Oddbean

I take a completely different view. Nothing is inevitable, not even nostr. Every project wants to grow 10x. But not every project can grow 10x, maybe only 1 in 5 can, maybe less. Which means 4 in 5 dont make it. So the odds are against. Our rivals have gone 10x in the time we have gone sideways. Instead of complacency we should learn. We can load the dice in our favour by trying to get as much as possible right. But it's all good. The next level of nostr might not be as fun as this level, and there will be nostalgia for what was before. Rather than better, it will be different. So enjoy each phase of the journey, try to lean towards the good, and give ourselves the best chance in what is a big challenge, but one that is worth trying.

Are they really rivals to Nostr tho? I guess the answer differs based on what you want to use Nostr for. Personally, I don't see either of them offering foundational building blocks for the new Internet. IMHO, only Nostr provides self-sovereign cryptographic identities, web of trust, communication layer, and persistence layer - all of which are truly open and permissionless. That's why I think that Nostr is inevitable.

They would claim the same things of their stack, with some reasonable validity. I was doing single sign-on with PKI on the ActivityPub stack in 2007 (which extends to the whole semantic web, solid, DIDs, FOAF etc.). Each system has trade-offs. But I agree nostr has a special combination, particularly, payments. Ultimately turing complete is turing complete. All the stacks will end up as turing complete. Identity is not sigular it's a key ring of relations. Some are further ahead on this than others. Some have politics and so on. Like you, I'm very bullish on nostr use cases, as a form of advanced innovation. However, other stacks have gone 10x in user base, which unlocks other things such as sustainability etc. though perhaps with added politics.

I realize that in theory similar things can be claimed, but do you see large numbers of users actually holding their keys on these networks? If not, then we are talking about different types of networks imo. Also, what's your take on the diversity of apps being built on the competing networks? On Nostr, we have just about every imaginable app type being built or at least attempted. I find this to be insanely bullish for Nostr.

For holding keys you'd need to look at IPFS + shitcoins + DID stack. Though DID is creeping in to alot of places. Tons of apps there, but I consider that proprietary. Yet there is still innovation. When you see games get to 10 million users in a month on other platforms, you realize that nostr as big competition. You can make the argument it's apples and oranges, but there is an intersection. Nostr has legit competition in social, and legit competition in payments. We of course know it's proprietary shitcoins, but the users dont. IPFS and protocol labs have their feet in both areas with investments in activitypub projects, bluesky and also their own premined tokens. Even just looking at the old Luna project that went bust, had a very impressive set of apps. I dont think nostr has every imaginable app. There are few social games (e.g. words with friends), few prediction markets, few smart contracts, few market based apps. Lots of good twitter clients, blog clients, zap stream is great, torrents. But we've not replaced reddit, facebook, netflix, google, dont have cutting edge AI (ok maybe openagents). There's not a really good chat app that competes with whatsapp/telegram which quickly goes to millions of users. Unclear how far the infrastructure can go. There is legit competition on all fronts, nostr is a niche space with high R&D, but plenty of folks doing lots of stuff out there. Will be fun to see how it evolves. What is true is that nostr is in the 1000s of users, and competitors are in the millions of users.

Nostr is the protocol, the base project that sits under a lot of smaller projects. I'd guess that at least 2/3 of the nostr projects have already failed. Some barely even brought a client to market before being wound up or fading into obscurity. The most popular projects are smashing it by iterating & building on top of their successes. New projects for other use-cases are constantly sprouting up & fizzling out. Only the best survive, but the protocol remains & your npub allows you to play in them all with very little cost. The protocol & the idea is more resilient than the apps that are built on top to interact with it. Nostr is inevitable, what's uncertain is how we'll all use it.

You think there is little cost, but that is because the costs are hidden from you. The relay network is neglected and shrinking, and along with it, censorship resistance. The issue with nostr, in fact with any social netowork, according to research, is that after some time there is a tendancy to free ride. After that kicks in, cooperation decreases and there is a force to reduce. Nostr is not inevitable. It's rivals have grown 10x in the same time nostr has gone sideways, and the relay structure slowly dying. It's a double loss, because you lose the relay, and you also lose a talented developer that might have helped the project. In fact the cost of developer time is more than the cost of supporting the relays. The problem with nostr is that the relays were intentionally starved of support, with the comment, "we dont need more relays". Which is sad.