About Nostr, email and subscriptions

I check my emails like once or twice a week, always when I am looking for something specific in there.

Then I go there and I see a bunch of other stuff I had no idea I was missing. Even many things I wish I had seen before actually. And sometimes people just expect and assume I would have checked emails instantly as they arrived.

It’s so weird because I’m not making a point, I just don’t remember to open the damn “gmail.com” URL.

I remember some people were making some a Nostr service a while ago that sent a DM to people with Nostr articles inside – or some other forms of “subscription services on Nostr”. It makes no sense at all.

Pulling in DMs from relays is exactly the same process (actually slightly more convoluted) than pulling normal public events, so why would a service assume that “sending a DM” was more likely to reach the target subscriber when the target had explicitly subscribed to that topic or writer?

Maybe due to how some specific clients work that is true, but fundamentally it is a very broken assumption that comes from some fantastic past era in which emails were 100% always seen and there was no way for anyone to subscribe to someone else’s posts.

Building around such broken assumptions is the wrong approach. Instead we should be building new flows for subscribing to specific content from specific Nostr-native sources (creators directly or manual or automated curation providers, communities, relays etc), which is essentially what most clients are already doing anyway, but specifically Coracle’s new custom feeds come to mind now.

This also reminds me of the interviewer asking the Farcaster creator if Farcaster made “email addresses available to content creators” completely ignoring all the cryptography and nature of the protocol (Farcaster is shit, but at least they tried, and in this example you could imagine the interviewer asking the same thing about Nostr).

I imagine that if the interviewer had asked these people who were working (or suggesting) the Nostr DM subscription flow they would have answered: “no, you don’t get their email addresses, but you can send them uncensorable DMs!” – and that, again, is getting everything backwards.