• David King’s earlier Highlighter found traction in author-and-reader rooms, but its broader feature set did not.
• My Nostr version repeated the same scope-creep pattern across extraction, subscriptions, chat, and publishing.
• Repeated rebuilds and forgotten features made the breadth of the problem obvious.
• The 2026 restart begins with one narrow unit: an invite-only NIP-29 group around a book.
• It uses standard, portable events: NIP-84 highlights, NIP-73 references, and kind:11 threads.
• The implementation uses one NMP Rust core with thin native and web clients.
• The operating rule is to remove and simplify before adding more surface area.