my hopefulness for the longterm success of nostr swings between excitement+optimism and total despair. there is no inbetween. it honestly could go either way.
to me it has already succeeded, but some people might only see success as complete world domination.
I would definitely like to see it grow a lot more, but if this is all it ever gets to I guess it is what it is.
one thing for sure is if the funding dries up and working on nostr becomes unsustainable, I can rest knowing that the clients and tech I have built will keep working long after I'm gone.
So many startups and web apps come and go, but protocols are forever.
Replies (36)
Thank you for Damus's part in keeping me here
real ones build through the despair. Protocols don’t need permission….they need persistence….keep on keeping on brother…
One can only control what they put in.
I think eventually #nostr will "win." Maybe it won't take over the world but I think it will have a large enough user base to stay relevant. It took Elon buying Twitter before ActivityPub and the Fediverse got more attention. I think someday Nostr will get the attention it deserves.
What is the success?
Nostr sucks because it's engineers building whatever they want: obscure tech that normal people don't care for
Building clients with empathy toward the average person is very difficult. It’s something we have spent 90% of our meetings talking about this year.
I wouldn’t attribute it to malice or indifference. You have to spend lots of time talking to users and watching how they use the app. It is very time consuming and not trivial to do, especially with a small team
@Daniel D’Aquino @elsat @Vanessa @ericAlways need to bring in some normies to see how they respond to something
Them feels
You’re on a different nostr than me. The nostr I use is awesome thanks to people like
@jb55!
Build it and they will come (and stay) they said.
Insane amount of listening, learning, and work involved…
👌
All my dislikes of #Apple aside , this is what they really nailed ..Jobs was the champ of normies ..
Pretty much. When I see people talking about multisig nostr event signing I can only lol.
The unfortunate reality is most people don't care about freedom
maybe if we care about their freedom that will be good enough
I first learned about nostr with the introduction that it's a social media version of Bitcoin. However, I felt that this doesn't guarantee nostr the same inevitable success as Bitcoin, and that decentralization could even hinder its growth.
For decentralization to work properly, the issue of spam needs to be addressed, and ultimately, to solve that, users would have to pay money for long-term sustainability. While this isn't a major problem for Bitcoin, I felt it could be a significant issue for social media.
Would people really be willing to use a model where they have to pay even a small amount of money just to post a random thought on the internet? I was a bit skeptical, but after seeing how easy payments can encourage spending through nostr zap, I’ve become somewhat more optimistic.
It seems like
@Keychat is trying to make this work somehow, and I truly hope they can succeed.
jb55
my hopefulness for the longterm success of nostr swings between excitement+optimism and total despair. there is no inbetween. it honestly could go either way.
to me it has already succeeded, but some people might only see success as complete world domination.
I would definitely like to see it grow a lot more, but if this is all it ever gets to I guess it is what it is.
one thing for sure is if the funding dries up and working on nostr becomes unsustainable, I can rest knowing that the clients and tech I have built will keep working long after I'm gone.
So many startups and web apps come and go, but protocols are forever.
View quoted note →
How do you think the Internet was invented, engineers building obscure tech that normal people don't care for.
🫡
Real question, why not have your nostr clients "gossip" more? It seems to me that not propagating notes between relays is the reason nostr will never, ever be able to scale.
Both Meta and Automattic (WordPress) announced ActivityPub support before Elon purchased Twitter, and the fediverse had already seen multiple big waves of user influx at that point. Not even mentioning the countless papers written about it, or the many different implementations in existence by then. I think there were about 25K active servers/instances in late 2023.
It was Bluesky that grew massively after the Elon purchase.
Either way, the important takeaway is that large-scale adoption can only happen when you already have a healthy network running, and it has enough users on it to be interesting enough for newcomers to stay for longer. Posting exclusively to the networks you want to grow, instead of cross-posting to the networks you want to shrink, is the best way of creating that sustainable base.
Exactly my point. How did the internet become usable to 90% of people?
Have you been able to up first week retention?
How's your marketing comms? What message to whom and where?
To put it into perspective, the Internet was conceived in the early 60's, it went live in 1969, it converted to modern Internet protocols in 1983, commercial traffic was permitted on it in 1989, the same year the web was invented. Broadband was born in the late 90's and Google didn't exist until 1998.
Mobile Internet started as a protocol called WAP on dumb phones on 2G networks in 1999. Smart phones came around 2001, the iPhone launched in 2007, Bitcoin launched in 2009. NOSTR launched in 2020.
WE ARE STILL EARLY
We could put out a timeline showing years instead of dates and compare to make it more visual.
Exactly!
Actually, 90% of people are used - and abused - by today's Internet, from the dopamine triggers constant flow to systematic fact-checked fake news and a privacy nightmare that turns "1984" into a bedtime story.
Nostr has a lot to learn from the Internet, to try and not copy/paste what it has become.
Who remembers the information superhighway on tomorrow's world 🤣🤣
Yes 😂
we have done a bunch of user testing and it seems where most people get frustrated is simply finding people and then finding their community. This is why 99% of people don’t stick around, which is why our focus this year has been mainly onboarding into topics, topic communities, damus nip05, etc
It’s still very much a chicken and egg problem, but if we don’t have community tools and discovery then it will never happen.
mainly because of a limitation in the iOS design. I have been working on new technology to get around the limitation (nostrdb). So it will be able to more reliably sometime in the future.
It’s further along in notedeck, almost there.
You just need more principled big accounts to switch to Nostr. In my example I followed Gigi
@Gigi and Odell
@ODELL here. Valued their content more than the majority of slop on X.
Chicken and egg because big accounts on X will be small accounts on Nostr (for now).
So far it seems to work great I don’t see any features I’m missing as compared to X. Maybe a better search function.
Only bitcoiners seem to have made this leap, it’s an easier sell for them.
We need to build tools so that other communities can exist on here as well.
Follow packs help a lot. We are adding interests to onboarding as well to help users find people who have similar interests.
I'd say increase certainty. Certainty that relays saw the post, much less relatives and friends. Certainty that shadowcensor doesn't happen. Big picture of network helps. Oh, I'm looking at this cluster of notes over here. It's an objective global agreed view I can depend on, anxiety goodbye! Personally, I would (I think) post things 1/1000 people would enjoy forever, if I'm getting a fair shake. If I can't even be sure my fam can see it when i @ them, I lose interest. Disclaimer, I'm not a good test market like Gary, Indiana.
#BEAWARE
Users don’t know what they don’t know.
New paradigms don’t need users, they need top notch product strategists, designers, managers etc.
Empathy is useful but innovation happens when you do the same thing differently.
When everything is said and done, more is said than done…
Watchya talking about?? I’m just a normal person and I think nostr is awesome thanks to people like
@jb55 who are really smart and build stuff I can just use.
Very accurate summary
