Minds.com is one of the original approaches to building a social networking service that seeks to empower users with more freedom (e.g., free speech, portable identities, etc.). Beginning over 10 years ago they’ve evolved the service to play a role in the modern architecture we’re exploring with Nostr. After Bill’s recent appearance talking about Nostr on Joe Rogan’s podcast we got a chance to dig deeper on the key philosophical and technical principles behind their work and how they think about Nostr. We were also lucky to include Mark Harding who is CTO of Minds.
0:00 Opener
0:42 DK intro to convo
1:34 Minds - philosophy and exploration of nostr and other open source projects
4:04 What’s important when evaluating open source technologies?
4:20 3 Pillars: Sovereign Identities, Interoperability, Portability
6:45 Minds history with various technology approaches
9:42 adapting centralized approaches to decentralized technologies
19:00 why email signup is needed for spam prevention
24:28 will there be “one ring to rule them all”?
28:39 web5, Dorsey
30:27 schema-first approach
32:34 AT-protocol
35:12 fiatjaf’s feat of magic
36:37 a possible Minds fit in the nostr world
38:27 Verified Credentials
42:23 NFTs, token-gated community
44:22 making money on Minds
50:00 Minds business/community funding/advertising
56:30 Some final thoughts on interoperability and portability
57:12 Collaborate with Minds! https://gitlab.com/minds
Nostr Talks: Bill Ottman and Mark Harding on building Minds.com