Oddbean

Last week I posted about "Nostr struggling" and while there were many good responses, it seems to me that a bunch of people misunderstood my premise. I'm going to clear that up here and expand on the idea a little further. First of all, I'm a Nostr bull. I'm sold, and I know how necessary this is. I'm still recruiting souls from twitter: https://x.com/SvetskiWrites/status/1828403019081269661 Secondly, I know that Nostr is SUPERIOR, technically speaking - and while the apps might not be as smooth, and some of the UX might be buggy, the substrate were working with is fundamentally better than the status quo. @rabble did a fantastic job of explaining that at the recent @thenostrworld conference (I suggest everyone watch that if they haven't - and I'm still bummed I couldn't make it). There are so many NIPs, and so much tech shit going on, that nobody else stands a chance really. Elon might have cool AI, but we have @PABLOF7z that can produce more prototypes than all the AIs in the world, combined. That being said, my reference to "struggling" was not about the technical side of things. It was about messaging & go to market. I speak to people every day about Nostr. I live in Brazil right now and travel on a regular basis to at least 10 countries each year. When I speak to people, they don't really care so much about censorship resistance, or Bitcoin (interestingly enough, two things Rabble also mentioned in his talk). What they want is a place to connect, that's COOL. And that's a VERY HARD thing to do. @jack and the guys did it with Twitter early on, and so did the Instagram founders - but for every one "hit" - there are another 1000 well built flops which people just didn't find "cool." Right now, the messaging is more doom, than bloom. More "you need this bc government gonna get you", and less "this is where the cool kids are at". Now...I understand that this is gonna take time. All good things do. But if we're going to attract more people, the conversation needs to evolve. I wrote a piece a little while back called "Social as a Service" and framed Nostr more as this substrate for a Universe of new applications. Once again, Rabble echoed this in his talk and leaned into the "Social Protocol" angle. I personally find this more compelling. More white-pill, and more appealing for the purposes of growing a network. People need to be pulled, not pushed. The latter can work in bursts here and there (as we've seen this week since the Telegram debacle), but it's not sustainable growth. @LynAlden has been doing really good work with her framing, and I think her 80% bloom / 20% doom approach is a good one. @Ben Arc has some good framing too with the “city” analogy _______________ Thinking out aloud, maybe we just need more angles. I guess the Bitcoin people are still going to be attracted by "government gonna get you" - and we're FAR from saturation in that dimension. So maybe the right approach is the have that conversation with THEM...but a very different conversation with others. Ultimately, I hope to see more go-to-market initiatives that are user-oriented, and get people excited about Nostr. We saw that at the Nostr booth @BTCPrague that @Derek Ross kicked off, and that @Tanja is now working on. We've got some plans for later this year at a few conferences as we unveil @Satlantis I know @utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻 and @fiatjaf are doing some podcast stuff, which is excellent. Also @Jason Hodlers is doing a Nostr book. I'm starting to repeat some of what I said last week, so I'll stop here. Ultimately the point is this: Nostr is not struggling "technically" speaking. But it's not yet found a compelling enough SPACE in people's minds, outside of the Bitcoin community. And it's not found a narrative yet that's compelling, beyond the "government gonna get you / big tech gonna ban you". When we find that, I expect things to really begin taking off. Thankyou for coming to my TED Talk 🤣🤣🤣

Lots of good points here, and that seems to mirror a lot of my experience from @thenostrworld - plenty of exciting stuff, but there are still difficulties getting people to move over. For my part, I'm making a concerted effort to be on here, and to almost entirely replace my Twitter doomscrolling with engaging in conversations here. My only subjective comment at this point is that the tangible difference in my daily mental health is a good enough reason to ditch Twitter for Nostr. And my hope is that others get the same feeling once they get on here and get the experience to work for them.

It should be everyone's goal in life to constantly improve and look for ways to make things better. I appreciate your thoughts and am glad you're trying to help move the needle in the right direction. #GrowNostr

Establishing a new city and colony is not easy, it takes time and hard work. Nostr going to take some time to bloom. Right now we don't know how it will bloom but it will bloom eventually. “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” – Rumi

It will get better when we have digital communities migrating from slave tech and looking for alternatives. Ditto by nostr:nprofile1qqsqgc0uhmxycvm5gwvn944c7yfxnnxm0nyh8tt62zhrvtd3xkj8fhgprdmhxue69uhkwmr9v9ek7mnpw3hhytnyv4mz7un9d3shjqgcwaehxw309ahx7umywf5hvefwv9c8qtmjv4kxz7gpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43z7s3al0v seems like a solid start

NOSTR isn't struggling. I am successfully recruiting Pedophiles from the Fediverse because their instances are getting holocausted there. That's organic growth. However, if you never lost your account on X or never lost your Fediverse instance, you will see NOSTR as unnecessarily complex. B1tco1n started out as a tool for illegal drug sales on Silk Road so i understand why Co1ners may feel they belong here on Nostr but really at this point B1tco1n is is a financial instrument and y'all should stop acting like anybody is persecuting you or not allowing you to pump B1tco1n on X ... as a precautionary measure of course i do understand why Co1ners may want to have backup since the Monopoly of Violence may choose to cash out at any moment ... but really NOSTR must recruit from groups that are persecuted on Mainstream Social Media Platforms ... Elon has restored not only conservatives but even most Nazis to X ... NOT ALL Nazis were restored but just enough that X is once again THE place for Nazis to hang out even if not all of them are there ... Elon has basically killed off all the alternative platforms like GAB, GETTR, Truth Social and so on by allowing just enough freedom for most people to come back to Twitter from those platforms ... The ONLY group that is still not welcome on X is pedophiles, and they are also seeing significant friction on Fediverse as well and realistically are the only group receptive to what NOSTR has to offer in terms of security and censorship resistance ... B1tco1n was originally for drug dealers. NOSTR must originally be for pedophiles.

Growing NOSTR requires the entire community's involvement. By working together, we can build the trust necessary to attract more users and achieve critical mass. If we do this right, we can take it even further and create something truly significant. I believe that having a physical presence at all Bitcoin conferences and events is the most impactful action we can take over the next few years until NOSTR reaches escape velocity!

So true! Community engagement is where it’s at! I just joined this week after attending #DwebCamp and hearing @rabble speak and have had more real conversations here in the last week than I have ever had in Twitter/x where I mostly like and retweeted others. I have been on Twitter/X since the Arab Spring and back then was repeatedly sent to Twitter Jail and am still censored on a daily basis for defending human rights, especially Indigenous rights and #Landback While I try to find workarounds it’s no fun! The relay delays on here take some getting used to - the other day my profile zeroed out and I thought I had been shut down for JAH knows what. ..Tears came to my eyes and I realized how high my desire is for genuine connection and the opportunity to build real relationships.. Sad 😔 but True! I’m here to help transform social media and communicate! Let me know how I can be of assistance…Let’s do this!

I want to add one more thing. I tried nostr before like a year ago but there were not so many accounts which I follow on Twitter was here, the community was not here at the time. That was keeping me away not because I want to because I had to. I use twitter to follow news(not main media news obviously), ideas and sometimes share mine. I couldn't do that on Nostr back then. I even had to reactivate my twitter account(I deleted it because they banned me because I said fuck, not to somebody btw). I even lost the key of my first nostr account so created a new one. Community is here now, just couple of accounts remaining which I follow for local economic views, news etc. They are resistant to come nostr didn't even reacted my invites but we'll get there. What makes it work is not the UI or how easy to use it or how decentralized it is, they are important too but none of it as important as the community itself. Mostly Bitcoiners will be here now because they are tip of the spear. But couple of bans and arrests later everybody will flow in. Nothing motivates people more than an example. I just wonder what twitter will be like without us😄

Thank you for the link, great idea btw. But I'll leave that function to governments, they will work better than me 😄 Most people are not convinced unless they live it. They will be banned and even fined using it with VPN then they will understand the value of nostr.

Honestly my guess is that the only way any of the decentralized/federated social media protocols are going to massively grow is with their adoption on larger more corporate platforms. Not a lot of non-nerdy people seem interested in managing cryptographic keys or searching out Activity Pub instances, but Threads managed to get ~200x the size of Mastodon and even BlueSky managed to get ~6 million users in like a month. Now of course if there's a lot more people on big corporate platforms that can communicate with anybody on Nostr/Activity-Pub/AT then there'll probably be more people who'd be interested in migrating away from the big platforms to the more decentralized/federated side of things. But I doubt a large percentage of microblogging users will ever be outside of larger easy to join corporate platforms. If I turn out to be right it's not all that bad IMO. I can talk to fellow nerds here on Nostr as well as communicate with those on Threads, BlueSky, other future big platforms, and all of the fediverse from within my Nostr account here. My 2c anyway.