Derek Ross

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.

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.

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.

Banning Fable 5 Only Accelerated the Open-Weight Future

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Inkwell: A Writing App Born in Walmart

I built a Nostr blog publishing tool while waiting for new tires. When existing apps failed me, Shakespeare helped me solve my own problem for about $3.

Nostr Predictions for 2026: The Year Everything Clicks

2026 is the year Nostr clicks—“Other Stuff” goes mainstream, diVine brings in millions, Shakespeare turns conversations into apps, and NIP-17 finally fixes DMs. Zapstore and ngit mature for the open source ecosystem, and as Nostr gains wider attention, the focus shifts toward privacy-forward messaging—setting the stage for 2027 as the year of WhiteNoise and NIP-EE.