For the past few weeks I’ve explored the Fediverse and Nostr. I began writing a long post about these decentralized social networks and discovered something big was announced. I’m writing this short post to explain the significance.
screenshot from SoapBox web app hosted at dline.xyz
The OpenSats grant is sort of the equivalent of having a Hive DHF proposal approved to fund the development of the Ecency front end.
Trump's organization employed Alex Gleason as the Head of Engineering for Truth Social. He has decided to step down in order to focus on a new project. He received a grant to build out an open source Nostr client, called Ditto.
Ditto is likely to use components of Gleason’s previous project, SoapBox. That software is an open source web client that acts as a front end for the Fediverse, and an alternative to the well known Mastodon app.
Gleason also developed a project called Mostr, which is a relay that bridges the Fediverse network to the Nostr network. It makes it so that Nostr content is visible to the Fediverse. This Mostr project is controversial because many Fediverse residents hate crypto and Nostr is where all Bitcoin maximalists hang out.
It seems like Ditto is the next evolution of and a combination of SoapBox and Mostr, both developed by Gleason. The Ditto software will be a front end for the Nostr network, that can be deployed by anyone on their own server. Very similar to Ecency, which is an open source Hive front-end that can be deployed and configured for break-away text community sites.
I think the OpenSats grant is very interesting and we should keep an eye on other projects being funded. There are some good ideas we could learn from and incorporate into Hive software. There is VC funding pouring into Lightning Network and Nostr development, which is not the case for Hive. Our Hive community could piggyback on that momentum as we have some similar ideals within our communities i.e. decentralization, censorship resistance.
I will continue monitoring that space and looking for opportunities.
What do you think?
cc: @steevc
