Great fireside between @ODELL and @jack at Nostriga. I got a chance to listen to it now.
Regarding the question of whether Nostr will have more users than Twitter/X in five years (~500 million), my base case would be no, actually. And I say that as a huge Nostr fan and daily user.
In the long arc of time, Nostr's addressable market is nearly unlimited (basically everyone who uses the internet could be using Nostr in some form), but I expect somewhat of a slower burn. Infrastructure build-out type stuff. And breaching a network effect with a better solution is generally quite a long uphill climb.
To me, Nostr is successful once it starts serving tens of millions of people well. I expect it to be more of a quality over quantity thing for a while. Bitcoin is almost 16 years in and still isn't at 500 million users. But for many of those people, it was lifechanging.
I'd like to be surprised to the upside, but I also don't want people to think that if Nostr is "only" at tens of millions of people in five years, or 100+ million but still sub-Twitter, that it underachieved. It's tiny right now, and numbers anywhere approaching that would be a huge increase.
Nostr is a great improvement for everyone using it. But sometimes it takes people time to see why a given solution is better than what they have, or to realize they have a problem at all.
So in the meantime I monitor Nostr's success by the quality and quantity of developer activity, the capability of the protocol as a freedom tool or the shortcomings it still has for that use case, the quality of the conversations throughout the ecosystem, how many people consider it to be lifechanging tech compared to centralized social media, and in time, steady growth.
Have you tried corny chat at corny chat.com made by @Vic
It is awesome, you can go in anonymously and talk to devs and nostriches, I’ve been doing art while chatting.
It’s similar to bitcoin in that adoption could be directly proportional to censorship growth. A strong move by governments and cooperating media outlets to silence critics and dissidents around the world could push hyper adoption.
Lyn, I think onboarding will be a massive improvement for Nostr.
1- onboard friends and family with a link to follow you.
2- design the invite so that you build their profile for them: suggested accounts to follow based on who you follow and recommended relays.
3- preload their wallet with ecash
nostr:nprofile1qqsd7ele5ljpzft5tjl84naae5pkj9uqcepa77adwr6ayyy0948uyqqpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qtxwaehxw309anxjmr5v4ezumn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tmwwp6kyvtdv9hxcmnxd3uh57t2dpnkswfhxp6rsmtddenhyerew33hqvm2wfkkzcfkxe6nsdpkvankwdm5xgcxxem3w9m8jm3ew3hr7cnjdaskgcmpwd6r6arjw4jsz9mhwden5te0wfjkccte9ehx7um5wghxyctwvshsavanjs is working on this and we need to get him some funding. Can you help spread the word so he can push out the MVP?
NOSTR needs this: https://geyser.fund/project/nostrmeetme/goals
Do we want mass adoption or smart adoption ?
Content is still the biggest challenge for me. Broader categories outside bitcoin and nostr don’t have the content depth yet. Categories like breaking news, politics, and finance. Hard to make nostr a single point of contact at this stage.
This is spot on! It's not just about hitting big numbers quickly, but about building something that truly matters to those who use it. The long-term vision is what counts, and it’s exciting to think about how Nostr will grow steadily and impact people's lives. Quality over quantity for sure, and the way it's developing now, it feels like we're on the right path. Thanks for sharing these thoughts!
yeah, like how many people are still watching cable TV when there is now Youtube/X. And now X is melding into Nostr. (Not sure where Youtube ends up).
growth/degrowth for the different markets will just take a long time, but right now it looks like Nostr>Twitter>legacy media ?
I never thought about it like that. That is an interesting thought.
We should also take into account the fact that twitter userbase will shrink when people like ODELL leave with their audiences, and others move here b/c they got banned there. So the final number to compare might be different to nostr advantage
KEY PAIR 🔑 IDENTITY.
FEW.
Important to remember that nostr simply relays notes and other stuff, from one user to another. That will always be valuable. It does not STORE data, there's other solutions for that, which are not nostr. The storage market (e.g. for notes, and other stuff, which actually was written in the original web proposal) will always be 1,000-1,000,000 times bigger. So nostr has a total addressable market of maybe 0.01% of the web. That is perfectly OK. The challenge is not, and will never be to grow nostr to 500million users. The challege is to spread ideas such as zaps, or ability to move from one app to another, or an app eco system, to the wider web. Nostr then provides realtime payments, which is the cherry on top.
That’s not how I would personally think about marketshare. I would measure market share more along the lines of “what portion of identity-based applications can I log in with via my nsec?”
When measuring Nostr’s global market share, however, we need to be aware that “hybrid” Nostr apps will not have the same freedom power as “Nostr only” apps.
If it uses Nostr as identity layer, and stores user data in a local DB, is it really freedom tech?
Hybrid apps are inevitable. Question is, how do we measure success and promote freedom tech?
I think we're agreeing. This is much more in line with an extended nostr eco system. Remove the relay part, and allow logging in with nsec identity is essentially the bridge to the wider web, for which the TAM is 1000x bigger. Relays end up being a small part of that.
Phrasing it another way. nost is far bigger than nostR. But nost itself is basically the web + taproot.
thank you for explaining.
what is Nost?... I haven't heard of that
Nost is something I just made up : Notes and other Stuff
It's much bigger than NostR which depends on relays
And adds an important element of taproot and schnorr to the web. What you could call an nsec too. This has a much larger total addressable market than the relay part.
I knew fiatjaf for many years before nostr. I kept saying to him that the data must be transport agnostic. Either by luck or design, it is in nostr. That's the path that will let it scale to a far bigger market, though most have not yet realized this. I think Lyn has.
Sadly most people prefer easy and popular to secure, free speech. I'd even argue that most people like having opposing speech silenced because opposing speech is uncomfortable and requires a person to actually think. The government schools have taught people to blindly follow and not to think. People aren't comfortable with having their paradigm challenged. Those people will never join nostr.
I believe once people start getting banned on other platforms they will find their way to Nostr. Considering the trend, it can accelerate pretty quickly.
Nostr is growing at the perfect speed, learning lessons along the way.
This kind of realistic and very clear debates about what #Nostr may or may not get to do should happen more often.
It is clear that the protocol will not even jokingly reach a number of millions of users, and for a simple reason: it is not an imperative need for 99% of normal users now.
That said, I think we have a great future but we have not yet discovered it, the current use is the traditional use of social media and this use already has big and bigger actors at stake.
shit can go sideways pretty quick in clown world though. some people are really starting to see the mass manipulation that is occuring.
Well said, I think the most important part is not calling it a failed project if it doesn’t overtake x platform numbers by y time .. need to have a long time horizon to use this platform do it right and you own your data forever
"Bitcoin is almost 16 years in and still isn't at 500 million users."
I find this shocking to believe even though the price has hit 100g CAD. how much signal do you need?
I think the only exception to this would be 3-4 rockstar apps making uptick faster than can currently be envisioned.
So it isn’t a question of prediction but of, “will you build something great?”
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