Derek Ross

Kind 1 Replies Should Be Comments, Even Though It Breaks Things

Replies to Nostr notes are moving from kind 1 to NIP-22 kind 1111 comments. It breaks things, and the people pushing back have real points. I went through the specs, the client code and the relay data. It's still worth doing, as long as we do it deliberately.

Prince Was a Nostrich

In high school I mocked Prince for changing his name to a symbol. At Paisley Park last weekend I finally got it. Own your name. Own your work. Own your money. No gatekeepers. That's the Bitcoin ethos. That's the Nostr ethos. Prince would have been one of us.

Opal: Nostr in Your Omarchy Bar

There was no Nostr signer for the Linux desktop, so every app and script wanted my nsec. Opal is a small daemon and a gem in the Omarchy bar that keeps the key in the keyring, signs for apps under rules I set, and brings notifications and status along.

Carnelian: Publish to Nostr Straight from Omawrite

I write in Omawrite now. Carnelian adds a Publish to Nostr entry to the Omarchy Share menu that uploads my images to Blossom, signs the article through Opal, and sends it to my own relays. One key, one dialog, done.

Goodbye Dock: Retraining Twenty Years of Desktop Habit for Omarchy

Fundraising that can’t be deplatformed, now on any website

Agora campaigns can now live anywhere on the web. Pick a widget, preview it live, paste the code, and visitors donate Bitcoin without leaving your page. Here’s how.

Leave anytime. Take everything: how Ditto’s Import &amp

Your entire post history in one file you own, and one click to push it back to any relay. A walkthrough of Ditto's Import &amp

Why Bitcoin: The Base Layer of Freedom Tech

Two weeks in the Mediterranean, one question at every dinner table: why does a social media company need Bitcoin? The answer is about freedom, not price.

Self-hosted auto-moderation for Armada: meet Master-at-Arms

Armada Communities are serverless and end-to-end encrypted, so the relay can't moderate for you. Here is the bot we built to watch every message and act on spam in seconds, and how to run it yourself.

Leaving GitHub: A Decentralized Git Alternative on Nostr

GitHub is one company, one jurisdiction and one takedown notice away from your project being a 404. That is why we moved Armada off it and onto Nostr. Here is what actually replaced it, what it cost us, and why the daily loop is still just git push.

How to Self-host Armada: Open Source Discord Alternative

Armada communities already run without a host. Here is how to own the rest: the app you load, the relay your messages travel over, and the server your calls go through.

Buzz made me rethink how teams use agents

Block's new workspace put agents in the member list, and it clarified something we'd been stumbling toward for two years: agents should be themselves when they need to be themselves, and extensions of their humans when that's appropriate.