Oddbean

I told someone who absolutely hates cryptocurrency (and banks, oddly) about getting tipped a few bucks for posting about a problem with a site not working with Tor. She jokingly called me an influencer since I got paid for posting on social media, and influenced the website owner to look into the issue, so I conceded. I'm a social media influencer now. 🤣 Anyway, she's going to check it out, so I guess my point is that some of us are getting new people on here. People with radically different opinions. If the new people don't stay, then at a minimum it's evidence that the tools for filtering out the bullshit and assholes need improvement. At worst, it means the only people attracted to open protocols are unhappy people who just want to 💩 on everyone to try to make themselves feel better. Either way, this is independent of whether other social networks are any good.

Regarding the lack of content diversity. Couldn't this just be a factor of you not following enough people? Since there are not algorithms to speak of I have found that you have to follow a lot more to find different content, and then curate.

It is fair to say that these isn't that much diversity. I see a lot of anti-state memes, pro-bitcoin memes, nostr dev talk, etc. But I feel that this is normal, because that's what the people on here care about. How do you encourage people to talk about their other interests to manufacture said diversity? I don't see how you can.

Twitter Bitcoin "influencers" don't really care about #Bitcoin or #Freedom, they just pretend. Otherwise they would have jumped to #Nostr, or at the very least, mirror posts on both places, manually or with a bot. Nostr clients are getting decent, #Snort and #Primal for example are very identical to Twitter UI/UX. And you can find content via hashtags.

Even if that were true, I can't really fault someone for doing their job. The vast majority of people you have a chance of convincing to use Bitcoin and Nostr are not here, they are out there on other platforms. Regarding your point about the mirror. Yea, you're right, they probably could do that. However, it takes time and effort to set those things up.

Its okey. Don't use #Nostr then. Go back to Twitter and pray Elon doesn't ban/shadowban you. Have fun getting your DMs bombarded with crypto scams, have fun getting crypto scam ads non-stop on your feed, have fun having scammers commenting on all your posts, have fun wasting money for a blue checkmark, have fun having your phone number attached to your account. You may have more likes/comments/views on Twitter, but remember – its mostly bots.

To be fair, all this applies to Nostr. IP instead of phone number, no blue check but you pay for relays and pray they be around for a while and don't ban you which they could, Nostr is full of bots, Crypto scams and DMs look just the same.

Nostr is mostly for #Bitcoiners, #Cypherpunks and tech-savy people. Crypto scammers won't bother with Nostr because none of their 50 IQ scams would work here. Regarding IPs, id rather trust the relays that i choose and are ran by plebs like me, than big tech anti-freedom overlords. You don't have to pay for any relay, you can self-host your own relay, backup all your notes, and broadcast them at any time to new relays in case you get banned. I've been using #Nostr for a while and i only had to mute 1 bot so far. My DMs are clean. If i were on Twitter my notifications would be spammed with crypto scammers tagging me, the fact that Elon doesn't fix that is beyond me.

With increased exposure comes a larger attack surface and you will receive more spam. I see you have about 100 follows and half as many followers, 10 or 20x that and you will notice. Deactivating global feed for free relays helps with the spam as paid relays do a good job filtering out the crap but if the free experience is porn and spam, people stay away. There is no free lunch and that is just right. V4V. Your infos won't just stay on some of your chosen relays, they spread, and your npub will be regarded as attack worthy. The again, there won't be much more free lunch as running relays cost money and with more adoption comes higher demand for data throughput and storage, the altruism will run out fast. You will either need to pay for a connection, see ads (which will usher in the censorship), or be on your own node. But why would other relays accept your nodes data upload and offer free downstream to you? There will be many Nostr networks, some isolated, by choice or by force, losly connected by some index servers, and that's okay because that what evolution, freedom and resilience mean. At least it grows naturally and by the means of all market forces, ideologies, desires, virtues and vices Man. The protocol will find a way. https://tenor.com/de/view/life-life-finds-a-way-jeff-goldblum-gif-7391185

You make a good points. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens. But hey, my old Twitter account had no followers, no comments, no likes, and my follow list was private, yet, I still got spammed with DMs and notifications of scammers tagging me. Personally, I don't bother with the global feed. I'm only interested in the posts from people I follow and the topics/tags that i care about. Free relays not keeping notes in storage forever is a good thing, some folks might not want their posts hanging around online indefinitely.

I like to follow new peeps that are reposted or mentioned from those I’m already following. I like to check out global and see if there’s anything there. It’s a process for sure. Discoverability can and will get better. When I was on twitter it had all the discoverability features big tech could offer, but I couldn’t have an interaction like the one we’re having now.

Just go here with a NIP-07 enabled browser and use the "follow all" button https://friendstr.vercel.app I created a simple ranking algorithm that's better than a naive trust score which only accounts for popularity. The "friend score" tallies up the mutual follow relationships between your follows and people you don't follow.