Replies (48)

Judge an emerging social network by the tech, not the community. Community vibes change wildly as the network grows, as has happened here and over there. That said, the clients are very polished and custom feeds are amazing and work great. The self-moderation tools, however, are questionable. We’ll see where that goes and how it affects the culture and growth. As for the community itself, there’s very little crypto talk over there. The larger community hates it and always has, but there’s a growing Bitcoin community slowly coming out of the woodwork. If I had to guess, bitcoiners far outnumber the .eth crowd on Bluesky.
Bluesky is a great project to learn from. Their investment in infrastructure paid off with big growth and a great UX. They have become more open over time. #nostr still has the potential if it can "out-open" them, by transitioning from a 1 person hobby project to a completely open, transparent community (work is ongoing there). Then use bluesky as market research of what is possible with great infrastructure, great ux, great content, and great growth (where nostr is lagging).
Likely a combination of things, but you asked me to pick one. Better infra is an easy win, for example @OpenSats could earmark 1% of their nostr fund to help the relay network. That would be a nice touch.
I did try and talk to Gabor about the value of open protocols and how t2 ni Pebble should consider building it open. I shared my research in to open protocols. I genuinely wanted him to succeed but as an open project.
It seems that only a few are genuinely interested in building based on an open-protocol, and the rest want to gain control and maybe dress on the openness if it fits the marketing strategy. It may require exceptional level of clarity and vision to use open-protocol to capture enough value to sustain the business effort of building it. The VC money is also not attracted to less than brilliant cases and it’s easier to pitch/build another Twitter/X etc. clone with the hockey stick growth projections.
No links to Nostr? The Verge clearly didn’t do their homework. Jack explained here why he unfollowed everyone. And I don’t think he was referring to X as “freedom tech”.