, Milian, we've got to start with a burning question, as we always do.
Is Noster dead?
Yeah, it's hilarious.
It kind of reminds me of all of those Bitcoin is dead news articles that we've seen over the years.
You know, the Bitcoin obituaries.

(16:06):
Maybe we should start something similar for Noster.
Seems like we're kind of lacking.
We're kind of two, three years in, maybe four, depending on how you calculated.
and this is only one of our first death pronouncements that we got recently uh we need to
pump those numbers those are rookie numbers
love it well our live audience uh is uh at zero right now so now certainly appears to be dead

(16:36):
and it turns out you know to all the critics we would like to say you were right you know we're
dead. You know, Miljad, you said something once. I think it was at BTC Prague last year
during Dev Hack Day. And you said, Nostra is a perfect example of something that doesn't work

(16:57):
in theory, but works in practice. And I think that's really true, right? For the most part.
Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to observe all of these, quote unquote,
competing protocols sprouting up and I think Odell has the best framing there you know many of the

(17:18):
so-called competitors are actually blue sky competitors they're not really NOSTER competitors
but it kind of helps us maybe get a clearer picture of what it is that we're actually doing
here how NOSTER is actually different for a protocol like this for a network like this to

(17:38):
to exist come into being,
it has to be a kind of an organic grassroots situation.
You know, a few different factors need to be satisfied.
So, for example, you know,
all the users need to hold their keys

(18:01):
for a network to, of course, be truly decentralized
and for users to be self-sovereign.
So check. Then the architecture of the network needs to be such that anyone can run any part of the infrastructure.
So let's definitely check on Oster. And then lastly, there needs to be evidence and proof that people in fact are running all kinds of different parts of infrastructure just without permission.

(18:31):
and that's also happening on Oster and I think if you look at everything through that lens
Oster really has no competitors because when you look at the competing networks
none of them satisfy all three criteria only Oster is there you know a protocol that has

(18:54):
kind of sprouted out of nothing and organically grew to a place where we have by the way we have
way more than 800 active relays.
By our count, we have like over 2,000,
close to 3,000 active relays.
So this is like plebs running the infrastructure.
Anyone can do it and people are doing it.

(19:16):
Then you have, you know, media hosting services.
There is maybe a dozen different Blossom media hosting services
that are interoperable.
You know, that's incredible.
There are a number of indexers out there, you know,
And in terms of apps, I mean, they're impossible to keep track of.
There's so many of them.

(19:36):
So Noster is a movement and it's thriving,
even though it's still early days,
but there isn't anything like it out there.
And you can see, you know, like people coming in
and, you know, with their critiques and stuff like that.
But I think a lot of them come from, I don't know,

(20:00):
place of maybe irrelevance or jealousy or you know it's a desperate cry for attention it's kind
of the way i'm looking at it yeah the mini apps i have to i have to interject here because i created
one this week it's called hash man it's a pac-mon i went on shakespeare i'm about 130 deep into

(20:21):
shakespeare by the way that can be pricey uh trying to actually vibe code something uh but i
made a pac-man game it was called hash man uh all the little boosts were like thermal paste uh cpu
cooler heat sink uh motherboard upgrade and you had to basically eat as many it's just like pac-man

(20:42):
but you eat all the little hashes and uh once you get to a certain threshold then the center opens
up and you can mine the block uh fun little game but it was i mean it's got bugs like everything
else that gets vibe coded but i don't have no idea what if that's on a relay i don't have no
idea if that's on what server it's on i mean it but it was so easy to make i don't think you'll

(21:06):
ever be able to track how many nostre apps there are because it's truly built on nostre
yeah i think the explosion of vibe coding tools especially the some of the work alex gleason's
doing not just with shakespeare there's mk stack before that right it's uh it's made it so that's

(21:27):
that's what i built it on so shakespeare has you can choose which uh uh i don't even know what
they call it what what engine you want to use and i i used i chose mk stacks for it so it's
a simpleton like myself i got kind of far pretty quick just make sure you're not uh you're not

(21:48):
You're not doing payments.
You're not managing people's payments, QW, and personal data.
I ended up putting too much in, and then I screwed the whole thing up,
and then I rage quit.
So that was it.
Yeah.
So, Milian, what do you attribute?
It depends on how you look at it, the stats.

(22:09):
There's either a plateau or a bit of a dip in the weekly active users.
What do you attribute that to?
Yeah, I think people usually go to stats.noster.band for these numbers,
and I'm honestly not so sure how maintained that is and how accurate those numbers are.

(22:33):
We did some quick numbers at Primal because, of course, we run our own indexer,
and the type of downward sloping curve that's present on, you know, Noster band,
that's not what we're seeing. Ours is kind of slightly upward sloping. So, but yeah, I'll

(22:54):
concede that this is, that we've reached some sort of a plateau and we're growing slowly.
It's kind of interesting. I think we've reached our initial audience. So people who are
who are extremely interested in self sovereignty online, who are also Bitcoiners,

(23:21):
and are willing to withstand some pain in terms of UX to deal with an early stage protocol like Noster I think we have that audience
and they're quite happy where they are from what I can tell.
They're not going anywhere.
None of us are going anywhere.
So we have this kind of phase one

(23:41):
in the bag, so to speak.
How to grow from here is an interesting question.
We ponder it all the time.
I think it's going to be the matter of building some killer app
in addition to kind of improving the existing apps
to make the onboarding smoother
and kind of bring more content

(24:04):
so that people that have that first experience
getting onboarded and getting exposed to content on the roster
get something interesting to see,
which, by the way, is why we prioritize the Primal Studio
this time because we want to make it easy for content creators to bring their content over.

(24:26):
But I think if we zoom out, we need to be satisfied with what we've already accomplished.
Because Noster was able to bootstrap the world's first network of cryptographic identities
and the public web of trust.
This is something that's been in the dream of cryptographers for decades.

(24:49):
There have been so many attempts to bootstrap something like this, and we managed to do it.
So the fact that Nostra exists, the fact that we have this public relay infrastructure that anyone can use and participate in this network,
already is a massive accomplishment.

(25:11):
I think Gigi had a note along those lines.
We need to kind of take the wins, too.
In addition to that, we already have the largest Bitcoin circular economy with millions of transactions kind of going through the network.
These are not small accomplishments.

(25:32):
But of course, we want more.
And I think I'm like a Nostra permable, and I'm still of the mind that Nostra eventually captures everything just due to its openness.
but I think it's going to be a long road.
We're here ready for the grind

(25:54):
and I think it involves bringing content creators over,
providing the tools for them
and ensuring that Nostar is the best place
for content creators in the long run
which I also think is going to be the case.
So happy to take the conversation
in any of those directions you wish.

(26:15):
you know qw i i because you mentioned the largest circular economy dear
did it maybe avi what what's your thoughts first does does nostr hold the world record for most
bitcoin transactions in 24 hours i'm sure it does it's got to right it's got to in in 30 minutes in

(26:35):
that zapathon i wouldn't be surprised but uh you know this what's reminded me of qw is our
conversation last week with Nathan Day and BTC Map, which is, it seems like a chicken and egg
situation on Bitcoin adoption, right? The merchants say they don't want to accept Bitcoin because

(26:55):
there's no one who's going to pay in Bitcoin. And then you talk to the users and they say, well,
we don't want to pay in Bitcoin because there's no one accepting Bitcoin. And I think the way you
do it is you hammer, the way you break that cycle is you actually hammer merchant adoption.
I think what, Milian, what you were saying sounds like it's a similar problem,
which is similar chicken and egg.

(27:17):
Well, the users aren't coming because there's not enough content.
The creators aren't coming because there are not enough consumers of their content.
And the way you break that cycle, sort of parallel or analogous to hammering merchant adoption
on the BTC map side is hammering creator adoption and building better tools for them
so that they bring in the users, the consumers.

(27:42):
Yeah, that's the way we're looking at it.
And that's why we prioritized Primal Studio,
which, by the way, going back a few months,
that was on our roadmap for next year.
Primal Studio was supposed to be kind of
second half of 2026 product for us.
And then we started working with some content creators,

(28:02):
some people with Substacks and so forth.
And it was obvious how sorely lacking the tools are for these content creators.
And there is a cohort of content creators who are quite curious about Noster,
who like the value proposition of being finally sovereign on a network

(28:24):
and being able to earn sats directly.
Those are very attractive attributes to a content creator.
Yes, the audience is currently small but growing, hopefully.
So this is a reasonable pitch that I think enough content creators would be interested in for this to kind of start this onboarding wave.

(28:55):
but the tools that we were able to offer them at the time were just not embarrassing honestly
so I decided to switch gears a little bit and you know focus on Primal Studio for a few months
in fact BTC Prague was coming up and I ended up booking a main stage announcement slot

(29:24):
there prior to us even starting to code the product.
So there's one way to put a gun to your head.
Yes, like we're burning the ships.
We're going to build this and launch it.
You know, we had already made a pretty detailed plan

(29:44):
of how this would play out.
But of course, there's always risk
when building products like this.
But yeah, it kept everybody sharp.
and it also made us decide very precisely what the MVP was,
what the minimum viable product is,
and prioritize all the kind of crucial features,

(30:09):
get them in a good enough state so that we can ship version 1.0,
and from here we are supposed to iterate forever.
Basically, this is a new product line
that we're just going to continue building
just like our consumer apps.
So what I'm hearing is our good friend Kondalorian

(30:30):
has been rugged on his GIF keyboard yet again.
You're about to do it, Milyan,
but you pulled something in from 2026,
second half of 2026, into the roadmap,
and you moved GIF keyboard to second half of 2026.
Did I get that right?
That was precisely the trade-off.
we'll get into more detail on primal studio in a bit uh but uh you know i think the last time we

(30:56):
had you on which is may of uh last year episode 61 of pleb chain radio and we're on 121 we just
missed if you'd come on 122 million we would have been sort of doubling right uh but anyway uh you
I think we talked then about Primal's branding as the social Bitcoin wallet, right?

(31:18):
Is that still how you're branding yourself or have you changed the messaging?
We've changed the messaging a little bit.
We decided to go a little bit more high level and just go with live free.
The meaning of Primal, the meaning of life.
Might as well, right? The highest level.
The reason why I chose primal is because it's our true nature to be free.

(31:43):
That's what primal means to us.
I don't know if it's serendipity, Milian,
but the brand and everything around it just seems to...
I mean, from the outside, it does appear like wonderful serendipity
because it's primal, it's about life, it's the basic essence of life.

(32:04):
And then you have the Pura Vida culture, which is sort of front and center in the branding of Primal through, you know, Paul and others in the jungle, in the Primal house in Costa Rica.
So was this all an elaborate plan or a series of happy accidents?
No, you can't really plan stuff like this.

(32:26):
there are so many happy accidents or synchronicities all over the place
you know from from day one and they still keep happening we
we sort of we are discovering them more than just
coming up with them right love it so what's changed i know

(32:47):
may 2024 is a long time to throw your memory back to but
any significant changes and we'll get to studio in a second
but outside of that, from Primal's perspective?
Right.
So May last year, we were probably just starting to work on our 2.0 release.

(33:07):
So at that time, we already had shipped the integrated wallet.
Basically, Primal at that point was Twitter cloned with an integrated Bitcoin wallet,
if we're kind of to summarize it like that.
What I'm interested in in general is kind of more nuanced, long-form content.

(33:29):
I'm interested in content that has more signal that's less fluffy, less frivolous than the usual social media feeds that people scroll through.
In fact, I think Noster has the potential to become the network where you really go for high signal content.
content. Maybe in addition to kind of it being open and supporting all different content types,

(33:57):
also the monetization kind of methods that are likely to succeed on Noster are way different,
and they're likely not to be heavily based on advertising. So going back to May last year,
the reason I brought this up is that we decided to incorporate long form textual content into Primal.

(34:26):
And we didn't want to do that in a small way, we wanted to do that in a big way.
So we wanted to provide the same level of UX and maybe even exceed the UX of the established players like Medium and Substack.
So we were just starting to work on 2.0 in addition to long form articles, which kind of got their own dedicated tab and the whole dedicated section for articles.

(34:55):
We also were working on advanced search feeds so custom feeds that you can define and kind of have a feed gallery and so forth So it was like quite an elaborate release that took us in retrospect probably way too long

(35:17):
So we ended up releasing it in November,
but we were heads down on Primal 2.0 back in May last year.
So yeah, that release got shipped by NLT.
of November and yeah we were now kind of working on Primal 3.0 and in parallel on Primal Studio.

(35:46):
So Primal Studio what what's your general roadmap? Maybe talk about what kind of the features today
and then maybe something that is maybe the holy grail looking forward.
We want Noster to be the best place for content creators, as I mentioned previously.

(36:07):
So part of that is providing kind of very high-end, easy-to-use and powerful tools for them.
So that's the idea behind Primal Studio, quite simple.
The initial release that we shipped last month has enough kind of to get started.

(36:28):
So essentially, we have more elaborate authoring tools than what you would find on Primal.net for kind of as free consumer tools.
And in this first release, we're focusing on notes and articles.
So those are the content types that you can author in Primal Studio.

(36:51):
but you get more control over those types of artifacts.
So for example, they both have what you see is what you get kind of WYSIWYG views as well as code views.
Then you can have previews. You can preview what your content will look like on the phone or on the desktop browser or in the feeds.

(37:19):
reads, those types of things that are quite useful, right?
Like if you're content creators, you don't want to publish something and then get surprised
by the way it renders on the phone and have to kind of redo, maybe delete or update and
so forth.
So we're kind of trying to make that process more seamless.

(37:41):
So importing capabilities, so people who do long form content in terms of essays and blogs
and so forth, articles, currently most of that content exists on legacy platforms like
Substack and Medium and Ghost and so forth.
So we're making it easy to import your content from all of those platforms if that's what

(38:05):
you're using currently.
And then the type of things like scheduled publishing is something that's fairly obviously
is needed.
So you're able to create your content and schedule it for publishing at a time that
kind of makes more sense for your audience.
Then also we have team collaboration.

(38:26):
So you can, in fact, this particular feature is something that incited the creation of
Primal Studio at this particular time. We wanted to help some authors create,
bring their content over to Noster, and what we wanted to do is do some work for

(38:50):
them, you know, prepare all of these articles, their own content, in a way
that's ready to publish and then get them to log in and sign with their key
and publish it. And there just wasn't a good tool for this that would kind of
have a very seamless flow to enable this.
So at the moment I was trying to figure this out

(39:14):
for a particular author that we wanted to bring on,
I decided, okay, we're building the whole thing right now.
So that's essentially one of the features
that instigated the building of Studio right now.
So to kind of describe this feature in a bit more detail,

(39:34):
when you work in a team, let's say in a company,
you don't want to give your private key,
your corporate private key to your intern
to post social media posts, right?
So there are some kind of workarounds for that
with NSC bunker and so forth,
but essentially there isn't a good solution out there.

(39:57):
So what Primal Studio enables you to do is within a team,
a team member can log into Primal Studio, prepare all the content,
and then send it to another Noster account.
Let's say I can prepare an article under my account
and I send it to the main Primal account.

(40:19):
And then whoever controls the Primal account private key can log in.
They'll see the proposed content in the inbox.
They can take a look.
If everything looks good, they can sign and publish.
So this is the flow that's supported in Studio
very easily sort of out of the box.

(40:41):
Melian, could I ask you on that one?
Did you have to write a new NIP for that delegation process?
No, we didn't.
Actually, this is something that Pablo had already figured out
as a part of Highlighter.
So both for this and kind of for scheduling,
we leaned on the spec that Pablo already had put together.

(41:05):
And in fact, all these features are interoperable with Highlighter.
So if you, let's say, use Primal Studio to create an article proposal
and send it to another NPUB,
if you log into Highlighter with that target account,

(41:26):
you will see the proposal there.
so we're just basically encrypting
articles to the
recipients
mpub using
you know regular
encryption methods
for Noster and we're publishing this
to relays so there isn't anything
proprietary about this
Gotcha

(41:49):
but carry on
you were talking about the primal roadmap
and you were making your way
you said so you'd come to delegation
right so we have all of this and then we have um media management so that's built right into
primal studio so uh you for those of you who are familiar with the blossom protocol

(42:11):
for um media hosting in a kind of self-sovereign decentralized way
uh primal studio includes a blossom media manager essentially so blossom is an open
protocol that essentially utilizes Noster to solve this decentralized media hosting

(42:34):
problem. It's quite a simple and elegant solution, much like Noster itself. But it's an open
protocol just like Noster. And we adopted it at Primal a few months ago. As of a few months ago,
all Primal clients natively support Blossom.

(42:55):
So when you upload images or videos in any of our clients,
they are uploaded to our Blossom server.
And you can, in your settings, decide to upload them to any other Blossom server
and or do mirroring of uploads to other Blossom servers.

(43:16):
So for example, you can have a setup where all your uploads go to the Primal server,
Blossom server and then get automatically mirrored to Blossom.band, for example,
or any Blossom server of your choice.
So you automatically get backups of all your Blossom media uploads.

(43:38):
So that's kind of cool.
Blossom itself is excellent.
And we decided to make it easier to manage all your media uploads in one place.
So you can do that by going to the media tab within Primal Studio.
And you can manage your uploads to the Primal media server or any other Blossom supporting media server.

(44:02):
So that's kind of cool.
And then last but not least, we have analytics.
So the homepage of Primal Studio gives you this kind of analytics dashboard where you can select a time range.
and then will give you the kind of the trending of your content over time in terms of reach and impact and so forth.

(44:27):
So you will see your top notes, top articles for the selected range, along with the breakdown of all of the kind of content scores and number of replies and zaps and even zaps delta.
For example, you can see for the selected range, you've sent this many zaps, you've received this many zaps.

(44:47):
so here's your zaps delta in terms of number of zaps and sets so you can see if you're up or down
for three months or whatnot um but what's how do you how do you get to those analytics um because
if i let's say pull up a no stir and i'm on some relays and then i pull and i look at i got you

(45:08):
know this many reposts this many likes this many zaps but then i go to primal and then i have
different analytics uh you know some the same ballpark but it's just a little different
uh where do you where do you draw those analytics from so we run an indexer of the entire nostr
network so we attempt to connect to all of the publicly accessible relays and uh collect all of

(45:35):
the events that are publicly accessible and all those relays so i think you mentioned nostour
If I understand Nostur's architecture well, it is a kind of client-centric Nostur app that works directly with relays.
But it can only connect to, it will connect to the relays that you specify.

(45:57):
Usually people have a handful of relays, maybe half a dozen or a dozen relays.
So probably the stats that you see in NOS2 are based on the numbers they received from those relays, whereas we attempt to index the entire NOS2 network.

(46:18):
On the relays, and I'm kind of going off chart here because I was kind of looking at my relays.
Tell me about the premium.primal.net versus the relay.primal.net.
Is there any benefit to it?

(46:39):
Yes.
So relay.primal.net is our public relay.
And for context, yeah, this is the premium one is for the the legend,
the legend, the premium primal to standard.
client users.
Yeah.
So premium.primal.net, sorry, backing up,
relay.primal.net is our public relay

(47:01):
that anyone can connect to
and anyone can post, you know, content to.
So it's one of the bigger relays
where there's a ton of spam in there.
We don't do a lot of kind of spam mitigation.
We kind of accept all the events
that get posted and kind of try to make sense of them later.

(47:27):
So it's kind of a free-for-all relay.
Sometimes it gets really bombarded with a lot of content
and it slows down.
Actually, in the last couple of days,
we had some issues where requests would take a few seconds
and we, of course, don't like that.
It needs to be faster than that.
But those are the realities when you are dealing

(47:48):
with like a public facing relays which is very, very open.
In contrast, premium.primal.net is a relay only for our paid users.
So people who either are on our premium tier or the recently introduced Primal Pro tier.

(48:08):
So now we're talking orders of magnitude fewer users.
So these are our paying customers.
So only they are able to post content to premium.primal.net, but anyone is able to read.
So as a consequence, this relay is much more reliable.
It has much higher signal because spammers don't pay $7 a month to be able to post from an AMP hub.

(48:42):
Good, good, good.
I was just, I was generally curious because I'm, I'm on both relays and relays can be confusing to,
to, you know, newcomers and they're the, you know, you'd be on 45 relays and your, your,
your internet service provider sends you an email saying you just maxed out your monthly and it's
day seven or something. So yeah, it's, it's interesting, but quality over quantity is,

(49:06):
is the way so um going back to the uh the the primal um uh the the studio not to be confused
with primal game studio uh if you're if you google it uh primal studio.primal.net
talk about the the cost of the tiers and um where the value is right so we have uh this is the new

(49:30):
but essentially pro tier that we've launched with primal studio uh that essentially for those of a
you who are familiar with our kind of legend tier which was introduced back in November
which was actually quite popular you know especially like the first few months with

(49:50):
many people signed up for the legend tier and then it tapered off and we got surprised by how popular
that was. Essentially what we did with the launch of Primal Studio we introduced the new
pro tier and then we rolled this legend capability within the Primal clients into the pro tier.

(50:15):
So the pro tier now includes the access to Primal Studio and all of the pro tools that we'll be
building as time goes and this kind of higher level of visibility and recognition on all primal
clients which is the legend tier that is now part of the pro tier so i hope this is not too confusing

(50:36):
and then uh those people who by the way the pro tier was like a lifetime tier uh and so what we
did is for all legend users we gave them a lifetime subscription of primal pro so they get
they don't you know they get everything they had previously plus access to all of the pro tools

(50:58):
they were building what is the next well i think that by the way that did make sense but it can
And also, it's easy also to get lost in.
Pro became Legend, or Legend became Pro,
but there's a plus, little extras there with Primal Studio.

(51:20):
That's what our show's here for, right, Avi, to dissect this?
Yeah, exactly.
So you said, Milian, you've started off with authors, right?
It's more written content,
and you're trying to get it to the standard of Ghost
or any one of those where you have rich text editing.

(51:44):
And by the way, as someone who's used Promise Studio,
I think it's pretty much there, right?
It's very easy to use, excellent user experience
as someone who posts articles.
So that's the starting point, right?
You're targeting creators who are writers.
What tranche of creators are next on your roadmap?

(52:04):
up? So what we're starting to get into, and this might take some time, so I'm not going to make any
promises in terms of timelines, but of course what we would like to see flourish on Noster is
long-form video content. So these video tools need to be there, need to be present for content

(52:26):
creators and in terms of kind of the consumption user experience for consumers, the UX needs to be
amazing for within the apps as well. So this is broadly speaking kind of the next big area that
we're attacking within Primal and I know there's a barrage of questions coming in to start with a

(52:51):
when. So
can't really talk about timelines
yet.
We'll talk about the what
then, Milian.
No, but before we talk about the what,
when? No, I'm kidding.
Every developer loves
every question that starts
with a when, especially after

(53:13):
shipping and release. Oh, when
is the next thing?
Yeah, exactly.
So are you thinking
more when you say long
form video sort of a
YouTube competitor
or are you thinking more
Netflix style?

(53:35):
That's a good question
and I don't know if you were there during
the announcement of Private Mail Studio in
Prague. I was.
Okay, so you remember I
started off with a little two minute
video clip by Gigi.
Gigi, yes. Yes, where
he masterfully
kind of dissects
the

(53:55):
kind of
the
situation we're in
as humanity
where our kind of
eyeballs are being harvested
because the internet needs to
monetize itself and the only
monetization
kind of
method that worked

(54:16):
so far was advertising
so
So when you play that out, you end up in this predicament we're in right now, which is kind of you're catering to the lowest common denominator.
You're kind of you you need to be build kind of slot machines for the brain is to maximize your profit.

(54:39):
And I think YouTube is, to an extent, a part of that, where there are some kind of platforms that are maybe more kind of high consciousness types of events or high consciousness types of content that creators are making,

(55:05):
where people subscribe ahead of time for content,
and then you don't see the patterns that typically,
the kind of the dark patterns that you see
in these advertising-based content platforms.
And usually the content itself is much higher signal.

(55:30):
So this is what I find interesting.
and we would like to cater to that class of creators.
Probably, you know, it's not really a mass market necessarily.
Eventually it might become,
but to put all of the incentives in place
to create high quality content

(55:52):
and really kind of engage with the audience
on kind of honest terms.
So this is kind of the vision that I have
for Primal Studio and then Primal and maybe Noster as a whole
could become a place where people go to for high-quality content.
How would that interoperate with the rest of Noster?

(56:17):
Obviously, you haven't described any architecture in detail here,
and it's just an idea, right?
But if you're talking about, and by the way,
huge fan of that, taking things in that direction,
which is higher consciousness type content
where people are absolutely willing to pay up front to consume it
because they know the signal is going to be high

(56:39):
and it is a much smaller niche, clearly, right?
You said slot machines,
but we might as well call brains slop machines at this point
because that's what most consumptions become.
It's just slop.
and that's just a direct response
to the advertising

(57:01):
driven algorithm
it's the eyeball harvesting
that's leading people to
all make uniform content
that's all the same
by the way happening in Bitcoin too
with all the NGU stuff
that's Bitcoin's version of slop
that's happening
but that said
how would you build

(57:21):
something like that
within Primal in a way that is, let's say, in keeping with the ethos of NOSTA,
which is it's also accessible in other clients.
Oh, absolutely.
And we don't need to do anything special there.
The specs are already there.
The nips already exist for everything that I just mentioned.

(57:44):
For long-form content, for paid subscription tiers,
all of the things that I mentioned can be done in an open way that's standardized through NIPs
and in fact like I said those NIPs already exist so there isn't a lot of new stuff that needs to be
invented we just need to build high quality experiences around all of these specs for both

(58:09):
creators and consumers and then we need to stand up services that are kind of reliable
and have the infrastructure kind of that's not going to go down and is going to be competitive
with the legacy centralized platforms.
This is the role of Primal That the way I looking at it We just recognize parts of Noster that we find interesting and where we find the content types are taking off

(58:43):
And then we build great experiences around them
and stand up infrastructure to make those experiences reliable.
This is really the work that needs to get done.
And, you know, a lot of times it's overwhelming because everything needs to be built.

(59:05):
But we're here for it.
I think that will be a big one, Malian.
People being able to post high-quality video content on Nostra in a way that allows their work to be honored,
right assuming it is high quality
to be honored
and valued

(59:25):
so that they're not catering to the algorithm
or what have you
so I think that's
that is in my mind a much
bigger deal than
writing articles
important as that is
so you said it's coming in two months right?
that's what you said?
we're dealing in twos so it's either two weeks

(59:46):
I mean now with Vibe coding
it's hours
maybe somebody will vibe code ahead of us we don't need to uh we don't need to bother
yeah no you so just to clarify i was obviously you did not say two months
yeah i'm i was joking about that uh so million is is i've heard on the grapevine

(01:00:12):
and feel free to neither confirm nor deny this,
but did Primal recently close a round of funding?
No, that's not the case.
Are you in the process of fundraising again?

(01:00:32):
Every founder is always in the process of fundraising.
But yes, we don't have anything to announce at the time.
have you considered a career in politics milian that was an excellent dodge right there
okay like when it comes to announcements avi um you know this goes for product announcements

(01:00:59):
for feature announcements for financing announcements any sort of announcement
uh for me like i i don't like pre-announcing things i don't like pre-announcing features
pre-announcing products.
I like to announce availability.
So when we announce something,
you can go ahead and try it today
and things like that.

(01:01:19):
I've been building software products
for many years,
and I've tried doing things differently,
and this is by far the best way for me.
And I have the scar tissue
to prove all the other kind of mistakes
that I've done, that I made like 20 years ago or so.

(01:01:41):
So, sorry, that makes for a bit of a more boring guest on your show.
But we like to announce availability.
Yeah, not boring at all.
This is an entertaining dance you just did, Melian.

(01:02:07):
Yeah, so the people who are using Primal Studio seemed quite happy with it and quite surprised

(01:02:29):
by how robust this version 1.0 is.
We received some feedback about the pricing,
that it's too high, you know, after we released 1.0.
And then, you know, people wanted to know
what the alternatives are and so forth.

(01:02:52):
And to them, I would say, of course,
we have light versions of all those tools for free on Primal.net,
as well as Primal Studio, just like the rest of the Primal stack, is open sourced under the MIT license.
The code is there.
Anyone is able to stand up their own instance and run it.

(01:03:16):
But for us to be able to continue building this and offering a high-quality product for professionals,
we need to charge these types of professional-based kind of fees, right?
So that's high-level kind of the feedback we got so far.

(01:03:37):
So the users of Studio love it,
but there are many people who are maybe disappointed that they wanted to use it,
but it's maybe outside of their price range,
which, by the way, I would say everyone should try it out for free for 30 days.
That's easy enough. See if you like it.
So it's at studio.primal.net.
If you go in, if you already have...

(01:03:59):
By the way, it's desktop only.
So this is not something you do over the phone.
This is more of a desktop or laptop kind of situation.
So if you already have your Noster extension set up
and ready to be logged into a Noster app,
just go to studio.primal.net and poke around for a month,

(01:04:20):
see how you like it.
Thank you.

(01:04:54):
Agreed. So we kind of wanted to, we realized...

(01:05:18):
Exactly. And a part of it, as I mentioned, we realized that our pitch to creators sucked.
We wanted to kind of bring some creators over and we realized our own pitch wasn't very good.
So, you know, we got to work and now the pitch is better.
But we, of course, have a lot more work to do.
And it's just going to be a grind like this.

(01:05:40):
I mean, there might be some fly-by-night, sort of like some sort of massively viral app that kind of makes it a noster and grows the network that way.
That's certainly possible.
We can all hope for this to happen.
But my base case is that we are going to have to take the kind of low time preference, kind of the hard road of building everything step by step, improving our clients day in, day out, building tools for creators, onboarding creators one by one, getting them to bring their audience over.

(01:06:20):
and then fast forward 10 years, Noster is now formidable.
That's my base case.

(01:06:40):
I think there is a lot of potential around these vibe coding tools
and the ability to build something very quickly using English as your programming language
and target the network that's open and has the infrastructure to, you know,

(01:07:04):
store your data and do everything for you sort of out of the box,
like you mentioned a few minutes ago, QW.
I think that's a massive deal.
And it's not yet, maybe it's not yet obvious based on this first cohort of applications that we're seeing, which are kind of basic and buggy and so forth.

(01:07:29):
But I think you can see very clearly how all of this gets a lot better quickly.
And then what's missing, in my opinion, is very seamless universal login kind of UX that we need to figure out on Oster in general.

(01:07:51):
Once we figure that out and any app can leverage it, I think this whole idea of openness is really going to shine then because people are going to create some crazy apps and onboarding onto them is going to be easy by everyone.

(01:08:17):
So a combination of these things, like what we kind of already have now that we didn't have a year ago are these kind of vibe coding tools that can let anyone build any app almost.
if we combine that with a solution for a universal login somehow,

(01:08:40):
and I don't have a solution for that yet,
but I think collaboratively as a kind of developer,
a nostro developer community, I'm sure we can figure that out.
I think the combination of those two could be very powerful.
Interesting times indeed,
and lots to watch out for,

(01:09:03):
or with eagerness, I would say, and anticipation.
Milian, what was it, a couple of months back, right,
Apple updated their App Store guidance
that people felt potentially was a positive move,

(01:09:23):
especially when it came to things like Zaps
and just other payments that happened.
on iPhone apps.
Has that factored into how Primal is thinking about their wallet?
Or you already have an elegant solution with the strike back end,
so you're good.

(01:09:45):
So that's a really painful situation just in general with Apple.
I mean, Google as well,
they are gatekeepers of consumer software releases.
You know, you don't get to release software when you think you're ready.
You can release when Apple says you're ready.
It's very frustrating to any kind of self-respecting builder,

(01:10:10):
especially since a lot of their policies are applied sort of arbitrarily And sometimes we don know we don understand fully why we were rejected
Sometimes we don't understand fully
why our build was accepted.
It's just sort of, you know,

(01:10:34):
you kind of have to account for this big unknown
when you create plans around your software product.
It's very frustrating.
So this event that you mentioned was a few weeks ago, I think, or a couple months ago maybe.

(01:10:55):
It affected Primal in a positive way in that we decided to again try submitting a build that has Nostre Wallet Connect capabilities
capabilities where users who don't want to use the built-in Primal wallet, which has some KYC light in it to enable it, so people who want to use an external wallet are now able to do so.

(01:11:24):
We had implemented that a while ago, and we had supported that in Android for a long time and also our web app.
But we had this complicated situation where we had to explain to the users that, yes, they can use an external wallet in all Primal clients except for iOS because Apple wouldn't let us do it.

(01:11:46):
So, we used that occasion to kind of brush up on that feature, make it a little bit tighter, and submit the build to the App Store, and this time it got approved.
I really don't know if it's at all related to that ruling or if we just got lucky this time.

(01:12:07):
It's part of the frustration of not knowing why it got accepted.
but the outcome is that now all primal clients support an external wallet.
So that's how we were affected by this.
There was, I don't know if you were able to attend this when you were in Prague,

(01:12:29):
but Vexel had that big announcement of the Freedom Store, right?
Vexel, the peer-to-peer Bitcoin marketplace that's out of the Czech Republic.
They re-enacted Apple's 1984 ad.
But obviously in this case, Apple is the bad guy, is big brother.

(01:12:53):
And I think there's an EU rule now where iPhones have to allow essentially the equivalent of sideloading.
So they've teamed up with some other apps, Vexel and a few others, and they've created a freedom store.
Do you see something like that coming to the U.S.?

(01:13:14):
And do you think Primal would benefit from something like that?
I really have no idea what will happen in that area.
I mean, Apple is, of course, going to fight this tooth and nail.
I'm not holding my breath that something like this would come to the U.S.

(01:13:34):
I think in the long run
this is a mistake
for Apple and in the long run
they will suffer the consequences
of this where kind of the most talented
developers are going to slowly
put most of their time elsewhere
and you'll end up with a substandard

(01:13:55):
experience
and feature set on
Apple but
that's not going to happen anytime soon
unfortunately I think
So this is just the reality that we need to deal with.
But also for builders of freedom tech,
it's good to get reminded of these things.
It's good to have some pressure being applied like this

(01:14:21):
so that we build alternatives.
But I don't have anything more specific to say than that.
Yeah. Let's move to metrics, Malian. So as you're tracking the growth of Primal and adoption or what have you, all the positive indicators that you're looking for, or negative indicators too, what are the key metrics that you look at?

(01:14:51):
because I know it can be challenging getting real numbers on NOSTA.
Now, with the indexer, you perhaps have one of the closest approximations,
but you still don't get things like views or impressions or things like that.
Those are almost impossible, I would think, to track on NOSTA.
But beyond that, what are the key metrics that you use within Primal

(01:15:16):
to track growth, adoption, and so on?
Yeah, you're right. So we don't have capabilities to track views precisely.
I know some other clients have some estimates, and that's fair, I think.
But it's fairly common among Noster clients to not have any sort of tracking built into the apps.

(01:15:44):
and the culture within Nostra is such to kind of maximize privacy as much as possible
and be careful whenever we consider different trade-offs
to kind of take privacy concerns into account in a major way.

(01:16:05):
So we don't have views, but we do have, you know, Nostra is a public network.
and where sort of cryptographic identities sign events and publish them to the public relays.
And since we have the web of trust algorithms that is fairly effective at filtering out bots,

(01:16:33):
we do have the ability to see how many users out there are on Oster
and how many users are primal and so forth.
So I would say the biggest metric is how many humans use our software

(01:16:53):
and are on our network every day, every month, every week, right?
To me, this is the most important metric.
Are humans having fun using our software and participating in Nostr?
beyond that I would say
zaps

(01:17:15):
so transactions that
are being made every day on Oster
to kind of transmit value
and to kind of signal to the rest of the network
regarding which content users find valuable
and so forth
so that's probably beyond kind of

(01:17:35):
the number of humans who are here every day with us,
we want to see that number kind of grow over time.
I would say in the same way we would like to see
the number of transactions grow
kind of at least proportionally
with the way that user base grows.

(01:17:56):
This is crucial, I think,
because if this is our opportunity
potentially to build a network with a different set of incentives,
not just from the kind of openness and kind of self-sovereignty point of view,

(01:18:17):
but also from the monetization point of view.
And those kind of perverse incentives that exist in legacy systems,
we have a chance to maybe build something better
that's based on kind of transmitting users voluntarily
and consciously transmitting value.

(01:18:41):
So I think this is one of Gigi's main points,
which is like it's a high consciousness action
to do a micropayment, to do a zap, let's say,
on a piece of content that you appreciate
for whatever reason, right?
So if this takes off, and we have some early indications that it is in fact taking off.

(01:19:06):
For the user base that we already have on Noster, let's look at some numbers.
For example, order of magnitude, I think between 50 and 100,000 humans are active on Noster.
And we've crossed the threshold of 5 million zaps recently.
Those are interesting.

(01:19:29):
That's an interesting ratio.
It means like those of us who are active on NOSTER
are active not only in terms of participating in the discussions,
but we're actually sending some money around and are active monetarily.
And that gives us kind of reason for optimism

(01:19:55):
that we might be able to stand up a network that has a different set of incentives for creators
than just harvesting eyeballs with advertising.

(01:20:25):
you know Noster is dead is is so hilarious all right I'm gonna actually
I'm gonna actually gonna go there because like uh Avi you were uh you were in Prague right

(01:20:48):
yes
and do you remember
that
Bitkit
and
PubKey
those guys
they had like
a massive
double booth
right by the entrance there
remember?
right they did

(01:21:08):
yes
prime location
it's like impossible to miss
did you notice anything
about the massive booth there?
what
tumbleweeds
like nobody was there
and did you notice anything about Primal's booth

(01:21:31):
they were hanging with Primal
it was kind of actually ridiculous
it was a zombie apocalypse at our booth
because like we were inundated
We were sworn for three days straight with people who just...

(01:21:52):
Yes the hang bar was a big success and Paul gets all the credit there We had a lot of fun there but there was like a lineup of people you know waiting to hang with us but also like to talk about Noster
and to participate,
you had to be on Noster.

(01:22:12):
So you come over,
Marco whipped up a little kind of leaderboard app
where we scan your Noster NPUB.
Your name shows up on the screen
with your avatar, with all the zeros.
And then the moment you start hanging,
you know sats start rolling in so it was fun and it was three days of non-stop action it was like

(01:22:34):
you know i don't know how many times you walked by but it was like it was ridiculous
it was ridiculous and then even like on day on the last day they were they were about to close the
uh the trade show floor uh at 6 p.m whatever we still had a lineup and i was like okay are we
taking this down, Marco, you're going to tell these people it's over?

(01:22:57):
And Marco's like, no, I'm going to let you go.
So the workers started dismantling all the other booths.
We were still going.
So anyway, that's on the topic of who's dead.
By the way, so, Milian, that was an incredibly clever piece of marketing,

(01:23:18):
hanging with Primal.
Also those cards that you give out with 2100 sats on them, you get onboard onto Primal and then you get those sats.
That was really cool as well.
So yes.
Yes, we introduced the cards in a small way at Bitcoin Vegas.

(01:23:42):
because they were not, you know, we couldn't,
the printer couldn't get the right amount
or the massive amount we needed in time for Vegas.
But fully, you know, it was fully rolled out for Prague
where every participant got a card when they entered.

(01:24:03):
And we were also giving them out at the booth.
But it's kind of like an interesting contrast
in terms of who's dead and who's alive.
No, for sure.
And you mentioned that other protocol, if you will, right, PubKey.
The interesting thing is, you know, you have folks like that.

(01:24:25):
Every now and then you have people with a competing, I guess,
who are trying to build a competing network,
who come in and they start making this intellectual,
yeah, technical or intellectual case
for why their network is better and why NOSTA is dead
on a purely technical basis.
And I think a lot of them,
and especially this most recent wave,

(01:24:47):
misses a really, really key point.
Most of us are on NOSTA
because of how we feel
being part of this community,
not because we were intellectually convinced
to be here
and we're here for some textbook academic reason, right?
We're here because it's nice.
It's fun.
And until and unless

(01:25:08):
they can recreate that vibe
or better in their network,
there is no migration that's going to happen.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, you can't just force
kind of create these types of networks.
They emerge.
And you especially can't force,
can't create them if you need an invite code

(01:25:29):
to get in or anything like that.
You know, that's a good growth hack
for centralized products.
I mean, that's fine.
they did great for i don't know gmail back in the day so no issues there but if you're
trying to bootstrap really to bootstrap a protocol that's tough i mean there needs to be some magic

(01:25:53):
for a movement to sprout around something like this i mean it's we need to appreciate how special
and rare is what we have with Noster.
These things don't happen often.
And we really need to take our wins

(01:26:13):
and be happy with what we have going.
And of course, we're going to keep growing.
We're going to keep hustling.
A bunch of different builders are doing daily work, right?
But what we have here already is impressive and special.
Yeah.
Yeah. And to your point, Milian, I think it is a really important point, which is these types of magic moments, they don't come very often.

(01:26:40):
Maybe they're once in 20 years or something like that. And we had that in late 2022, early 2023.
That's a weird inflection point, a weird wrinkle in the universe where a group of people showed up in one place at one time, had so much fun that they didn't want to leave.
Yeah, sure, one or two of them, a handful of them left, but the core remained.

(01:27:04):
And they still remain because of that feeling, because of that magic.
Good stuff.
Let's do some Wens, Milian.
I have a couple of Wens.
Sounds amazing.
Yeah, all of these are Wens, yes.
Proper Wens.

(01:27:25):
Wend NIP 53.
And for those who are unfamiliar, this is the NIP that allows NOSTA clients to show live streaming events.
So it could be like the way Twitter has Twitter spaces or I guess Twitter Live, which is videos, right?

(01:27:46):
So that's what NIP 53 in theory allows a lot of NOSTA clients to do if they implement that.
I believe Amethyst already implemented it a long time ago,
probably because Vitor was the one who wrote the NIP.
But yes, Milian, when NIP 53 or equivalent?

(01:28:06):
So NIP 53 is the one we would be supporting, of course.
And as I mentioned previously,
we are quite interested in long-form video at Primal.
uh the lowest hanging fruits are these uh live video streams or live streams just in general
um so in our roadmap i'm not going to say when it's going to get released or or you know

(01:28:33):
even the release it would be a part of but this is the feature that makes sense to ship first
Like if we're looking at long-form video content, supporting these content types from our clients, and they're created however the creators are currently creating them.

(01:28:58):
So if you have a live stream, we should be able to recognize that within Primal and then show the stream.
so
I guess soon
but
yeah like you said
there are already multiple other clients
that do a pretty good job
at supporting these and

(01:29:20):
we want to also
join the party
yeah Nostar does it
already they were one of the early ones
as well
I think the stream itself

(01:29:41):
is maybe
yeah
Nip53 is not wrecked
Zach.stream is wrecked
yeah
yeah
I don't believe there's enough.
Yeah.

(01:30:02):
Yeah, yeah.
We need alternatives for sure.
Okay.
So you're referring, of course, to the MLS protocol,
which would bring much more private and more powerful DMs into Primal?

(01:30:25):
Yes.
Yeah, and just to add to that,

(01:30:54):
Milian, I think the idea there would be to make DMs first-class citizens again, right?
In the case of Primal, when you started, you had the DMs, the Kind4s, and you had them in the bottom bar.
And then at some point, to me, that's a first-class citizen because then you see the notification while you're scrolling, right?

(01:31:18):
When you get a DM, obviously, Kind4 has its issues with privacy and what have you.
So then you move them to the sidebar where no one sees them anymore.
So with white noise, first of all, as QW said, when white noise?
And two, does that mean they become first-class citizens again in Primal?
Yes, that demotion of DMs was very intentional,

(01:31:41):
and it's exactly for the reason you outlined.
And of course, we're kind of in the process of,
when I say we, I mean the Noster developer community,
we're all in the process of figuring out
what the standard is going to be.
I really like what Jeff G and the team are doing

(01:32:01):
with white noise.
And I think MLS is probably the protocol to follow there.
to follow there.
So,
like looking at it from today's kind of point of view,
this seems like the best contender for the solution.

(01:32:26):
What I like about White Nose and Jeff and his team
is that they are not only building
the product on top of this open spec
and kind of adjusting the specs so that it works with Noster
in terms of publishing to release and so forth.
But they're also building libraries for the rest of us

(01:32:50):
that we can use easily to kind of reuse a lot of their work
and to be able to bring this to a client like Primal
down the road easily.
So we're already in touch with them
and we want to make sure we're aligned.
And I think the same is like other Noster devs

(01:33:15):
are kind of in the same boat.
So if I were a betting man,
I'd say there will be a point in the future
where this tech is deemed ready
and you will see many clients incorporated
in a short amount of time.
That doesn't really answer your when question, but it kind of hopefully gives some color on how this would play out.

(01:33:43):
Yeah.
You can ask Jeff.
Well, here's the thing, right?
And we will have Jeff on the show in a couple of weeks.
I think of white noise, and he'll probably correct me,
but I think of it as a reference implementation of the messaging protocol.
I think what truly turbocharges it is if Amethyst, if Primal,

(01:34:06):
if Darmus and others implement that within their clients,
because at that point, then everything is in the app, right?
Then we don't need a Telegram or Signal.
We create our groups within,
I can create a group within Primal, right?
And message folks.
And then so maybe that's what will finally drive NOSTA users

(01:34:27):
to get rid of Telegram and Signal.
But we'll see.
Yeah, that will be a powerful solution.
More powerful than Signal and certainly more than Telegram.
almost too powerful yeah with all of this in i mean um you can see how like powerful the whole

(01:34:53):
nostr stack is is going to become as a part of this like it's basically inevitable we just need
to do a ton of work and we believe me most of most devs are kind of day in day out like
you're putting in long hours right because we see how good all of this can be it's just like
like a ton of work needs to be put in to put it all together.

(01:35:16):
But it's kind of starting to seem pretty obvious
in terms of how it all comes together.
So speaking of long hours and hard work,
building in the public can be absolutely brutal.
And there can be a lot of noise disguised as feedback or criticism, right?

(01:35:38):
And we see that a lot on Nostro.
So what mindset shifts have you and the team used to help you stay sane amidst all this crazy noise that every now and then pops up and that nonstop feedback loop?
How do you stay sane and keep building?

(01:35:59):
I mean, it's the best case scenario is to get a lot of noise around the project that you're working on.
You know, tumbleweeds and complete silence is way worse, right?
You know, those who experience that might have a lot of time on their hands
to go troll the customers or users of other networks.

(01:36:23):
Well played.
Well played.
But, you know, in all honesty, it's been amazing.
You know, we got our amount of crap over, you know, the years,
and that's fine.
some deserved some maybe not so much but on balance uh feedback the feedback has been great

(01:36:43):
uh and both in terms of kind of getting support from our users but also uh getting competent
feedback that helps us improve the product i think building for nostr is a very interesting experience
because an unusually high number of our users

(01:37:05):
are actually developers.
And they're enthusiastic about both the protocol and Primal.
So we get a lot of high signal feedback
that helps us improve the product, which is great.
So really can't complain in this area at all.
I'll take this over any alternative any day.

(01:37:26):
love it so milian one of the things when i met you in prague and i met you uh for the first time
last year in prague 24 and you were working obviously i met marco your son who works at
primal and then this year i met your wife and your daughter as well and it seems like

(01:37:50):
what seemed really nice to me was primal largely seems like a family business almost
Obviously, you have other employees.
But talk about what it's like to work with family.
I mean, your wife contributes to Primal.
Your daughter does.
She doing an amazing job at the booth keeping up with all the crowds Marcos of course at this point he like you know he an expert So yeah talk about that family dynamic

(01:38:18):
what it's like running a business with your spouse and kids.
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
And I do have maybe a somewhat unusual karma when it comes to that
because one of my previous startups, I actually hired my dad.
And so I started the company and he was with IBM.

(01:38:40):
He was like a software architect on their Visual Age C++ team.
And I started the company and then convinced him to leave IBM and come work with me.
And we ended up working for 12 years together.
It was really an amazing experience to spend all that time with my old man.

(01:39:05):
and then we had a successful outcome with that company.
So we had that going and then when I started Primal back in January of 23,
Marco joined me maybe a few months later
and he was very sort of new to programming and all that

(01:39:28):
but he got up to speed quickly
and he's one of the, you know, a crucial part of the member of the team.
So for context, Primal is currently seven full-time people.
So we have four senior developers, Marco, Paul, and myself.
So we're all full-time.

(01:39:49):
And my daughter, Emma, joined us this year kind of part-time
because she's still in school.
She still has one more year of university.
but she joined us and it's she she started kicking ass pretty quickly too
she was definitely extremely helpful during the conference in fact she kind of studied up ahead

(01:40:14):
of time to make sure she can you know answer questions and be competent enough to man the
booth and then uh we had this uh moment where you know during the three days uh the four of them
were manning the booth i wasn't at the booth that much i was running around mostly and then at one
point i came back and i just sat down and there was this guy who approached us and asked us kind

(01:40:41):
of the most basic question he looked at me he was like so what is nostor and i just looked at him i
I was just like, I went blank.
I didn't even know where to start.
And Emma was right next to me and she cut in
and she just took the question and she crushed it.
So she was quite happy with that.

(01:41:03):
So to answer your question, it's a major blessing
to have the opportunity to work with family,
especially on a project that's so potentially high impact, right?
Like we're building, we're helping build out this protocol, which we think is going to be an important thing for all of us.

(01:41:25):
So it's really good vibes on our team.
You know, we really are just like a family, essentially.
And after the big success we had in Prague, we all flew down to Serbia.
and the next day we drove to this mysterious mountain in the heart of Serbia

(01:41:48):
and we climbed it as a team.
We all got up at 1 a.m. and did the night climb
and reached the summit at sunset.
Sorry, sunrise.
And yeah, I mean, it's just incredibly good vibes all around on the team.

(01:42:08):
So we're very fortunate to be working on this project together.
I love it.
I'm thinking about it, man.
I mean, I saw, I mean, my son is a few years younger than Marco.

(01:42:30):
But interesting parallels there.
I mean, Milian, Marco was going to be a basketball player, right?
And then instead he said if anyone hasn met Marco he 7 I think or maybe closer to 8 right Milian
Marco is 205 centimeters, so that's like 6'9", something like that.

(01:42:55):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's go.
Love it.
Love it.

(01:43:21):
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So that was another one of those kind of Paul ideas that like he put together a really good pitch

(01:43:58):
that we couldn't say no. I mean like the hang bar at the booth was his idea as well and
i mean it's interesting because he knew how successful it's going to be he was just trust
me guys it's going to be ridiculous and it was uh so i think when it comes to primal and noster

(01:44:20):
it's such early days and it's appropriate to experiment right you try a bunch of different
things. You know, I like to say we're in the fuck around and find out stage, right? So when in doubt,
you know, whether we should do something or not, we usually err on the side of doing it, trying it.

(01:44:45):
So the idea behind the Primal House, as Paul probably explained, was to
get a place at a really nice location in Costa Rica that's very wholesome,
that's very primal on brand, right?
With, you know, in the jungle,

(01:45:05):
with access to good food,
clean air, you know, the ocean, all of that.
And invite content creators
without any strings attached,
just to hang out.
You know, our door was open
to a number of content creators.

(01:45:26):
and we didn't really ask for anything in return let's just hang out and what played out just
organically at the place was um they ended up talking a lot about you know open networks and
kind of empowering uh users like a lot of these content creators are quite familiar with

(01:45:48):
uh censorship right like they know based on what happened in the last five years
what they're allowed to talk about and what they're not allowed to talk about and these people are
are not are not they're not cool with the status quo so uh we didn't really have any
uh clear sort of deliberables or kind of um metrics of what would make this

(01:46:17):
initiative a success or not we just wanted to hang out with content creators who are
whose values are aligned with ours and see what happens and what happened was is we made friends
with a lot of people and i think when the time comes when we think you know um nostor and

(01:46:42):
Primal are
ready
in terms of
features and polish and kind of
ease of use when we're ready
for the mainstream
you know we have some friends
that we can call upon
and that's
basically the idea behind Primal House

(01:47:03):
and whoever hung out
I didn get to go unfortunately but Marco spent some time there and paul of course was hosting it and i met many people who uh ended up going there and it like everyone had a really good time
and we had some great brainstorms come out of that place uh so uh it was always going to be

(01:47:30):
like a limited amount of time i think we got it for something like three months
so that's basically that's basically it we may do it again we may do it at the same location we
may do it at a different location it's kind of when things align will react but we're not actively
pursuing anything

(01:47:51):
so no more primal house at least not for a while you seem you seem disappointed
hey exactly you better be ready to show up with your shirt off right and a straight face right

(01:48:12):
hey if that's the only good thing that comes out of it that's probably not bad
I think we're just going to keep doing what we've been doing for the past couple of years,

(01:48:37):
which is identify parts of the Nostra protocol, which we deem promising,
and build great experiences around those specs for users and for creators,
and stand up infrastructure that's reliable and kind of high performance,

(01:49:00):
so that the whole thing kind of comes together.
That in itself is quite a bit of work.
I don't think we need much more than that this time.
Our hands are full, let me tell you.

(01:49:26):
Yeah.
Thank you.

(01:49:49):
No, I think this was great.
Good conversation, Milian.
I was afraid that we'd covered everything we needed to cover when you were here last.
but I think we've gone even longer
than we did on that episode
there was a lot to talk about
so that was good
that was fun
oh and the

(01:50:14):
YouTube replacement let's not forget
it's gonna be
it's gonna be a hell of a couple of weeks
let me tell you
you've
also
Milian it won't be the
first mountain you'll have to

(01:50:36):
pull an all nighter
climbing up this month
nice
this is routine for us now
alright well appreciate
you guys stopping
by again Milian and
and sharing all of these exciting developments with us.

(01:50:58):
And we will continue watching with a lot of interest,
using, of course.
Looking forward to continue using Primal Studio,
loving what I've seen so far,
and can't wait to see what's in the hopper.
Thanks very much for having me, guys.
That was fun.

(01:51:22):
Goodbye.

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PCR121 - Wen And The Art of Nostr Cycle Maintenance with Miljan

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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;}PCR121 - Wen And The Art of Nostr Cycle Maintenance with Miljan