The truth is you aren't a product in either.
Users aren't products and they aren't entirely analogous to products either.
That said, paying customers on platforms like Twitter, GitHub etc… are there primarily because of the network effect. This is to say, they are there because many other people are there. What they are actually paying for is (access to) every other user.
This is why a smart strategy on these platforms is to have a large amount (the majority) of non-paying users. It's not just that some of them could pay in the future. It's that paying users are there primarily because of the non-paying ones.
This is true for Nostr paid relays too, and for other services which connect to Nostr, with the difference that you can attract paying users even if you never actually use any service that they use. For example, even if you only use free relays, as I do, you may still indirectly help paid relays to grow.
That said, on Nostr you can hide your identity rather well, if you wish, by choosing what information to associate with your account and by hiding your IP address to relays. You have a finer control than if you're using proprietary apps.
Are you of the stance that user data isn't sold? Or are you just pointing out that users are not the product, but their data is?
Paid users and monetized users are off-topic here.
You can hide your IP on any platform. At least we agree that hiding your identity has nothing to do with the protocol.
Personal data is by no means the only thing that makes users valuable for a platform.
The mere fact that they are there, that they watch ads and that they interact with other users (a small percentage of whom will pay as a result) would be of great economical value on its own.
> Paid users and monetized users are off-topic here.
The claim that "users are the product" is the closest to being true when we consider the main business model of these platforms: ads.
Advertisers aren't buying data, per se. Data can be use to target ads. But even if it weren't, the only reason advertisers join the platform is because many users, most of which are not paying, are there.
There isn't a product, there is a service. And the service is the ad space. But the (usually non-paying) user is the only thing that makes that space valuable to begin with.
And this stands true for other paid features that have nothing to do with advertisements.
> You can hide your IP on any platform. At least we agree that hiding your identity has nothing to do with the protocol.
Your IP is effectively the only thing you share by default if you use Nostr.
Do you know what you are sharing if you are using a proprietary app which connects to mainstream media?
How? You can only trust their claims. Your knowledge on this is no stronger than their honesty.
If you use Nostr you don't need to share anything which you aren't specifically trying to share, except your IP. You can more easily verify exactly what you are sharing.
The protocol is important because the fact that the protocol is open and simple is what allows you to use any client of your choice or even write your own.
I never claimed that it was "the only thing that makes users valuable".
You keep making strawman arguements, which is distasteful and disrespectful.
The OP never said that "being the product" had anything to do with privacy. It doesn't have to be about personal data, that was your own strawman. What social media platforms "sell" is, mainly, interactions.
Also, and I repeat this, you don't know what personal data you share when using a proprietary app. If you use Nostr, you know exactly what you are sharing.
You have no clue what data a proprietary app will share. It may have all sorts of identifiers. You don't have the source code. You don't know.
So even when it comes to personal data, Nostr is widely different.
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