Fun milestone for Keydex today: I had my first successful restore of data. I was able to fire up several copies of the app and create a lockbox, break it into shares, distribute them to peers via Nostr, initiate recovery, approve the recovery request, and reassemble the data. There is still a ton of work to do but having the core flow working makes all the future changes feel small and incremental by comparison.

Keydex is going to be the first Nostr app I'm aware of that uses relays exclusively to relay data from one peer's device to another, not for long-term data storage. I'm going to use NIP-40 expiration tags on all events so that they only live on the relay for a few days, which makes Keydex closer to a peer-to-peer application that uses Nostr as the transport (and identity) layer.

Day 2 using Github's spec-kit for development did not go as well. The AI and I got lost trying to write reams of overly generic TDD test stubs. It felt like the AI couldn't really get a clear picture from just the spec requirements what it should be testing before the actual implementation code was written. So today I changed course and changed my constitution (the like underlying spec doc for the repo) to use an outside-in development approach instead of TDD and we made a lot of progress. I also got a new playwright MCP set up for browser automation and it's working a lot better than the last one I had. After some considerable setup the LLM was generally able to run the app in the web browser and click around to test its own changes.

"any kind of decentralized, democratic or liberal political structure thrives best when defense is easy, and suffers the most challenge when defense is hard - in those cases, the far more likely outcome is some period of war of all against all, and eventually an equilibrium of rule by the strongest." A good (but long) blog post on focusing our collective efforts on developing defensive technologies to slant the future away from dystopia.

d/acc: one year later

Thanks @npub1yl8j...vz34 for the link!

@Danie what tool are you using to cross post across Nostr, scuttlebutt, Mastodon, etc.? I have been using OpenVibe but it has been really buggy lately.

I'm thrilled to share that I'm receiving an OpenSats grant to work on social key backup and a new Nostr groups/communities app. I'll be building both in the open and this account will probably get filled up again with posts about that work. I think one of the primary things the world needs right now is to move our social sense-making out of big social media platforms and back into community spaces that reflect our values. I'm so blessed to have the opportunity to chip away at these social/digital problems for a while longer. My intention is always to build in solidarity with folks who need these tools most. If you're interested in using these sorts of tools and want to help - I'd love to do an interview with you! Send me a DM or reply to this note and I'll be in touch.