Oddbean

For startup founders X is actually a good place to be for initial customer acquisition. It’s one of the reasons people will put up with a lot of abuse without leaving. It’s easier to get customers on those platforms than something like running ads. They go where the prospective customer hangs out - a lot of times it software for developers for example. Some people stay to hustle for the network and not necessarily the customer. The connections they form there can open up doors. Others go to LinkedIn because that’s where a lot of business happens. I’ve seen solo founder companies go from nothing to hundreds of millions in revenue just from spending a lot of their time on LinkedIn. Some also start on X and then move to LinkedIn. It all depends on what type of product you sell. Of course, those platforms are much bigger than one type of user, but I imagine everyone is trying to monetize their audience somehow. The common way to do that is to guide your followers from the earned marketing channel (x, LinkedIn; YouTube etc..) to owned (mailing list, community, groups etc..) most people know that when you rely on other’s platform, you’re at their mercy. But when you own the connection to your audience, nobody can take that away. This is why you see so much funneling happening, self promotion, shilling to get people away from the rented platforms to their own marketing channels. It’s just how the game is played. The thing with nostr though, is that you own the relationship without needing to funnel people to your own marketing channels. As long as people are following you, that’ll remain the case if you’re de-cliented. 😉 the only piece that’s missing is being able to reach people on demand with a high “delivery rate”. On rented platforms your reach is limited by timing of the post and by the algo. On nostr, if we have no algo, your piece of content is limited by timing. Only the people who are online at that time, and maybe later if you trend, will see your note. If we had a way to get 100% delivery (ie notification and a dedicated place to check if subscribed), that would complete the owned channel so to speak. You’d be able to reach everyone who wants your updates (beyond standard notes) and that’s pretty powerful in the eyes of people who create content and rely on the funneling described earlier. I am curious to see how things develop and what sorts of mechanisms we can create to empower creators and how we can make sure nostr makers don’t need to shill 24/7. / end random thought 💭

Not if you run your own instance. Which anyone can do for just a few dollars a month. When Bluesky is fully up and running and allowing people to run their own instances there then it would function more like Nostr than the fediverse from what I understand.

When there was an exodus to Mastodon, all the techie people I knew were confused af about which mastodon server to join. I don’t think anyone even thought of running their own. Take a step back to non-techie people and you’ll have few to none running their own instance. You don’t have this problem on nostr. I’m leaving blue sky out because I just don’t know much about it or what it aims to become.

Oh for sure, I don’t expect non-techie people to run their own instances for just personal accounts. And sure, you can get banned if you don’t follow the instance rules. But again, if you can use Google then you can find a handful of services that will stand up a server for you within a few minutes if you pay a few dollars. But yeah, that’s still an issue. Nostr doesn’t have that issue, but has plenty of others, especially for non-techie people. I’ve been in IT for over a decade now and I have worked with plenty of people you’d call techie that don’t have a clue about public/private keypairs. And the relays are confusing for newbies. Understanding what they are exactly, how many should you have, and which ones should you use. Discoverability is also very difficult on Nostr from my experience. It can be difficult to find who to follow if you aren’t a Bitcoin fanatic. So from my experiences, it’s been easier for the normal person to adopt something like the Fediverse or Bluesky than Nostr. The average person also likely isn’t worried about getting banned, so that isn’t as big of a draw to them. *All opinions above are my own and likely to be incorrect to the majority of Nostr users today*

What you are saying is Nostr somehow ends up as the bottom of the funnel... But that can't be the case, there's always a sale or upsale to shill. Otoh if many influencers just get zapped directly on nostr without needing to sell anything else then maybe at least shilling becomes more like good content. If v4v worked (which I doubt), then we would have less shilling.

There’s one less step on nostr if you have a mechanism to reach everyone async. You don’t need to get anyone to sign up to a mailing list for example, or to leave nostr to join a private community.

I think the major issue with all top of funnel comms, except maybe email, is that all margins of creators are squeezed away by the platform over time. Maybe that's a more direct reason shilling efforts are constantly rising, attempting to compensate for reducing roi on all channels. Nostr indeed could fix this.

I say it slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I do believe it, which is why @shopstr is being built for Nostr, on Nostr. It’s nice to have X or LinkedIn as options to communicate with people not aware of the ecosystem and gauge interest, but our customers are here.