Episode
149 – The Bat Signal Virus: Ridestr and Drivestr with Stirling Forge
- Podcast
- Plebchain Radio
- Published
- Feb 6, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 6229
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/plebchain-radio-6414268/episodes/149-the-bat-signal-virus-ridestr-and-drivestr-with-stirling-forge/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/plebchain-radio-6414268/149-the-bat-signal-virus-ridestr-and-drivestr-with-stirling-forge.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
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)