Oddbean

I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that bootstrapping network effects is hard. When someone says Nostr is too small, or they view it only as social media, part of what they are implicitly saying is that its network effect is not sufficiently scaled to be of interest to them, which in a busy person's life is reasonably valid. So then it depends on the builders to make a product so interesting to them that it breaks through and solves one of their problems in a way they can't ignore. nostr:note1x32huhztvd5cfpuq95n4v6dr6yjrfr6l2ufx97xvpn45hnnwyvsqlqsj7u

💯 This is why I believe that Fountain, Wavlake, and Tunestr/Zap.stream are proving to be so useful. They have a stickiness for their target demographic. Musicians, and I imagine podcasters too, generally already wanted sovereignty over their content and audience and the ability to monetize. Nostr, via those apps, allows them to do just that.

One could say the same about Bitcoin a while ago. Before the network effect kicked in, the low liquidity and high volatility was a deal breaker for a lot of people. However, it comes a time when you realize that your currency is being debased and that you are losing purchasing power, so you join the Bitcoin network. Than you see that you NEED Bitcoin (remember Saif’s gunpowder analogy). Likewise, when you notice your freedom of speech and ownership of your own data is being taken you join nostr. The timeframe will be different for each person (to me it took X being banned in Brazil to join nostr, even though I knew about nostr long before that happened). But the point is that each freedom tech must be useful for a person before they embrace it.

My friend find the idea interesting but Nostr doesn't have content for them (not yet), specially since they speak French. That said, the auto-translate option is very convenient. Maybe it's not yet ready to get too much new users too early. Maybe Nostr needs to keep developing and maintain a slow but steady growth. I'm pretty sure all the censorship that we see will be a good selling point for Nostr over time.