The unglamorous work
Two years of running the room, and nobody clapped
Car spent Saturday explaining why they stopped trying to build a Nostr developer community — and what Matthew 10:14 has to do with it.
The most-argued proposition on this network yesterday was not about money or protocol design. It was about who does the boring part, and whether anybody notices. Car opened with a claim and then, unusually, paid for it with an accounting.
I believe atp the only way people really adopt new technology is through community work and actually building hubs around it.
The accounting: NostrDevs, run in Austin for two years straight from the end of 2022 — a place for developers to learn, build and meet each other — plus a Nostr development course put on Udemy and a pile of resources meant to make it easier for whoever came next. It was entirely self funded and really was a group effort between developers and plebs alike.
What did not happen is the part they wanted to talk about. What was always strange to me was how little of that community work was amplified by the wider Nostr ecosystem at the time.
A repost, they suggest, would have been enough to put it in front of one more developer. It mostly did not come. After a while though, it becomes defeating to keep pouring resources into something that the people around it do not seem particularly interested in helping carry forward.
What lifts this above a complaint is where it lands. Car reads the verse in Matthew where Jesus tells the disciples to shake the dust from their feet at a town that will not receive them, and takes from it something other than grievance.
Sometimes you did the work you were supposed to do, gave what you could give, and then you have to recognize when it is time to move on and put that energy somewhere it can actually bear fruit.
Their conclusion on the two years: Not everything you are capable of building is something you are supposed to keep carrying forever.
The energy now goes to PlebLab, the hackerspace in Austin.
Pushed back on later — that Nostr should not have one centre — they conceded the point and kept the argument: decentralized ecosystems still need local hubs and people willing to do the unglamorous community work
. Both things, they said, can be true at once.
