149 – The Bat Signal Virus: Ridestr and Drivestr with Stirling Forge

In this episode, Avi talks with Stirling Forge about building a decentralized rideshare alternative on Nostr, sparked by the brutal economics of driving for Uber and Lyft today.

Stirling shares his background: former weather forecaster turned rideshare driver who stacked sats hard when payouts were better, then watched driver take-home shrink dramatically in recent years (with platforms extracting a much bigger share).

From there, the episode dives into his open-source project: Ridestr (rider) and Drivestr (driver), a peer-to-peer rideshare flow that uses Nostr as the communication layer, does routing and fare calculation locally on-device, and aims to keep privacy tighter (drivers share approximate location; riders avoid broadcasting location by default).

A big chunk is the “how does this not die to network effects?” question, and Stirling’s answer is the episode’s secret sauce: Road Flare, a “bat-signal” mode for repeat rides. Riders scan a driver QR once, save them to a favorites list, and later ping their personal micro-network of trusted drivers first, reducing signup friction and sidestepping the classic chicken-and-egg problem.

Links

• Stirling on nostr
• Ridestr Video 1 | Ridestr Video 2
• Ridestr GitHub page
• Avi's New Book – July 18
• Finding Home Episode 3 – Paraguay [IndeeHub Code: PIONEER21 ]
• Avi's First Book – 24 (2nd Edition)