Do we have a list of the most popular complaints from users, developers, potential users, tech people who think Nostr sucks, people who gave up Nostr? @elsat

Replies (42)

I’ve had a few friends I managed to convince to sign up using Damus or Primal. The complaints I heard from them were lack of engagement - they aren’t necessarily interested in Bitcoin only content and that’s probably the biggest issue for them.
I created account postning news from English/Swedish and economic sites. People complains that they didn't had news information. If you want news in other languages let me know
If we had as many users as X, it would suck big time. What keeps me hooked is the fact that it's a small community with shared values where you can really interact with everyone without every input getting lost in 1000+ replies, etc. We should try to scale based on community needs; there's no need for a huge central place where no one has a voice except the ones pushed by an algorithm. Obviously, this is not interesting for "influencers" who simply want to farm engagement to sell ads. Let's not try to copy this fake social media circus.
Too much freedom, it is way too easy to run your own node and host your own media... Literally unusable!
I have some complains problems ish & some questions in my 2 posts below.. & here But not giving up don't think nostr sucks Just think we could make it a lot easier & better & I'm here for it & hopefully I can help somewhere somehow anyways I will try to do my part 🫡🫡
Here are some I have heard from people: 1. Nostr needs a little higher speed of internet compared to Facebook 2. Managing relays is stressful 3. Should have some kind of recovery option for log in credentials 4. How can we deal with fake accounts impersonating real people if we can't even report them and get them blocked?
A translate feature for different languages, making the community more far reaching. A feature to pin a favorite note to the top of your profile.
I can’t find the note - the most accurate assessment I remember seeing from a BS profile on nostr is as follows: -BS guy understands nostr -BS guy assesses nostr as superior tech to BS -BS guy gives up on nostr because it is more or less Btc price “discussion” -BS guy does not mention the idea of onboarding his community to nostr -my assessment at the time, which remains today the same, is that there is no user friendly community onboarding tool -therefore nostr may not grow community by community past the current steady state
This exists already but no one cares. See Chachi, Flotilla, 0xchat. We keep thinking technology is the problem, that Nostr doesn't have much adoption because this or that "feature" is missing or because the "UX" is "bad" or other quibbles, but technology is not the problem.
I couldn’t disagree any more with what you said. None of the above tools to my knowledge has onboarded a single community to nostr. This is not about a “feature” or “UX”. There is currently no solution to the problem of onboarding communities on nostr. I’m extremely happy to be proven wrong.
Of course they haven't onboarded a single community, that was my point exactly: the software exists, it works, and yet it's far from sufficient. Meanwhile communities have been formed in many other places where the software didn't exist or was much worse, because there are many many other factors involved, most of which beyond our control, and we should recognize instead of always hoping this next feature will work (I'm not saying we should not work on whatever next feature, in case that wasn't clear).
If this was true then Elon Musk wouldn't have bought Twitter, he could have made X from scratch and used many millions to perfect his app's UX to be better than Twitter's and we would have won big.
These are very correct points. Although everything is graded on a curve. Software also plays a role. For example, there are online communities I would like to follow more closely, but they're very hard to reach for me because they live on Discord or Slack, which are awfully slow and cumbersome apps, so the effort isn't worth the gain.
Yes there is a social, marketing element. Usually there is one or more community organizers that lead their respective communities. I have yet to see an onboarding flow for community champions. Ditto team is at least discussing solving the problems for the “champion” persona. Which is the correct path and focus. Feature is not the correct focus. I will plan to go through the mentioned tools, and evaluate through the lens of problem of community champion/organizer.
Above thread point is that nostr is failing in solving BS guy’s problem of finding a non-owned platform that also has his people. The BS guy may not be a community champion. The point is he does not want to join nostr alone, without his community.
Niel Liesmons's avatar
Niel Liesmons 9 months ago
They acquired Twitter for the network. To get one community to use a new tool, you don't need an already existing network. They ARE the network. You need to offer something significantly better that they're willing to try or fits in to what they already do. Chat is the most used content type. If, at least, your Chat UX isn't better than what people already use, then what's your value prop? I'm putting a big effort into: - text parsing, rendering and (mostly) editing/typing - audio - custom emoji, GIFs, great image handling - other stuff, right there in the chat All for a reason. Better Chat UX is where it all starts for Community apps. For "winning" over Twitter, you'll have to join your local mystery babylon cult I guess.
I largely agree here, but none of this corroborates your previous point that "it's 110% about UX", but that's irrelevant, I shouldn't have started this discussion.
Niel Liesmons's avatar
Niel Liesmons 9 months ago
I just know how terribly frustrated @elsat is with the current community UX 😜 So in his eyes, :110percent: probably isn't an exageration.
Niel Liesmons's avatar
Niel Liesmons 9 months ago
It's all about starting the discussion in the right community 🙈
I think 90% of it is "right place, right time". Building all the apps and features and UX ensures the right place exists, but it's hard to manufacture timing. The best thing we can do is put ourselves in the best possible position for when there is another catalyst event. That includes: 1. Have a variety of apps with a variety of features - why not? Each one is a new opportunity to be the "right place" to the right community. 2. Begin courting Nostr-friendly community leaders and onboarding them as test cases, and respond to feedback (Ditto is in this stage now) 3. Spot the opportunities. It's normally something social/political that drives entire communities off of one platform and onto another, not features. These social conflicts are often about censorship or leadership, which Nostr is in a prime position to solve. 4. Marketing! Get the word out so that when something happens that causes a community to be looking for the new "right place", they choose Nostr. This also includes expanding our community connections so that when an opportunity occurs, we have people inside/tangental to that community already who can help steer them to Nostr.
lol. Perhaps I will get inspired to start a newsletter… There’s the easy answer and then there is the question of why is everything here a copy of something else. At a 10,000 ft level ActivityPub and Farcaster innovated with their protocols and experiences. Nostr and ATProtocol only innovated at the protocol level. Both face challenges as a result.
Product focused thinking and writing is sorely needed. I think there are quite a few new “things” built on nostr (zaps, e-cash, blossom, dvm..). The distributed nature of nostr and the median lone wolf dev means that there is an uphill battle to build performantly on nostr, even without the new “things”/elements. Way behind in the priorities are where theoretically the interoperability magic of nostr creates a not yet existing elsewhere experience.
These are all spot on and I hope we can tackle some of them with upcoming initiatives. We've missed a few events because we were not ready. I hope we can be ready for the next one.
I thought about zaps after I posted, but the key term is experience. Zaps repurposed an existing experience which has led to all sorts of adoption problems. Not because they are inherently bad - the concept is good, but the experience is problematic on several levels. Ecash is walking a line of legality that has too many unknowns. I’m not sure what blossom is - but would be curious to know more. My understanding of DVMs is that they are custom feeds similar to what Bluesky has. This is playing on the edges of experience innovation, but it’s not enough. Exhibit A is all the chatter on Bluesky about echo chambers and needing to remember to go look at the feed w/ flowers. It is 1000% amazing that people are experimenting. And it should absolutely continue. There’s so much untapped potential to build new and better experiences from the protocol.