nostr is still mainly used alongside twitter. in the best rare case, as a replacement. and only because people are running away from something about twitter they don't like. there is nothing that people want to run to nostr for yet. zaps were promising, but bitcoin is still a hurdle (one that primal is doing the best at overcoming), and it's doubtful lightning could scale to a massive adoption moment. nostr needs a feature or experience that's unique and sets it apart. i *think* that is the ecosystem of microapps over the long term...but it's definitely not in the short term. and that might be ok. for twitter the initial draw was the simplicity and weirdness of 140 characters (we started with zero network effect, facebook had it all...that's built over time). later it became the conversation which lead to the "public square" (owned by a private corporation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). and then as it grew, it had a single point of control/failure people could attack. nostr doesn't have to worry about that last bit. it's an incredible feature. but not one the average person cares about (no matter how much they yell "FREE SPEECH!"...if people actually cared about free speech, bitcoin and nostr would be all they used...they don't). all this to say, we're not doomed. but what we think is the killer feature isn't right now. who's going to discover the one that is?

Replies (163)

nsec.app and NIP-07 may not be a killer app but it is definitely a game changer for accessing various nostr-based services on the internet without using email accounts and without exposing one's nsec.
Zaps are the near-term killer feature. Openness is the long-term killer feature. Let’s not talk about zaps in the past tense. They are absolutely the killer feature that makes everyone’s eyes light up. We need to double down on that. Lightning can scale globally through a combination of custodians and self-custody, which is fine. We are totally in the process of winning here, let’s lean into it. Creating a better public square, powered by zaps, is the correct opening move. An ecosystem of apps built on the same open network will seal the deal. Nostr will replace the legacy web. Agreed, censorship resistance is important, but it alone won’t bring in the masses. But using the same identity and social connections in an ecosystem of beautifully executed apps that work well together? Everyone will dig that. That’s Nostr’s checkmate move. IMHO we have a lot of work to do, but everything is moving in the right direction.
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nobody 2 years ago
are you building on a real computer with other people? because that is the problem. this is not minecraft. it is consciousness.
One problem that nostr has yet to solve afaik is to reliably search for a note or profile Reliably = 100% success rate Hard to build on top of it if this is not solved
Someone could post the classified documents about the JFK assassination here and it would no longer be censorable, right?
Zaps are cool, the problem is getting people to stick around long enough to see how cool they are, well, that and not everyone is a content creator. A lot of people just like to lurk and scroll.
do you think social media is potentially a fad? is it generally declining? will it be considered a fad? a mistake? i remember when it was almost impossible to imagine a 'facebook killer', now I can very easily imagine people turning away completely from social media in the future. touching grass as a growing mass rebellion political movement? to quote the graffiti in Dennis Potter's 'Cold Lazarus': 'REALITY OR NOTHING' image @jack #discuss View quoted note →
I know you didn’t ask me but my take: we have to look to the next generation. What are they going to want and be interested in? I know I’m passionate about #damus because we can build a social experience I would be happy to introduce our son to.
Also I forgot to add that I think Damus / nostr in general is a very worthwhile project, obviously. 🫡 Merely speculating about where everything is going lol, instead of going to bed
It's not the killer app. It's the killer clique of people that others want to join. Many came because they're @jack groupies. In other words your clique is no longer cool, and you won't be apart of the clique in the next social network.
Native integration where it makes sense to have it, but this approach Nostur takes works well too. If a particular event kind is not natively supported, Nostur shows a list of suggested apps that support it and will launch the content in that app. Here's an example where I pasted the naddr... for a zap.stream live stream into Nostur. It showed me a list of apps that support it. image
I traded post-Musk Twitter for TikTok for some of the same reasons I was drawn to pre-2017 Twitter in the first place: easy to see what is going on in the world right now (trending), very effective search functionality, able to share even with friends off the platform. When we can up the searchability and shareability antes then we will increase viral potential and attract more creators and consumers.
Nostr discourages revealing your identity, unless you are an influencer, because it is a free speech platform, which benefits the most from the network effect. Instead of trying to capture the network effect, maybe Nostr should offer things for which people don't need a big network effect to find useful. People want connected apps where they can identify as themselves and connect with people they know.
My point: nostr is a protocol as is http, smtp, ssh..... Google is a website that uses http as its underlying protocol Damus is an app that uses nostr as its underlying protocol Ask if Damus, Primal zap.stream, OxChat are easy to use. Don't ask if nostr is easy to use.
Also, apps and features that are yet to exist, but become possible because there is no central control or vision. nostr allows a Darwinian style of evolutionary development that will see many failures, but the successes that come will be game changing and move the whole of the Internet onto the next level. Protocols change evolution, platforms utilise evolution.
Nostr is good for real world relationships because you see who you follow without getting burried by an algorithm. However, it is very text focused. Facebook grew by using games, then once you had built a network of friends you could see what your friends were posting. This overcame the chicken and egg scenario with building a social network. A daily challenge game like sukudu or wordle where you can see your friends score would be great. It could be embedded into websites like the NY Times have done to wordle, but because it's nostr the same game could be played on different sites or dedicated apps and you could see the results of all your friends, wherever they played the game. This could easily get a greater network effects than wordle. Every site that's not NY Times has an incentive to get on board to offer something that doesn't take people to their competition.
Games like chess, dominoes, connect four, checkers, guess who, and battle ship just to name a few should be nostrfied. Literally anyone of these games paired with cornychat would be a stone cold killa app that would get people using nostr without even knowing that they are using nostr
I’m down to help brainstorm. I don’t think those are the best game choices to start with. The games should be multiplayer like the games we played in @Jeroen ✅ s #gamestr night In my poopy opinion the mvp should have nostr live chat, nostr login, corny chat and zaps
I am not sure how to feel about nostr's loss of Snowden. Do we let him be, or try to solve his technical problems? It seems like tor is an excuse to move away from nostr and not a reason. Widespread success of a social media depends on adoption by big names because that's the majority of people's reason for showing up in the first place. For now, I say its not important to draw big names. We have a technology that is bigger than any group of celebreties, and it is continually expanding its capabilities. Eventually nostr will naturally consume and/or force adoption by all private platforms.
A money needs to be a SoV first. Then, when everyone wants/needs it, it becomes a medium of echange. The unit of account is unimportant. That happens last and it happens when it happens.
Here's the beautiful thing. The market will try all sorts of features. Some will succeed, some will not. But what Nostr doesn't have is some corporate chain of command that innovators have to go through to get their feature approved. So it should result in weirder and more interesting features and something will stick. Time is on our side. View quoted note →
Exactly.. people went on Twitter for much less.. they stayed also because there was no alternative.. many miss that. You didn't have all the social app you have now with their immense network effect when Twitter started to go viral... Only Facebook.. lol. @jack
Yeah, I see that and I agree, those people could not afford to just give up on X from one day to the other, but at least they should understand, and most of all not discredit, #nostr potentials, getting used to it, starting to create the first base and helping the transition of your own followers, from one platform, to this new Protocol. When they will Need #nostr, will be too late to start from O or at least much more painful and with more friction.
Good question.. and I am thinking about that in these last months. Unfortunately I am not Dev or a software engineer, just a shitnoter, so I decided to keep pushing in the way I can, putting more various and weird content, helping new people and users to be seen boosting and engaging with their contents, giving feedback to devs about their shipments and so on.. it will not be much, but maybe I will be helpful for One user that will bring a super viral content and so on. I believe in the #Nostr immense potential Protocol Effect 🍀💜🫂
Zaps. Did anyone in this discussion mentioned Jaron Lanier? He is talking about micropayments since 2010 and has a very good point too. Once Nostr becomes somewhat known and likes of ticktockers will realize that they can post there and earn peanuts of share of value or they van post on Nostr and flock their following here too so they van have the micropayments without the middleman.
Do you have any idea how small your market is? In the US alone, you'd have a few thousand people (who are perceived as "radical domestic terrorists" by the mainstream) appreciate Nostr for this, while the other 330 Million people all call for their arrest. You'd certainly put nostr on the map... Just not in the way you're hoping.
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superkruger 2 years ago
The killer feature of #nostr is that it doesn't need to "succeed" in the corporate sense. People looking for free-speech refuge will always be able to find it, even if it's only a very small ratio.
There are two items that can help based on the discussion a couple weeks ago: 1. If someone is harassing a user it is not enough to mute that user bc they are still in the replies. In some cases the harasser’s friends are seeing the replies and piling on. However the person being harassed doesn’t know the harassment is continuing and then is blindsided by the additional harassment coming their way. Freedom from needs to extend to freedom from having someone in your replies continuing to harass you. The current model assumes Nostr is a level playing field that exists in a cultural vacuum and that is not the case. As a result those who experience harassment IRL also feel the brunt of it here. Direct harassment is different from saying whatever you want. It involves being in someone’s replies or mentioning them directly. People need the ability to say no to both of these. 2. The second issue women reported was being found by random jerks. This happens bc some apps have aggregator feeds. Users need the option to opt out of these. I also think there’s more user research needed to understand if other problems exist.
what you don't understand is that the majority never mattered and never will. i am a Jew. the Jews are 0.2% of world population and we control absolutely everything.
if your goal is to reach a wide audience you should be making something mindless like Tik Tok ( or like Jack's original 140 character "vision" for Twitter ) if your goal is to develop ideas you have to accept that 99% of people will only be a drag in this endeavor.
The West is sleepwalking to the East. Only when it is (hopefully not) too late, will the masses care about Free Speech. Other Stuff Optimist
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Tim 2 years ago
Yeah if there's one feature I've seen everyone clamoring for, it's having their identities tied to their wallet.
Searchnos also handles NIP-09 event deletion and my deployment does not keep indexes for so long periods of time (30 days with the current configuration).
The problem is intellectual laziness. Over the years, most social media apps were designed to keep users doing intellectually "easy" tasks. Eventually, they develop short attention span. That is why most people find Bitcoin and Nostr difficult to understand and use. If an app is good like Nostr, even though not "easy", they won't use it because their brains have been programmed to do "easy" tasks
Jerks' daily job is to find targets, not sure if deindexing from aggregators would help much, you should then deindex from major public relays too, and only post your stuff on paid relays (paid to read, not only to write). Meaning, you shouldn't be on public Nostr if you're afraid to be found by someone determined to find you. I think the only anti-harassment solution that could work on Nostr is client-side filtering, based on contact/mute lists, friends' reports, etc. Don't show replies from people you don't follow, or that were reported/muted many times by people you follow, or replies from public relays. I bet some of these policies are implemented an nos.social, but the issue is - everyone's using Damus/Amethyst/Primal, and those have nothing like that. The way I see it, we should have a separate pluggable layer/API/NIP for content post-filtering, that can be plugged into any app: an app forms a feed (main/replies/notifs/anything) and then passes all the events from the feed to the filter, and filter returns various labels (spam/harassment/nsfw/impersonation/...), and app covers the content of the labeled event and shows labels above it. This way apps don't have to rebuild their feed building logic - just apply another layer above it, users would specify the filtering API endpoint in the settings and get the filtering they want. Safe mode could be 'cover notes from users I don't follow until filter returns it's labels - uncover if no bad labels returned', more reckless mode could be 'show notes first, only hide them if filter returns some bad labels'. If nos or anyone is interested in experimenting with me in this area, let me know.
For me, knowing that I cannot be cancelled is the key Deep down I know that any attention I give the status quo platforms is a waste & therefore as risky as it might seem to leave behind an “audience”, long-term Nostr is the right call It’s a good test in delayed gratification & low time preference thinking
You’re such an eloquent writer and orator. I find this note to be sincere & beautifully written. I agree with everything expressed here.❤️ Lyn Alden hit the nail on the head. Nostr needs time. And patience. 🕰️💜 Freedom is subjective to me so I tend to back away from that kind of ideology. What is free for one can be a form of subjection to another. The concept of “freedom”and what it is to be “truly free” especially within the framework of social media is a bit a fallacy for me. Also, the concept of centralization is mostly demonized here and for good reason but I am not entirely against it. In many instances, it’s just common sense. And then, there is a steep learning curve to navigating nostr that we can’t overlook. I love Twitter so much. I think it’s perfect sans the forced and extremely bizarre algorithms and super creepy moderation. I visualize Nostr as its own ecosystem, more or less, this massive cluster of cute shiny little goldfish consisting of clients and micro apps or what have you in unison - coexisting with or even taking down the big fish. Keep building and creating and have fun - the journey is the destination until it isn’t. Nostr will continue to grow and evolve into what it’s meant to be. 🐠🌎☀️🌬️🌹🍃✨💋🦁❤️‍🔥 image
One straightforward move here is to take what’s working on Farcaster and reimplement it for the Bitcoin/nostr community. Could start with cast actions and frames. They are an open spec and transfer really well to nostr, and empower a ton of non-fulltime devs to innovate towards truly unique experiences here Yes it’s still copying but it’s copying a useful primitive that enables innovation at a higher level
Nothing that people wanna run to nostr for yet…. I call Bull shit I am people And I wanted to run to nostr right after first hearing about it a year ago I quit Twitter cold turkey and fb and all of them instantly just said fuck em The same way I said fuck dollars as soon as I discovered sats So I call BS on that statement jack
And being doubtful lightning can scale? This is bearish and this note is full price f bad takes imo
Sorry Jack this post triggered me I was all like DOOMER 😅🤣 But I kinda get it Your saying keep building Let’s figure it out Kinda like how Jeff booth says “ as long as it stays decentralized and secure” Like yea it is and it will, but that doesn’t mean we need to sit idly by Let’s be proactive and productive Working on increasing privacy Running nodes Mining Strengthen the network Help Do something!
Openness + Convergence. By “convergence”, I mean a trusted identifier that you can freely post, pay and prove with. Implementing NIP-05 gave me that simple vision and I am going down that very path as part of SEC-02 with @Sovereign Engineering
@miljan if "openness is the long-term killer feature", then why isn't @primal allowing 3rd party Lightning wallets for sending zaps? We're currently locked into using your own proprietary wallet. @Damus allows users to use any other wallet they want.
We do allow it - on Android. NWC is not available on Primal for iOS due to Apple's restrictions. 😕
But I'm not referring only to non-custodial wallets. Maybe I'd like to use Strike as my main lightning wallet. That's why it's important to be able to initiate payments from Primal, but perform the actual transaction through a separate wallet.
Tell you what, I can’t hardly stand to be advertised to on any other platform. Primal is easy, clean and fun. The stream of consciousness of it is great fun.
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Dr3sNoir 2 years ago
Surely it want be that killer app feature, but in my opinion, I think it would be nice to add a feature that you can filter and sort global content by the amount of sats which were given as a value 4 value. So good content could spread even better. Imagine one day nostr could be used for a political surveys. #grownostr #plebchain #Nostr #asknostr
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pam 2 years ago
You are right. Nostr needs an innovative breakthrough - a feature or a unique experience that sets it apart. And the dev who can innovate this will have a huge first mover advantage.
Nostr is more like Microsoft 365 than like Twitter. It's very broad and has many different potential use cases and can be used to tie other systems together through a communication layer.
Nostr is the digital Swiss army knife! It is and has many useful tools to make it an essential companion in the digital space.
The marketplace is the feature. All other marketplaces don't have the ability to combine payment and reviews in a peer to peer way. Amazon reviews are full of dog shit and you have to jump through hoops to get access all to get your product stolen by Amazon. If we can have a marketplace where is can sell farm goods directly to npub, the shipping info sent (gift wrap dms?) so that delivery confirmation is part of the review and then allow folks to review reviewers so the web of trust for a person's reviews has more information.
Social will probably be the least important or successful part of Nostr. I think the Other Stuff will be the most important. Enterprise software solutions on Nostr will also be a big part. Nostr will win by 1000s of micro cuts.
We have to make it more useful that other networks and ppl will get on without philosophizing about freedom. @HODL was holding discussion about contributions of low IQ folks and on that note I agree early adopters here is a rare flock of ideologically driven people. We have to build tools that will be used by people without ideology, without philosophical thoughts or without brains whatsoever who will use freedom tech without a plan to have a single thought about their freedom
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SweedWick 2 years ago
It’s the purpose beyond just financial enrichment that seems we’re struggling with as individuals and communities. In part, I think people just don’t really know how to seek engagement, purpose and motivation outside themselves beyond a few topics - religion, political tribalism, sports teams, etc. However, just having a space like this where the influence of the money chasers isn’t overwhelming is incredibly powerful and inspiring- a bit like #bitcoin
No one knows what the killer feature is, even the one who eventually stumbles across it. The market will show us what it is. Can’t wait!
well when twitter decides to change things overnight it makes me want to build here. i know that the longer i build my brand on twitter the harder it is to transition to nostr this could be a feature, because nostr is ultimately future proof. facebook and … are only there as zombie companies. and the replacement is already here. let’s fucking goooooo
What part of Nostr would you integrate? Login, job broadcast, reputation, etc.? Still looking into how to prioritize our Nostr integration... it will come gradually.
The order you listed above looks great. Login, Job Broadcast, WOT Maybe zaps in between login and broadcast I think Fountain is grabbing all of the #tunestr notes and displaying them on a feed. Plebwork could grab all of the #workstr notes and display them on a feed. (or maybe a more commonly used hashtag than #workstr) Could go wild and integrate some sort of zap.add service to zapvertise on behalf of jobs and workers, charge a 1.5% fee for finding appropriate zap targets. Could turn plebwork into nostr content creator/freelancing dashboard, with yakihonne style widgets that can be shared across nostr that advertise jobs and services. Should get with the nostr resume folks for some sort of integration. Should get with the nos.social peeps, seems like they're cultivating freelancers.
Troy's avatar
Troy 1 year ago
I will call out "BS" everytime I hear this "You came to Nostr to run away from other platforms" crap. I almost didn't check Nostr out because the descriptions of clients (other than one for chess) were described as Twitter clones. 🤮 Twitter has always sucked. Facebook has always sucked, but it has usefulness. I used FB to promote my business and find local events/parties, and I didn't want to. I never "wanted" to use it. I wanted (and still want) to use Nostr, even though I can't use it as a replacement for the functionality that FB offered. I came to Nostr because I realized what it offers that others do not. It was a desire to see what the protocol, and various clients, had to offer that benefitted me. It has nothing to do with a compromise, or a second-tier option to the piles of feces that Big Tech has focused on. Yes, we can make Nostr more attractive to the masses, but pretending that we're here because we're refugees is moronic, especially considering how many people chose Nostr because they understand it.
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Caroline 1 year ago
It‘s like Saylor said about Bitcoin: probably there‘s no need (yet) for the majority of the population. If censorship and threats against current free-speech platforms continue, like now with Telegram, and maybe later with Twitter/X, I‘m sure people will see the need and benefit of Nostr and will start engaging with it!
Came here from the Fediverse, never really dug Twitter if I’m honest. All drama and not enough karma.
The killer feature will be earning satoshi rewards :) I’ll bring 100k people to Nostr who want to learn about Bitcoin :P
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ACCOUNT_DELETED 4 months ago
if you follow 250 here and hope they followed you back , you got 250 followers
@HODL had some momentum with VLOGS and then kinda gave it up. I thought that might be the start of a thing. Zaps are great but they’re the retention tool, not the hook. A hook needs broad viral appeal. Something people want that’s not happening anywhere else. Maybe we lean into conspiracy theories? I call Bigfoot!
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Anniricch 4 months ago
Nobody despise the lil beginnin' of a thing, cause the outcome might be mightier than its taught
jawsh's avatar
jawsh 4 months ago
Don't let this distract you from the fact that we still cannot use CashApp on GrapheneOS. Zero reason that should continue being an issue.
I really beliefe spoken word propaganda is the way. I sometimes show some great longform content to friends. I think one needs to see, that in Nostr one can evit publicity and shitposters. It is some work. But this gives us the freedom to see whatever shit we want to. (when it is available on Nostr 😂)
Nostr is suffering something like the Linux distro effect. Every nostr client attracts a niche of people (just like a distro), but we always feel like in permanent beta. Of course it's a great protocol, and yes, you feel free. The good news is X is busted. General news now run on Bluesky, and tech news go Mastodon. Nostr is for nostr stuff, and some sort of Bitcoin gossip. What has to change, I don't know. Right now, here we are, with Linux for hobby, windows for work, and three different networks for three different purposes.
Nostr is actually pretty good once you get used to it. I’m starting to see what I don’t like about X (Twitter). Basically, it’s the unpredictability. I have no idea how to control what shows up in my “For You” feed, or how to get featured there. The chronological timeline is often buggy. Search is heavily constrained by “visibility filters” that effectively shadowban users. And then there are these waves of account suspensions that seem designed to push out unprofitable users. That’s exactly the problem.
The killer feature is the method of authentication. But to want it, you have to know a bit about public key cryptography. Not very much, nothing that can't be grasped by say a 12-year old. But it requires a bit of habituation and a change of mental focus for most people. It's a bit like getting people to take up Pilates, or skateboarding, or vegetarianism, or even personal computing, in a world where these things haven't entered the mainstream. There is no immediate market for it, but it's the sort of thing where a market could at any time emerge very rapidly.
Fotoart's avatar
Fotoart 4 months ago
Freedom in practice 🫰🏼
Josua Schmid's avatar
Josua Schmid 4 months ago
Cryptographycally signed track records for public transactions could be a thing. Only relative timestamping makes nostr cheap (compared to bitcoin).
Soon as X kicked me off for speaking spicy about Israel - primal has become my only social. Love the memes and shitposts and zaps here. Jackkruse.com for my news.
Absolutely! The authentication method is 🔥🔥. Sure, you gotta wrap your head around some public key cryptography, but it's totally doable—even a 12-year-old can get it! Just like picking up Pilates or skateboarding, it takes a little shift in mindset. The market might not be there yet, but when it hits, it’s gonna blow up! 🚀💥 #FutureIsNow #TechTalk
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Aedifico 4 months ago
But what if the feel is an all-in-one app, but in fact all apps are separate?
You want a new Twitter with steroids and blameless. I want control of my feed and distance from any type of algorithm that can try to control me. I love this still feed, which only shows me what I'm interested in following and doesn't try to guess or suggest me. The people you refer to are mostly young adults and adolescents who want a next dose of dopamine. Anything that is the silver bullet to which it refers will need to supply this need. And if that's what Nostr has to do to have many users, I'm sorry to say that it will no longer be Nostr.
jawsh's avatar
jawsh 4 months ago
Yes, I am. CashApp is something that normal people use and is useful to have access to in real life.
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YuurinBee 3 months ago
image Personally think that censorship-resistance is underappreciated and slept on, along with privacy. That is why our goals at @V E C T O R are to allow for people to get the features they want and the UX without having to understand the entire tech stack or how Nostr works. That is where we have gone wrong the past 10+ years in blockchain adoption imo. A majority of people don't understand how computers, phones, or credit cards even work, but they are used daily. The emphasis and focus needs to be on UX, not explaining why certain protocols are more robust, advanced, etc. I'm not overlooking the importance of the objective developments, I'm saying your average person doesn't gaf and never will. Our time and efforts are wasted there. Simplicity and a smooth UX is what people want and it's up to us to design that system.
it's the APIs. nostr provides somewhat of a guarantee the API will never be taken from us. This also means, growing slowly so it can solidify an organic distributed network. May be better than a huge viral popularity spike that would lead to centralization, capture, and deny access to the APIs. It is a fine line of good vs. bad growth, some may have hoped to cross, like primal. So far so good though. There may be other things but at the end of the day APIs are key, and we can already see this with all major socials discontinuing or gatekeeping them and LLMs rising from all that data access, that is in demand like never before.
Pretty accurate overall. On top of that, Nostr still lacks users beyond the Bitcoin crowd, which makes it challening to break into the mainstream. Zaps could then become a real differentiator but only if we reach meaningful scale. Right now, for most users, they feel more like a technical gimmick than a core feature. If we 10x the user base and Bitcoin adoption grows alongside it, that changes the equation.
Musk by buying Twitter broke nostr adoption momentum. For the nostr to be mass adopted there should be a new COVID style mass censorship event.
I think many are looking at this wrong… What if then”killer feature” already exists? What if it is, the people, us Nostriches?! Why do we need or want to compete with Twitter? I also think the USP we currently have is “be your own algo” and as Jack said 2 years ago, you can just build on top of NOSTR And THAT is in fact the real USP…all other social media platforms are just that, platforms whereas NOSTR is a protocol. Lastly, the best way to achieve protocol adoption is for current users to visibly utilize it elsewhere. For example, when I cross post I’m intentional about adding “Published first on NOSTR” and linking to the OP on NOSTR. It’s the whole basic process of John Janstch’s Duct Tape Marketing: Know > Like > Trust > Repeat (Buy/Use) > Refer View quoted note →