Writing

    The Blog

    In-depth articles and long-form content about the Nostr protocol, decentralization, and the future of digital communication.

    Fundraising that can’t be deplatformed, now on any website
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Sep 11, 2026
    Article

    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.

    4 min read
    !Cover Crowdfunding platforms remove campaigns all the time. Sometimes it’s fraud enforcement. Sometimes it’s a government request, a payment processor’s policy, a journalist’s phone call, or a Terms of Service paragraph nobody read. If your cause is politically inconvenient, your fundraiser’s lifes...
    Leave anytime. Take everything: how Ditto’s Import &amp
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Sep 8, 2026
    Article

    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

    5 min read
    !Cover On Big Tech platforms, exporting your data is designed to be unpleasant. You click the button, wait days for an email, and receive a zip file of JSON you can’t do much with. The friction is intentional. A platform that’s easy to leave has to keep earning you. Lock-in is a feature, for them. D...
    Why Bitcoin: The Base Layer of Freedom Tech
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Sep 1, 2026
    Article

    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.

    9 min read
    !Cover I just spent two weeks on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean with my wife, from Barcelona to Rome. Sicily, Athens, Santorini, Ephesus, Mykonos, Olympia along the way. If you've never done a cruise, here's the deal: you sit at dinner with strangers every night, and sooner or later the conversa...
    Self-hosted auto-moderation for Armada: meet Master-at-Arms
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Aug 2, 2026
    Article

    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.

    13 min read
    !Cover 🛡️ Moderation 🚢 Armada ⚡ Nostr 🔐 E2EE 🔧 Self-hosting 🧭 What is in this post Moderation is the part nobody builds for you2. Why a bot is the only honest answer3. How it works4. How to self-host it How to configure it6. How to use it7. Demonstrations8. Current known limitations Moderation...
    Leaving GitHub: A Decentralized Git Alternative on Nostr
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Jul 30, 2026
    Article

    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.

    34 min read
    !Cover 🐙 GitHub ⚡ Nostr 🔀 Git 🚢 Armada 🔧 Self-hosting 🧭 What is in this post The case against GitHub2. What replaces it3. How it actually works4. What Buzz adds Reading a repository inside Armada6. Moving your project7. Now is the time to do this The case against GitHub On July 23, India's Cybe...
    How to Self-host Armada: Open Source Discord Alternative
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Jul 30, 2026
    Article

    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.

    12 min read
    !Cover I have been running a homelab since the early 2000s. Twenty years of hosting my own infrastructure at home: media servers, document servers, backups, whatever else I did not want living on someone else's box. Not because any of it was the convenient option. Because when someone else runs the...
    Buzz made me rethink how teams use agents
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Jul 23, 2026
    Article

    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.

    11 min read
    !Cover The internet spent the last few days buzzing about Buzz, Block's open source answer to Slack, where AI agents sit in the member list alongside the humans. The launch is making me rethink how we use agents at Soapbox. Not because working with agents is new to us. Because it isn't. We've been d...
    Building an Armada: Our Voyage to Encrypted Communities on Nostr
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Jul 14, 2026
    Article

    Building an Armada: Our Voyage to Encrypted Communities on Nostr

    NIP-04, NIP-17, NIP-29, Marmot, and now Concord. A personal account of every wall we hit trying to build encrypted communities on Nostr, and why we kept going.

    17 min read
    !Cover If you've followed my work on Nostr for any length of time, you know I don't usually lead with the hard parts. I'm the guy on stage telling you why this protocol is going to change everything. I believe that. But I want to tell a different kind of story here, the one about how many times we h...
    How Soapbox Ships So Fast: Our Stack, Our Tools, Our Workflow
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Jul 8, 2026
    Article

    How Soapbox Ships So Fast: Our Stack, Our Tools, Our Workflow

    People keep asking how a small team ships so many Nostr apps so fast. The honest answer: there's no secret. It's all open source, and it's all in our Toolbox. Here's the whole playbook.

    9 min read
    I got on a call last week with a friend in the Nostr ecosystem, a seasoned developer who's shipped real things and now leads engineering at a Nostr company. We weren't there to talk features or partnerships. We got to talking about one thing: How do you ship so much, so fast, all at once? How does a...
    Banning Fable 5 Only Accelerated the Open-Weight Future
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Jul 1, 2026
    Article

    Banning Fable 5 Only Accelerated the Open-Weight Future

    2 min read
    On June 9, 2026, Anthropic launched Fable 5, a Mythos-class model so capable at code analysis and vulnerability discovery that it immediately topped every leaderboard. Within days, the US government forced Anthropic to pull it offline entirely. Not Anthropic's choice: an export-control directive, tr...
    How to Disappear From the Surveillance Internet
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Jun 16, 2026
    Article

    How to Disappear From the Surveillance Internet

    The UK's under-16 social media ban means age-checks for everyone. Here's how to opt out with Nostr, Bitcoin, NostrVPN &amp

    14 min read
    The UK just decided that being online should require showing your papers. Here's how to opt out — with tools that already exist, that nobody can revoke, and that you can run for the price of a coffee. On June 15, 2026, the UK government announced it would ban social media for everyone under 16. TikT...
    Building Zuka: A Voice That Can't Be Killed
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    May 12, 2026
    Article

    Building Zuka: A Voice That Can't Be Killed

    We built an AI persona platform for activists in 48 hours at HRF's second AI Hack for Freedom. It protects the humans behind the voice — and makes the voice impossible to silence.

    9 min read
    !Cover We built an AI persona platform for activists in 48 hours. Three days before the hackathon, a Rwandan YouTuber with 60,000 followers died in custody on the day he was reportedly supposed to be released. By Sunday, we had a working prototype that hides the human behind the voice — so the regim...
    Soapbox at Bitcoin 2026: Nostr Became Infrastructure
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    May 4, 2026
    Article

    Soapbox at Bitcoin 2026: Nostr Became Infrastructure

    How Bitcoin Conference Week 2026 played out for Soapbox: five panels, NosVegas 2.0, V4V music payouts, and Nostr finally landing as infrastructure.

    31 min read
    !Cover Every year, Bitcoin Conference Week gets bigger. This year, something shifted. Nostr wasn't a side-quest anymore — it was in the room, on the stages, and in the conversations happening between every panel. Freedom tech finally moved from niche pitch to accepted premise, and Soapbox was in the...
    The Chameleon Method: Three Skills That Future-Proof You in the Age of AI
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Apr 7, 2026
    Article

    The Chameleon Method: Three Skills That Future-Proof You in the Age of AI

    The three C's: Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication, are durable in a way that technical skills aren't. They transfer across tools, industries, roles, and eras. They're what made humans valuable before AI, and they're what will make humans valuable after AI becomes ubiquitous.

    8 min read
    Everyone's asking the wrong question about AI. "Will AI take my job?" "Should I learn to code?" "Is my degree worthless now?" These are fear questions. They come from a place of paralysis. And paralysis is the one thing that will actually make you irrelevant. The right question is simpler: what make...
    Small Business Owners Don't Fear AI -- They're Hungry for It
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Feb 26, 2026
    Article

    Small Business Owners Don't Fear AI -- They're Hungry for It

    What I learned teaching a two-part AI seminar to local entrepreneurs.

    8 min read
    Over two sessions in February, I taught a group of local business owners about artificial intelligence -- first the fundamentals, then hands-on building. These weren't developers or tech workers. They were contractors, accountants, real estate agents, landscapers, shop owners. People who run busines...
    Coding Doesn't Die. It Evolves.
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Feb 12, 2026
    Article

    Coding Doesn't Die. It Evolves.

    Elon Musk says coding dies by December. He's right about the direction. He's wrong about the conclusion. The future belongs to people who can think.

    6 min read
    !Cover Elon Musk thinks coding dies this year. Not evolves. Dies. "I think by the end of this year you don't even bother doing coding. The AI will just create the binary directly. And the AI can create a much more efficient binary than can be done by any compiler." No source code. No compilation. No...
    Vibe Coding at One: From Meme to Movement
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Feb 2, 2026
    Article

    Vibe Coding at One: From Meme to Movement

    One year ago, Andrej Karpathy coined 'vibe coding.' It became a dictionary word. At Soapbox, we've spent that year building the tools to make it work—not just for throwaway projects, but for real applications that matter.

    8 min read
    !Cover February 2, 2025. Andrej Karpathy fires off a tweet that would define the year: "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,' where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." "I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff,...
    Building Onyx: Why I'm Creating an Open Source Alternative to Big Tech's AI Productivity Tools
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Jan 24, 2026
    Article

    Building Onyx: Why I'm Creating an Open Source Alternative to Big Tech's AI Productivity Tools

    Big Tech wants to lock your productivity into their AI platforms and mine your data. I'm building the alternative. Onyx: encrypted notes, Nostr sync, open source, AI skills library. Your data stays yours.

    6 min read
    Building Onyx: Why I'm Creating an Open Source Alternative to Big Tech's AI Productivity Tools Hello all! I started a new career path at the beginning of this year and immediately felt the need for an AI-powered productivity tool to help manage my daily workflow—an executive assistant of sorts for t...
    Building Pathos: From Hackathon to Real-World Activism
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Jan 23, 2026
    Article

    Building Pathos: From Hackathon to Real-World Activism

    We built a censorship-resistant platform for activists in 48 hours. Within hours, Venezuelan activists were using it to organize against authoritarianism.

    6 min read
    !Cover Last weekend, four of us from Soapbox - Alex, MK, Chad, and myself - flew to Austin for the AI Hack for Freedom hackathon at Bitcoin Park. We were joined by two external collaborators: Hzrd149, creator of popular Nostr projects like Nostrudel, Applesauce, and Blossom, and Elsat from the Damus...
    AI-First Development on Mobile: Shakespeare Changes the Game
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Dec 15, 2025
    Article

    AI-First Development on Mobile: Shakespeare Changes the Game

    Unlike dedicated mobile coding apps that have failed to gain traction, Shakespeare is a Progressive Web App that delivers a full development experience on mobile with Nostr Git sync.

    5 min read
    AI-First Development on Mobile: Shakespeare Changes the Game If you've tried using AI to build apps on your phone, you've probably been disappointed. A recent TechCrunch report found that dedicated mobile apps for vibe coding have largely failed to gain traction: "Despite the massive success of vibe...
    Announcing the Shakespeare Community: Connect and Learn
    Derek Ross
    Derek Ross
    Dec 10, 2025
    Article

    Announcing the Shakespeare Community: Connect and Learn

    Join the Shakespeare Community to connect with builders, attend workshops and events, become an ambassador, and get help with your AI-powered web development projects.

    4 min read
    !Cover Shakespeare Community Events Building websites with AI is better when you're not doing it alone. Today we're excited to announce the Shakespeare Community — a place to connect with builders, get help with your projects, and be part of the future of AI-powered web development. Join Shakespeare...