February – April 2026

    OpenSats Grant Report: February 2026 – April 2026

    Rebuilt Ditto from scratch with MKStack and Shakespeare, launched a high-performance Nostr relay, shipped Shakespeare to Android, and built tools for activists.

    Summary

    This quarter, we focused on growing and improving our AI tools and systems, which empowered us to finally return to Ditto. We rebuilt Ditto from the ground up with MKStack and Shakespeare, incorporating everything we learned over the past year of working on Shakespeare to make a new version of Ditto that is better than ever. We also launched a new high-performance Nostr relay, shipped Shakespeare to Android, built tools for activists, and continued strengthening the core infrastructure that powers the Soapbox ecosystem.

    Ditto 2.0 — Complete Rewrite

    Ditto 2.0 is a complete rewrite of our Nostr social client, built from scratch starting February 16 using Shakespeare and MKStack. The vision: a social platform where fun requires freedom. It launched on March 26 as v2.0.0 and saw 26 releases in under two weeks, reaching v2.6.2 by April 8.

    • Custom Themes & Self-Expression — Full profile theming with color palettes, background images, fonts, and more. Users create and share themes, browse others' creations, and turn their profile into a personal canvas.
    • Infinite Content Types — Far more than text posts. Ditto supports 27+ content types: posts, articles, photos, short videos, livestreams, polls, music, podcasts, books, events, games, geocaching, Letters, Blobbi virtual pets, badges, nsites, and a world map.
    • Comment on Anything — Posts, URLs, profiles, hashtags, countries, books — if it exists on Nostr, you can discuss it.
    • Bridge to the Open Web — Ditto connects to Bluesky, Mastodon, and the entire Fediverse through the Mostr Bridge and Bridgy Fed. One account, three networks, zero lock-in.
    • Made for Hacking — Open source, builds to static files. Deploy on a $5 VPS, GitHub Pages, or a Raspberry Pi.
    • Run Apps Inside Ditto — Nsites and web apps run directly inside Ditto. Webxdc games launch in-app.
    • Social Discovery — Follow links and QR codes for one-tap follows. Shareable follow packs and follow sets. Badge system. Custom profile tabs.
    • Mobile-First Native Experience — iOS and Android support via Capacitor. Ditto is now live on Google Play and Zapstore.
    • Performance — React 18 to React 19 upgrade with roughly 50% initial bundle size reduction.

    Ditto Repository | Blog: Soapbox Launches Massive Update to Ditto

    Shakespeare Updates

    • Android App — Shipped a native Android app powered by Capacitor with deep links, splash screen, and signed release builds.
    • Nsite Decentralized Deployment — Added nsite deployment for decentralized hosting via Nostr.
    • App Publishing UI Redesign — Redesigned the App dialog with overlapping banner and avatar card layout.
    • New AI Tools — Added Blossom media upload tool, Nostr encode/decode tools, and image generation improvements with transparency support.

    Shakespeare Repository

    Ditto Relay

    We built and launched a new high-performance Nostr relay backed by OpenSearch, designed for horizontal scalability and advanced search.

    • NIP-50 Full-Text Search with rich extensions: filter by detected language, sentiment, media type, protocol origin, and sort by top/hot/controversial/rising/zaps.
    • Horizontally Scalable — Stateless design allows running multiple instances behind a load balancer sharing one OpenSearch cluster.
    • Replaceable Event History — Preserves version history of replaceable events, configurable per kind.
    • Off-Thread Analysis — Worker pool handles signature verification, language detection, sentiment analysis, and media detection off the main thread.

    Ditto Relay Repository

    Agora

    Agora is a censorship-resistant platform for activists, built with MKStack and Shakespeare at the Human Rights Foundation's AI Hack for Freedom hackathon, where it was named one of the winners.

    • Launched a Venezuela pilot in partnership with Leopoldo López and the World Liberty Congress.
    • Features country-specific feeds with organizer-led actions, Bitcoin bounties, a built-in self-custodial Lightning wallet, and Bluetooth mesh networking for internet shutdowns.
    • Supports 26 languages. Expanding in 2026 to Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, Cambodia, and Uganda.

    Core Infrastructure

    • Nostrify — Added NIP-42 AUTH auto-retry, client-initiated NIP-46 login, Web of Trust quorum support, and React 19 compatibility.
    • MKStack — Upgraded to React 19, Vite 8, and Zod v4. Added NIP-42 relay authentication and client-initiated NIP-46 login.
    • Mostr Bridge — Migrated from SQLite to PostgreSQL. Split cipher table into separate actors and objects tables.

    AI Tooling & Agent Ecosystem

    • Sheila — An AI agent that replaced our entire accounting flow. Reads invoices from email, sends payments in fiat and Bitcoin, tracks everything in spreadsheets.
    • Dirk — An AI project management and intelligence agent that sits across Soapbox's projects, people, and data.
    • AGENTS.md Standardization — Adopted a standardized AGENTS.md pattern across all repositories for consistent AI agent instructions.