Replies (96)
If it is the future, then why can't I buy a pack of smokes in my lil' town using my selfhosted CLN?
Because it loves to break, because I lack channel liquidity, which I can not get without swapping. Let alone the vendor needs to do all of those too.
It's baggage. Both, the term "crypto currency" as well as all the tech involved and required. Just buying a credit card terminal and signing up for Square is much easier than bootstrapping coinage.
It is definitively nerdy, fun to explore and - yes, I wasn't joking, I do in fact host a BTC node and my own CLN too - but not everyone can, will or even want's to do that.
Remember when GPUs were scalped for Etherium? Or remember how all ransomware demands payment in crypto currency? _That_ is what most people see, and why this is, what I would honestly consider, an anti-feature.
But hey, clients just...dont have to implement it. Which is nice.
Yes -- the question isn't so much "what is Nostr?" but "who is Nostr for?"
Bitcoin faces the same dilemma. It needs to be "for everyone" to succeed, but "everyone" always starts with some particular community of users....
nostr marketing is ass. that's not happening anytime soon ๐ ๐
Think so? Could be, maybe just show $ equivalent?
Nope, just don't.
Connection to crypto currency is a massive turn-off. And money-in-social is very much how people feel about X these days (Twitter never did this - sponsored posts, paid badges etc.)
Leaving it in the settings as an optional is a much nicer way to allow the user to enable and engage with it rather than instantly putting their minds to this.
"What's that zippy button? - Crypto? - Oh god no, I am out."
This is a quote from soneone I tried to purple pill. And I have heared renditions like that thrice. x)
Think about the psychological shift folks went through going from cash to plastic, and all the social tools that were used to make that happen "quickly" (media, advertising, education, politics)...
It'll take seriously competitive fiat wealth to similarly move folks' psychology from accounts to keys.
I think clients that look & feel like a legacy site could go a long way. Let the psych shift happen at each user's own pace. I'd even suggest referring to nsec's as "unchangable passwords" so the normie response is "why is it unchangeable?" instead of "wtf is a private key"? I find it easier to explain PKC if the person knows about the concept of uniqueness first. ๐
Nostr is a really neat decentralized group chat.
Time already spent building up your audience. They dont want to risk throwing that away.
The music scene is small but growing rapidly here
Good, please keep building and growing, and let me know how I can support you
We see the same with musicians. Talk to them ask day about owning their own music and decentralization and they are all ears. The moment you say bitcoin most are done listening. Logic isn't part of the equation.
This.
"Solve real problems. Build indomitable infrastructure."
Do it in every silo you specialize in and we suddenly have an ecosystem built for actual users, beyond the protocol layer.
Users interact more intuitively at a platform layer, not the protocol layer. Right tools for the right job.
We are trying to do similar with the music scene. But it's tough when we attract a bunch of artists, everyone gets hyped, but then very few people actually open their wallets to support them in a meaningful way.
People cry about not having content but dont support it when it shows up. We've had swaths of different communities blow through here over the years...
I think we just need to reach out to people, I have not had the time yet to do it enough, for example I asked
@Ancap Air to join and he did, keeps posting great content on here. He was the first I reached out to, just because his post was on my X feed.
There is plenty of great content by many people, it's a discovery issue that most Nostr client doesn't help with quite the opposite.
That's the spirit, we may be the last two standing.
"This is also a take I've been considering. In terms of the masses, or marginal user, not so much that they've given up, but have been conditioned to be consumers only."
Yeah this is worth considering -- everyone thinks of social media, and particularly stuff like Youtube content, in contrast to what came before -- linear TV.
And in this context it's true that it's far more "participatory" in terms of user engagement than what we had before. But on the other hand, in recent years in particular, things seem to be tilting back in the direction of "1 star with millions of followers" rather than "10000 stars with 1000 followers each"....
Going to have to make it easier. There are ways to do it, but all the smart guys out here only talk about Bitcoin and how it's the next everything. . . To You! To everyone here it is. It can be to the people not on this platform, however there needs to be a lot more education and a lot less high brow antics that belittle everyone else. It can be done!
True but weโre essentially asking the same 4000 people to constantly pay for everything. Even if the music doesnโt suit their taste? ๐คจ
How many users should there be? I don't want x nostr is fine.
> Let twitter be twitter.
They can't do it, it's what they want. Devfuencers wanna devfluence. When they build something they want cheers every day about it, or they stop working on it. That's great we all want that but it's not realistic. Again all good and no bad. Doesn't work that way. Im saying sometimes you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
> If the few active users I'm following now end up leaving, then I might as well do the same.
I mean yeah that's kind of it right. Sometimes you just gotta post something and hope new people find you, and those who stuck around feel like interacting again. It's also neat seeing people come back after a year or more off.
Someone returning does put a smile on my face.
"It's coming from inside the house." Many nostr devs aren't going to stop the botslop when they are the ones botslopping and gooning for the AI fantasy. No market forces, no mission, just larp. Nostr will remain an obscure playground for in-clique developers or be captured and commandeered by shitcoinery unless it gets a stronger sense of purpose.
I personally enjoy it here and love many of the people and the tech, but I've seen a lot of promising things die on the vine and I hope that doesn't happen again. The world could actually use what nostr could actually be.
I tried to engage with with devs on the bot problem realistically some months ago and got nothing but cold shoulders. I understood why when they all started creaming about clawd and bot swarming their own users.
Se la vie, I guess.
I mean yeah - its a flywheel and we are the unfortunate masochists hanging around who can start it.
If artists get paid they tell their friends. Word of mouth is still king in the indie music scene. These friends bring fans. These fans are the superfans who will actually follow a band to a less convenient place, for nothing but the sake of support. This grows nostr in a real way that sticks.
reddit style threads and subscription based content creators are prime real estate
Specifically to your point of supporting music outside of your taste - its about the bigger picture. You're supporting the artist, but that vote of confidence also supports the message that we opt out of their system. This supports the greater overall network. The stronger we are, the better chance we attract musicians you actually do enjoy. And most people can recognize talent, even if you dont enjoy the content per se. These monetary votes of support is signal, and propagating the signal matters.
Right, but we've been there and done that so many times and it rarely amounts to anything in terms of user growth.
The only thing small about us is our weiners
I think it's different. Bitcoin is clear.
Bitcoin is money.
Bitcoin is money for enemies.
I can't say what and who nostr is so easily. You get weird functionalists answers.
"Nostr is a protocol" ... Yeah, no kidding, for what? "It is what it does." And in practice it serves mostly as a toy for its devs.
When Bitcoin has these same problems (core devs, miner self-dealing, shitcoiners, bigblockers) the users show them who is in charge. We are seeing that again with knots and 110. The purpose and mission of the network is enforcing itself again.
Nostr is a cool protocol. I want the freedom to publish and message, for myself and for others. I'd like to see that same clarity and zeal for the mission here.
I dont disagree - and im not saying everyone zap and we'll take down spotify tomorrow. There's a lot of steps in between and a lot of points of failure. Yeah we've been around this carousel before but it only starts if we insert a token first.
Some will accuse me of thinking "but thisntime its different". Well that's the thing, it really is. We have real industry people like myself,
@OpenMike @Aaron of Essex @means here and a whole load of real difference makers in the real world pushing this forward.
We are talking to mainstream artists who play to crowds of millions and getting positive responses. I have in my hands an album to release, from one of the touring members of the Goo Goo Dolls. We have major venues that are on the world's stage interested in what we are doing here. It may not seem obvious from our little corner of the world but forces are in motion every day. This momentum builds very slowly in a world where the talent swims in a pool of sharks and we are getting somewhere.
Keep the faith is kinda what I'm saying here.
appreciate ya'lls hard work! keep it up! Yeah, I have not lost faith or anything. I want to be super clear that whenever I say something that feels depressing, I'm not actually communicating my feelings - just stating things for how I see them. Most of the time my notes are detached of personal feelings unless they are full of emojis
I guess we should get to know one another in that case. ๐
I need to post more essays. Been slacking a bit.
I'm new here, hello! Someone follow me, and I'll follow back. Cheers
Nostr isnโt addictive. Itโs facing the harshest competition for mindshare and attention ever created by humans.
It also takes work to build/curate your community on nostr. Once you hit an escape velocity it is amazing, but people are use to their content being spoon fed to them. They donโt like doing any extra work to find it.
All good brotha - I appreciate the conversation!
People land, donโt get a good feed quickly, donโt find their people, and churn.
Main issues:
1. slow time to value
2. weak discovery
3. fragmented client/relay UI
4. no clear must have use case
On top of that, itโs been a bit hamstrung by being too Bitcoin-only.
Zaps are powerful, but locking payments to Lightning narrows the funnel. The NIP should really allow users to choose any payment method and route to the best match between users. If someone prefers Lightning, fine. If someone else wants fiat rails or something else, that shouldnโt break the interaction. Payments should expand the network, not segment it.
It also started backwards.
Nostr tried to be a Twitter replacement first, then bolt on DMs and groups later. Thatโs backwards for how networks usually form.
I think I'd we focused on communities, private over MLS like,
@White Noise and
@Keychat can possibly do or public over specific relays.
The ability to cover privacy DM or open public notes grows naturally from the social graph that developes from the group's.
lol... nostr works as is for so many... give me 4,000 sources of signal vs. ai driven noise any day. I get that many want it to be the next big thing... but, currently, I could care less...
nostr is a big club... and normies ain't in it.
The problem is that previously we weren't doing this:
How many times do I have to shout this? You can't bring people who continuously see: nostr, bitcoin, I love nostr, I worship bitcoin, let's build nostr and other shit like this.
i do admit, there is churn and nostr is small. But calling it daily active users when someone posts real non bot content that day (in comparison to media that tracks *every view) is an inaccurate description for this narrow view of the data.
Why not call something like "Real people that post content". This is a metric no other social media would EVER disclose because they would be shooting themselves in the foot, their valuation crushed, their business gone.
It's kind of a big deal, what these numbers represent. Remember when elon tried to back out of buying X cause it was "all bots"? And yet here on nostr we solved this problem and all we get is disappointed investoors and influencoors that have lost faith that anyone sees their content.
How many see one of the many DAU posts and then take the opposite action than that we want.. A self fufilling prophecy of a ded nostr.
I've said this many timez, oh well.. People really should understand how valuations work, cause it isn't like this, that's for sure. โ๏ธโ๐ฅ
Perhaps you are right
nice synth setup, upload some music Br00
I hope you're not quoting me on that.
I was just adding up the numbers in the screenshot you posted.
I have no clue on the actual numbers.
What arbitrary number of daily users do you think we need for Nostr to โsucceedโ? It succeeds for me. I pity the people trapped in transhumanist centralised platforms. Iโve been off social media for years and feel no urge to return.
Can you make a badge for them?
Nostr bears
"Numbers can be tricky! ๐ Just sharing thoughts and insightsโno quotes needed! Let's keep the conversation going. ๐"
I have discovered, after a lot of thought, that *I* am much less motivated by sovereignty than agency. For as long as folk don't feel their agency threatened, they won't think about sovereignty much. Agency is either rooted in sovereignty, or in trust. If that trust is misplaced, nobody notices or cares until they are let down in some way.
Pretty interesting what social media becomes when you strip away the algorithms that capture and manipulate your dopamine system.
I think this is healthy and worth the grind.
It's very likely that a nostr user will be stuck in a limbo unless they have strong relationships with other nostriches. No feed, no connections etc. specially because of AI and bots
I donโt know about the numbers, but I feel that Nostr is a natural fit for people with a sovereignty mindset. Many people donโt simply value privacy (โI have nothing to hideโ) and self-ownership (โwhat if I lose my password?โ).
If the vast majority of Bitcoiners (people who are running nodes etc.) are using Twitter, Facebook, etc., I donโt think itโs surprising that there are not that many of us here.
I have not been using Nostr that long, but I like it. I donโt use traditional social media, and I cannot even consider using it anymore.
I see it like this:
We will have a lot more people, who wake up and start embracing Bitcoin, Nostr, and other freedom / privacy tools.
But, unfortunately, we will also have a lot more people, who get totally addicted to their TikTok accounts and other shit.
That's bait.
Nostr has been MY work for 4 years, I've earned the right to judge it
I like solutions and im sold on this one
Growth can follow hype. Look at openclaw's rise to power. All fake boosted numbers. So you can't sit here and tell me that wringing our collective hands over these 'real' numbers and not counting bots and such does not just provide us yet another headwind for growth.
Do you think bsky actually had 1M users? I don't. These numbers are all fake and it's stupid for us to give them any credibility. If anything, we should be promoting this metric RPPC (something they cannot and will not ever provide) instead of chanting DAU.
(Just post note ids not links)
Important that we acknowledge what is. As Peter Drucker said "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." There's another quote I like "The best way to realize your dream is to wake up." This is a wake-up call. And ... some people will prefer to live in the simulation where everything appears fine (and criticize you for reflecting an uncomfortable truth) than take the blue pill and confront what is. Kudos to you for saying it like it is. I'd also love to hear any ideas you have about how to increase active user count.
Yes maybe we just need to communicate with each other. Few people who communicate individually is better maybe!
Fuck fiat.
Fuck high time preference.
Fuck consumer culture.
Fuck the looters.
Nostr is a cathedral. Whatโs the rush?
As a dev it's hard to justify investing years of your life into a dying protocol
nobody knows what a protocol is. who knows anything about ISO OSI?
we say nostr is not a platform. so why a primitive kind 1 user count is important?
nwc, coinjoin, recent sparrow plugin for nym payments, Tim's work on records, rpc, ... that's what i find interesting and promising. the transport layer.
Maybe nostr doesn't need to win the mainstream, maybe it just needs to be there for the people who actually need uncensorship?
honestly the "waking up" framing misses a whole group: people who didn't choose this, but just got pushed. for example, from authoritarian countries, their bank froze, telegram is blocked and account deleted because of censorship.
nostr finds them, not the other way around. that's literally who I'm building for rn, would love your take if you're into it!
Iโm not sure whether to be disappointed by those numbers, pumped to be part of the exclusive, cool kids club, or a little of both.
I mean why would people come in to Nostr? why would a normie leave insta or tik tok and move to Nostr. There is no reason, as a social media user/consumer you have no reason, your friends are not here, your content creators are not here, there is no algo. I think it's ok, Nostr social media is more a place to get together with other fellow max retard government hating conspiracy geeks thats ok imo. it's also good to social media detox. but there can be a lot of activity beyond social media, like Ai agents using nostr for chat etc.
I kind of agree. I feel like Nostr is in a way inevitable, because it's such a simple protocol, you can never lose your account even if people aren't active, so it can pick up again at any point (i.e. as if your mastodon server can't go down), and it's useful for escaping constant surveillance (to an extent) and for bypassing censorship. Plus you can build tons of apps off of it. Idk what's not to like, really
we have a lot of that on nosrr
all those talk about bitcoin and nostr is boring to a lot of people, even to tech guys. that is the problem, we need interesting subjects
#2
1. Great news from Miljan to us ๐
View quoted note โ
2. Nostriches, what is your opinion about this? ๐ซต๐ป
View quoted note โ
3. We are still early and our method of spreading Nostr is through persuasion ๐ฅ
View quoted note โ
4. You still need to be on centralized platforms? ๐๐ป
View quoted note โ
5. Primal team is reacting so quickly to the bugs ๐ช๐ป
View quoted note โ
6. The very first day of an UK music artist on Nostr ๐ฉ๐ปโ๐ค
View quoted note โ
7. A decisive statement from Rizful ๐๐ป
View quoted note โ
8. A note of thanks and gratitude ๐ซก
View quoted note โ
9. Have you noticed what she's asking? ๐๐ป
View quoted note โ
10. A real-life example that schools pushes students to centralization ๐คฎ
View quoted note โ
11. Are you jumping in with him? ๐ซต๐ป
View quoted note โ
#community_nostr_recap
Nostr is a success in serving a very niche community of bitcoin maxis and sovereign individuals and probably for that same reason itโs a failure in terms of attracting a broader audience.
Indeed.Itโs a great idea and great technology for a very niche tribe. And thatโs ok. Itโs a success for those people, and a failure if it was supposed to be of a bigger service to the part of life thatโs digital. Fortunately there is whole other part of life out there, this one will end up being for agents lol
We meed interesting people that are not treating like retards for not wanting to close their bank accounts and switch to Nostr
Thatโs the exact โfuck themโ vibe the prevented and will prevent Nostr from growing. And thatโs fine. A small community of people that feel superior to the world, with a nice idea of a protocol, focused on self-sovereignty and bitcoin-only standards. Very niche but thatโs ok.
Modern digital world is unfortunately, spread love!
The catalyst that changes this trend for the better is likely going to be legilative or platform AUP change on the legacy systems.
what we need is better most algorithms
*nostr
At this rate this place is dead
not if your feed algorithm is alive
I like it down here with nostr ppl.
View quoted note โNot enough quality content drugs people away to find it on other centralized ๐ฉ
*to find something better I meant
Agreed. Lets change that.
What helps? Without creating something that evokes emotion, there's no incentive to reply or like a post. Zaps is a different story.
Nostr will grow by people realizing other platforms are just farming your data. But that doesn't mean nostr is better overall. This is a dead city people like to stay for that 1 ideal they believe in.
I think we need to stop referring to using Nostr as "being on Nostr". Nostr is just a protocol that apps are built on. But those apps intercommunicate... so yeah sure I'm on Amethyst but it's the same idea and network as ditto or wisp. so it's complicated. we have a PR problem. Nostr is a weird, unfamiliar system and the general public doesn't even have the vocabulary we all have to describe it easily. Honestly we need a company to come in, make a sick nostr app, and make bank off of it without focusing on nostr cus that's the only way we'll get the money and advertising we need to reach a broader audience.
I will state fact, not everyone is in to bitcoin. Bitcoin is linking your profil to you were it brakes the privacy.๐คทโโ๏ธ Also most of people cant even pay rent does days, so how on earth you expect them to get bitcoin. Sorry but thats obvious, and its about to get worst and worst. Also everypne that will refuse the new vaccinal passport will be ban to have even a bank account or acces to the web and sociaty and no food.
Nostr is Bitcoiners social media. There is not many of us. Nostr's dau will mirror adoption. We are so early and young. Keep on stacking and enjoy the ride. Gradually then suddenly.
View quoted note โPeople should post why they're on #nostr
Not in generic sense like privacy, anonymity etc.
I'd understand those things in previous nostr not full of bots. Now with bots even on nostr, what keeps you here?
#asknostr
View quoted note โThere is so much potential and at the same time I agree. Iโm constantly thinking about how we can come up with solutions to this problem.
How about weekly active? And what counts as active? Any activity, even likes?
Yep any activity, but that user needs "credible" followers. Surely there's more lurkers than this number suggests
Damn ... Remember you can scale group chats with all yo all encryption key sharing up to many hundreds or a thousand. That is basically fitting Nostr users in a handful of Signal chat groups for analogy!
View quoted note โ
The fundamental problem is simple: Nostr is an excellent protocol wrapped in an alpha-quality experience.
Three years in, the basics still aren't solved. Onboarding requires cryptographic literacy most people don't have and shouldn't need. Account recovery means "you've lost everything." And instead of one well-designed, stable client, we have ten half-finished ones competing for attention no one has given them yet.
The pitch isn't helping either. Answering "why should I use this?" with censorship resistance and digital sovereignty only resonates with a narrow audience โ and we've largely already converted them. The next wave of users needs concrete reasons to switch: things they can do on Nostr that they simply can't do elsewhere. Those features exist. Identity portability across clients is genuinely powerful. Zaps are one of the most innovative monetization tools ever built for creators. But potential alone doesn't drive adoption โ the funnel around these features still needs to be built.
There's still a lot of work ahead. But I'm confident that Wisp will become synonymous with Nostr.
- Community tech that works and is open-ended enough.
- Fantastic Design.
- 80% effort in marketing to niche communities, out there. Not here.
