19: Romantically Shitting on Paywalls w/ Pablo — No Solutions

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

Pablo & Gigi take a walk. Recorded December 2025.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Projects & tech mentioned:

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

In this dialogue:

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

Related dialogues:

Recorded at 929,730.