It is hard to get an accurate sense of how big Nostr is by nature of the network. Looking at just what’s written doesn’t tell us the whole story. We can see ‘writes’ in the various nostr statistics sites like https://stats.nostr.band/

That shows us having about 10k daily active users. But in this case a daily active user is somebody who has a positive trust rank and  publishes something. 

Nostr.band estimates there are 350k users on Nostr. While Primal.net/explore puts the number at 660k. In both cases they’re looking at users who’ve got a trust rank and verified user. Users who are just lurking will never show up in those numbers.

Show how many people are really on nostr? The question is worth asking, because many people are looking at emerging social media platforms trying to pick which one to use. Size and engagement are concrete numbers which help people decide. Should they use these numbers this way, no, but it’s a thing. 

There’s the 1% rule of thumb for social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule It says that 1% of the users will be the creators, 9% are creators or curators, they reply but don’t generate original content, and 90% of people are passive consumers. In the real world, those numbers aren’t right, as every platform has different levels of engagement. What is useful to remember is the general ratios. 

With Bluesky we know more about the ecosystem than we do with nostr, due to the architecture of their system.  You can see the stats for yourself here: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats It shows us there are currently 2.5 million registered accounts, of which only half have posted a single skeet (note). We don’t know how many are spam or fake accounts. When bluesky had 500k users, I was told by a team member that their DAU’s were between 1k and 2k. They’re clearly getting a lot more use per user today as they’ve got about 130k unique users posting per day, 90k new followers, and 200k people liking a post. So my guess is their actual DAU is somewhere between 250k and 500k. This is a huge shift, where they’re getting much more engagement per user today than they were 6 months ago. 

My guess is that we’ve got between 25k and 75k actual DAU’s on Nostr. I’ve got to get some breakfast and focus on building nos, but those numbers should get people started.