ZeroHash's avatar
ZeroHash 1 week ago
The fact that only 0.1-1 % of humans are intetested in censorship-resistance and privacy at all is one reason. The other is: the mainstream is fucking afraid of using 'keys'. They are not able to grasp that concept. They can't handle self-hosted things and they don't want to. They lose their fucking passwords and need someone to recover passwords for them when they are lost. BTW: The UX is ten times worse for normies. Try explaining to normie-internet-users that their data/posts are gone now cause a relay is offline and they should have run their own relays. Or that they can't use image-uploads cause someone needs to pay for the hosting. Or that half of the apps don't work very well and are only vibe-coded over one weekend and then abbandoned. I spent a lot of time showing the Nostr protocoll and different nostr apps to people. They mostly don't like it. Bad UX. Imo: Nostr is niche. And will always stay niche.

Replies (1)

Constant's avatar
Constant 1 week ago
Alright, lets tackle this: First, privacy is not really a Nostr talking-point. Aside from apps not needlessly spying on you, and if they do want all your base to be are belong to them, you simpy use another app because you can. Nostr is first and foremost a publication protocol...i.e...public; it was not designed to be private. Second, censorship-resistance from its political angle indeed is not all too interesting to most people. But the internet itself is censorship resistant, was build for that purpose, and is very much the reason why it caught on because it also means fault tollerance. The fact that some content creator gets away from view because it gets (shadow)banned for whatever reason, or platforms simply stopping existence, or some AWS panick shutting everything you use down ARE reasons why Nostr is simply better; because it does not (necesseraly) suffer from those things. You don't need to self host anything, Nostr is delibaretly not P2P. To quote the intro of the ''white-paper'': "it does not rely on P2P techniques, therefore it works.". As for keys. Humans generally are perfectly capable of savekeeping things. It is not some foreign concept, we do it all the time. They are just not as familiar with cryptographic keypairs yet. This is just a concept that they need to develop intuition around, in order to addequately leverage the practices, tooling and systems we have and can come up with to mitigate some of the rougher edges. Saying ''they are not able to grasp that concept'' is frankly stupid if you look at a bazillion of everyday things we ''demand'' the general populace to ''grasp'' in order to function in daily life; you just never reflect on them because they are already normal to you. Data-loss is first up a bad relay setup; and second not some incomprehensible thing. What, are people suprized they lost their stuff if their house burned down? Same thing with the key stuff....do we have ''house rotation'' for the moment your house burns down? Are houses doomed and will never take off because a lack of ''house rotation''?Do people expect that magically their valuables, like photo-albums to re-appear and are they confused they are gone if their house burned down? Ofcourse not. All of this is such a cold take, because basically what you are complaining about is the fact that people have yet to develop an intuition around a completely new paradigm. Well...duh, obviously. Zoomers can't read analogue clocks anymore, is that because analogue clocks are some mysterious ultra-turbo-mega complex thing? How about you try to explain how to draft and post a letter to a zoomer, or how banking worked before the internet. You will probably have just as much of a hard time explaining that as you have explaining Nostr to newcomers. In first instance, this has nothing to do with Nostr as such, but just with the fact it is new, and therefor unfamiliar. They lack the concepts, the words, and some image on how things roughly fit together in order to incorperate it into their world-view. The thing is, non of this actually stopped any new paradigm from ultimately becomming normalized. So that brings us to the question as to why a transition to the new paradigm would occur at all. That, i already gave a brief outline for that.