This seminar project established the foundations for studying Community-Driven Variability (CDV), an emerging variability paradigm that departs from classical variability-intensive systems. Nostr, a decentralized messaging ecosystem, exemplifies this paradigm and features a highly diverse landscape of independently developed software variants that offer different capabilities yet still interoperate across heterogeneous technologies. To enable large-scale CDV investigation in Nostr, we built an analytics platform integrating a custom relay implementation, along-term data harvesting pipeline, and an analysis toolchain. First observations revealed irregularities in relay advertisements and feature specification conformance, underscoring the complexity of CDV-exhibiting ecosystems.
Michel J. Kaiser (Thu,) studied this question.