Scale and "connected communities" aren't necessarily at odds. You need a certain scale to have a functioning "social network" of any meaningful utility.
Any interest category outside of Bitcoin or Nostr development itself basically has 0 discussion taking place on Nostr. You simply don't get that with 15k DAUs.
This is why I've been really trying to encourage the improvement of Mastodon bridges. Mastodon has ~500k DAUs.
This still supports all the good stuff about small, connected communities... Because nobody's going to force some "trending" algorithm on either Nostr or Fediverse users.
All it means is that you can actually "find your people" much better because you can select for the 0.01% of the population that actually shares your interests / worldview / tastes.
Replies (4)
I get the point about scale, but we’re mixing up growth with arrival. Healthy networks don’t show up fully formed. They take shape through shared culture, trust, and repeated interactions. Humans evolved in tribes of about 150 people. That’s roughly the maximum number of relationships we can genuinely maintain. Beyond that, systems need time to build norms, roles, and identity before they become something larger.
Nostr is still in that tribal phase, and that’s not a weakness. It’s how meaningful systems always begin. First you get depth, then diversity, and then scale is a side effect. If you jump straight to “big,” you get noise without connection.
Bluesky and Mastodon don’t introduce a new mental model. They feel like the social apps people already understand, just with different plumbing. Nostr asks something different. It changes how identity and connection work. That shift takes time because it creates culture before it creates scale.
All good points...
I guess this kind of mirrors the discussion about Bitcoin adoption where people make the argument that, you have a "front-end" fiat, but on the backend it's BTC... (C.f. square terminal)
I fully believe that this strategy, similarly to Mastodon bridging, will lead towards people making the "paradigm shift" towards BTC and Nostr respectively.
Mastodon users will eventually come to appreciate the value of self-soverign identity, just like the vendor who can now accept BTC on their existing square terminal will inevitably see the value of self-soverign money.
At the same time, I love the eclectic little community culture of Nostr today. But if we really expect millions (billions?) of users, it's sort of inevitable that "Nostr culture" will go away just like "internet culture", which was a thing in the 90s, basically doesn't exist anymore...
That being said; just like phrases like LOL, etc, originated in 90s chatrooms, I agree that we have a chance now to define cultural norms _before_ crowds show up... Which is very important
While this is true, the truth is that the bitcoiner discussions here are better than discussions on larger networks, this can be true for any topic.
The main issue with decentralized platforms is that people willing to build community like on Reddit also want to control community. In a system that resists control your ability to attract weirdos who will put in the work and not have the power of a mod is rare outside of freedom tech. It will happen though, just will take time.
