Oddbean

At least we can say it's Proof of Work. They lead by putting in the hours to make the Nostr happen. So I'm fine with that. And also, because I have no obligation whatsoever to conforming to their ideas or opinions. I have said this many times here: anything "social media" is not a need. I can do without and simply turn it off if/when I stop liking it or I come to disagree with what's happening, like I did many (in internet terms) years ago now with FB, then with Twitter, long before the Nostr even existed. Both of which I was among the earliest adopters and a heavy user for years. When I start to see relay-level censhorship and "content moderation", or hardcoded into the clients, I will simply stop using it because those are absolute dealbreakers for me. Nothing dramatic, though.

Hmm I'm not convinced bots are the solution to anything lol but at least it's addressing the correct question imo. How about a bot that lets you make a bot of an account you want to see the content of? (Does / did anyone here even follow the top followed twitter accounts anyway? I doubt that it.)

The normie is a mythological creature. And/or even if they did exist, my guess is that they would probably never be here, even if you made Westworld theme park of twitter mirror bots to follow. Still think letting users here make bots of actual interesting people could work. It may be an injection of different topics / discussion starters. Although it might just end up a clone of b!tcoin twitter lolol. Oh dear we have 50000 Michael saylor bots. 🤔 I don't know, just my thoughts, it's worth doing as a project anyway.

Not to sound like a hipster lol, but I doubt they would be cloned, just going by your 'most big accounts' description. Erik Davis, Nick Land (lol), Nina Power ... Just a top 3 off the top of my head. Maybe they have been cloned ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

OK Outsideness apparently has 1 follower on fedi LOL @Outsideness. The other two I could force by following from a masto instance but yeah this is going to be a little impractical if the accounts you're thinking of aren't normie type accounts like Elon Musk LOL.

The feed for outsideness seems empty to me. Also I suppose a lot of the fun of that account is also the amusing reply guys. You realistically need a genuine ecosystem ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Mostr doesn’t deliver the post until someone does what exactly? Oh is this one of those things that has Ethan Hunt going since impossible expectation like disclosing the speaker because Egyptian, vodka and whispers are free speeches? Oh is this a random question? So exactly what is the expectation for the post to be delivered? Asking for an amigo

‘nother thing that friends have done. federated feeds were gabs best feature before selling out, however, difficult to find a justified squeeze connection here with federal postal services mail delivery. Care to explain?

There was/is quite many of those done via the RSS-bridges already but I never found them to work consistently. Either it was the nostr client changing the relay settings (removing the bridge relay) or something else happened (the bridge stopped updating). I collected some 50-100 on my following list in the spring but don’t have them anymore. A micro-bot / service where you could look for your favourite user with their handle (twitter/mastodon/bsky), website address or RSS-feed address might help in discovery and feed population, and add them if they don’t have a feed yet. This is the other way to do it on the client side: note1vlq9mu02glchlh9d7a6qv7tgy5gqvppk3r8lxlp0fc48d4er652q87llt3

Since you'll get more exposure: My complete onboarding solution pack would be: 1. Upon account creation, automatically follow 1500 random accounts. You can have a button in the client that says "Follow 1500 random people". Then, start curating your feed if you don't like what you got. 2. The most useful feature I found when I first got on: "FOLLOW ALL" button when checking Jack's follow account, and subsequent few accounts. In ten minutes I was following over 1700 people and had a populated, lively feed. 3. The aforementioned mirrors/bots 4. Automatic relay management, configurable later on as the user gets more knowledgeable. Stuff like asking people to pick tags when they create the account and whatnot, is not useful *yet* because the content simply does not exist. What's the point of me picking a bunch of tags that deeply interest me like "linguistics", "Catalonia", "seafood", "knives"... if there's nothing or nearly nothing about any of them -- yet? In the future, yes. But right now it's not worth wasting time on this. ------------- Even with all the above, we all know that the UX is, at best, wonky. In my opinion, it's just not normie-ready yet, and expecting to have "normal" UX retention rates is delusional. A shortlist, and I'm only talking about "social" clients: Devs haven't even sorted out a single common way to quote events. Some use "@", some "nostr:", some nothing... It's a shitshow, for being a "protocol". Embedded content display is not smooth and varies greatly between clients, especially video. The system to embed content is not coherent among clients. Clients not only don't talk to each other - they nuke each other. The fact that we advertise "one single account" for all apps. Yet, the simple act of logging on through another client may cause you to lose: 1. your follows list, 2. your relays, 3. your own fucking notes. Kind of bums people out... Right now I have to switch between Damus and Coracle to write this because the some notifications and notes are missing from each other. Search is terrible, when it even exists. Clients like Damus don't even try. The list of UX-related stuff is really very long, and I'm not one of those who bitch about silly shit like "oh, it doesn't scroll up and down smoothly". But in any case, as I said before, the main and most pressing problem is simply populating one's feed.

I don't know this sounds like it would make the problem worse to me tbh lol;) Oh wow I've followed 1500 people who all have b!tcoin tourettes. Will I start unfollowing 1400 people ofr will I just delete the app? 🤔

What if existing users had a section where they could list (or pick off a list) certain interests. People could scroll through that list to find people who like spelunking for example and get a list of spelunking enthusiasts that they could follow.

From my parent note: Stuff like asking people to pick tags when they create the account and whatnot, is not useful *yet* because the content simply does not exist. What's the point of me picking a bunch of tags that deeply interest me like "linguistics", "Catalonia", "seafood", "knives"... if there's nothing or nearly nothing about any of them -- yet? In the future, yes. But right now it's not worth wasting time on this.

I think clients like satellite .earth and Nostrudel etc, could be working within the realms of this problem. The reddit-style / topic focus rather than twitter-feed following account focus also potentially works. Following topics rather than people. No big names needed. Obviously you still need to attract people to talk about topics, but seems more plausible(?)

I dislike the idea of flooding nostr with mirrored content from X or other sites. If someone feels they need that content they can view it on the respective sites or try and purple pill that person so they share their content here.

Hmmm, how about the following take. We create alt accounts of popular accounts. We can see their content without opening any other platform. This could give already a user base to these accounts on nostr, making the switch easier. Usually the problem is social graph. If we rebuild without them, the switch will be easier. It is not this easy. But I just wanted to share a different purpose for mirroring content. Maybe bad idea.