Oddbean

There’s nothing “weird” about it. Decentralisation comes with clear drawbacks in the marketplace. Nostr may be superior technically, in almost EVERY way, but there is no coordinated communications effort. I posted about this two weeks ago, and half the responses were: “oh you’re too bearish on Nostr” or “look at all the cool tech we’re building”. And that’s precisely my point. The focus has ALL been on the tech (and rightly so). But my entire argument was that the gaze needs to begin to shift towards communications & go to market. There’s no point building the coolest car if nobody knows about it. Unfortunately, I don’t know if the @OpenSats people agree with this (they seem to be the only org funding collective initiatives). They just ignored the post despite tagging them. Either OpenSats needs to fund some marketing efforts, or these efforts ultimately come down to the businesses building on Nostr. The best option would be BOTH. I have some other ideas. I’ll DM you and see what you think. In the meantime, GOLDEN opportunities like this are being completely missed or just not taken advantage of. Nostr should’ve grown by a million users this week, not fucking Blue Sky. 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️ https://primal.net/e/note1e8gzpmeum8tqzqg6sjkuxge7v764h9x49n7e000as0x40lpekazqfhwk8f https://primal.net/e/note1aqhmwcvukz45ngr2zunhmsjc5nru2lqg65wgrhzjr7pydw923ens99w26p

What I was thinking about it to send zaps to a fund that all it does is push advertising. That in turn brings more people to the protocol and we will get our investment from zaps tenfold. Or is this just not doable now. We already have shared zaps.

Too complex. Who’s gonna manage that, who decides where the money goes, how do you measure success, what’s the economic incentive for the individual contributors. Stuff like that is always 1000x harder than it sounds

Who cares?! Truly. Just like folks getting bitcoin at the price they deserve, they’ll find nostr when they need to. All this talk about forced growth are counterproductive. Furthermore, if you want something to happen, make it happen. Things improve by change not chance. Too many folks with too many followers thinking that makes them relevant. We are all irrelevant.

I just think the next step is clients marketing themselves, not nostr. Just saying nostr doesn't really inform anyone of where to go. From the users point of view they are looking for a new client, not a protocol. Although in nostrs case each new client user is equally a new protocol user :)

I don't think this makes sense. Separate clients by themselves cannot offer a compelling alternative. Hiding the protocol from usets is a losing move. If a client tries to compete in the market as if it was a proprietary platform, and if any succeed it will be by capturing and breaking the network.

Bluesky was compelling enough for a Million Brazilians to sign up. I wasn't thinking in terms of "hiding" the protocol. More in terms of: "Join Damus/Amethyst, it's a great alternative to twitter that can't get banned because we use the nostr protocol." Whatever outreach / marketing, i think is more effective it it contains a direct pointer to a client. Because non techies don't want the extra complexity of going 1. nostr 2. *find a client among many 3. register on one of those clients *there's research that says that to many options lead to indecision.

btw. I think nostr is strong enough in the long run. Things will sort themselves out. We got this nostr:nprofile1qqsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8gprfmhxue69uhhq7tjv9kkjepwve5kzar2v9nzucm0d5hszxmhwden5te0wfjkccte9emk2um5v4exucn5vvhxxmmd9us2xuyp :)

I have been writing in bits and pieces. Although not many people are receptive. Also - still trying to wrap my head around the various ideas. That said, the specific idea I was referring to in the note above was for some sort of Nostr “builder’s council” where various Nostr businesses come to together & pool some money to fund some co-marketing initiatives that they may not be able to afford on their own, but could do together.

I see. That could be bad, but could also be good. But what would be these marketing initiatives concretely? It might be easier to get support for specific plans limited in scope than for a generic lifelong organization.

Deciding on them is the hard part. That’s why I’m thinking of it as “builders” and as a council. Builders actually have skin in the game. They’re invested in the success of both their business and the protocol. And a ‘council’ is the best name I can come up with for an informal, unofficial kind of group of these businesses who try to workshop some of these ideas

One of the problems with marketing and nostr as I see is that to market you need to highlight features. Features to the end user shouldn't be based on protocol, censorship resistance (OK maybe this is important for the edge users), relay function, social apps beyond social media etc. Just on social media, the end user cares about how they have a mobile and desktop app, whether their friends are on it, whether they can downvote to see less of the topic, deleting posts, finding friends, bookmarking, new content etc. I know some of these features exist in some clients. But there isn't consistency (nor do you really want it as that's the feature on nostr). But you its hard to market to an end user as I see without a consistent set of features amongst clients (ie if you download damus you can do x but on iris you can't). Beyond that, as we know nostr is much more than social media. So marketing could get easier for nostr as the ecosystem of apps grows. Ie it is essentially a decentralised single sign on for many apps. Personally i think an 'app store' which is a directory of PWA's could help discovery of the ecosystem and give people a familiar interface for entering the ecosysten. Think https://appsco.pe/ for nostr. I'm.happy to work with someone on this idea and fund it.

What you said at the end makes a lot of sense. There’s other benefits of Nostr (way more important than just features) which we can build narratives on. And that’s really what I’m calling attention to. The way we’re talking about Nostr right now, might not be the right angle. Of course, it will evolve and we’ll find a better way - but only if someone starts that conversation. That’s my whole point.

Let's put this on a billboard in front of the Brazilian tourism board HQ. nostr:nevent1qqstf2rl8eyy28z3pxqr7y55tuyr0q0r0sjh9w0w9m0uahqgw7we9hgpzemhxue69uhkummnw3ezuerpw3sju6rpw4ej7q3qnjst6azswskk5gp3ns8r6nr8nj0qg65acu8gaa2u9yz7yszjxs9sxpqqqqqqzwcuqhj No, but seriously I think there could be fairly cheap, effective marketing campaigns. Sponsorship of small cultural events and video channels already aligned with nostr and have presence here. Eg. Meshtastic community and permaculture spring to mind. These 'niche' interests which actually do pretty big viewership numbers. Maybe a sponsored segment on Jay Dyer's youribe, he already seems to get t-shirts from lightningstore thing lol

nostr is not competing with Bluesky or any other bullshit platform, some clients may want to but that's difficult to pull off without external funding or sustainable business models. This still needs to be figured out, most devs are still exploring what's possible here. That said I can appreciate your competitive mentality and not sticking with the usual 'it's still early'.

Nostr isn't superior in every way. Centralization has technical advantages. It makes meaningful search easier. It makes discovery easier. I think it's important to recognize and be honest about the inherent limits of Nostr. What I hope will happen is that more people will use Nostr, alongside with centralized (or federated, like Mastodon) platform with express free speech policies.

Thank you. There is Minds, which used to support Nostr and it no longer does (if not to an extent so minimal it might just as well not), but it does have permissive policies. It doesn't have the benefit of censorship resistance, but it does have some technical advantages and I think it's reasonable to guide people towards both, making sure to point out the differences. As for Nostr, it'd be nice to have relays with express free speech policies in different countries (so that they won't all be influenced by one government).

I agree with you. I'm not in a position to fund any grand projects, but I'm meeting with a potential partner to discuss starting a media effort to draw business owners to #nostr with examples of how to work it into their business plans.