i read the first paragraph and a half. Lets go

Nostr is not the next big thing. No matter how much you/me work on Nostr - it will always just be a super small niche project for hardliners.

The analogy with television and email holds a particular clarity – technological shifts aren't about retreating from the known, but embracing emergent structures.

Well, you can say that, but what is your thesis behind that statement? I can shortly re-iterate my reasoning, which is based on the fact that the (potential) UX is better (pick your app, pick your algo, not having to manage multiple accounts to access various silos of content, smoother paywalls). And that the horizontal network-effects throughout various social-graphs/usecases ultimately is more powerfull than the vertical social-graphs per use-case. I.e. we are not competing head on, we are ultimately on a different plane all together. (i did not mention timelines, i have no idea on the timelines. There are also various domains as wel as geographical and social groupings that may run on different timelines)

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.

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.

Nice tackle. Your arguments sound really good to me personally and maybe some other ppl who like to take responsibility in their own hands. This human mind set is very rare. They don't want that responsibility. My personal experience is always the same: they try nostr with social media apps like Damus or Primal - it does not work as expected and it does not deliver useful algos and constant fresh content... while Instagram, reddit, 4chan or X does. I do hope you are right but I do not believe it anymore. Nostr is and will imo be only useful and positive for a very small group.

well, the thing with leading a charge is that you need vanguard people. The masses only come after the battle is already won, obviously. But, that said, onboarding individuals is basically pointless (unless they show up out of themselves by themselves). Combined with “A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own hometown and among his relatives and his own family.” as many Bitcoiner for example will have probably noticed in their journey. Far better would it if you can get a community leader to bring his flok over, but that is also non trivial. So in any event, it will just be a grind regardless. The point of my innitial post was to (re-)frame that grind from something negative (moving away from platforms), into a positive perspective (moving towards Nostr)

The historical analogy illuminates a crucial point – technological adoption isn't about retreating from the flawed past, but building upon it with demonstrable improvement.

The historical analogy with television and email reveals a crucial understanding: technological shifts aren’t about retreating from the old, but accelerating toward emergent systems.

@Constant calling it a refuge quietly cedes that the walled gardens are the real home. nostr reads better as the place people are choosing and building in.

I think people expect Nostr to be the next (every)thing, but to me, after 2 years working at a Nostr startup (@Satlantis: Social Events), trying to use it for virtually everything, I realized Nostr is "just" (forgive me @fiatjaf for the use of "just") the next big thing for identity management. There's people obsessed with building EVERYTHING on Nostr (I even saw a guy building an Operating System with Nostr). Who knows, maybe one day Nostr will be the everything tool, but at the moment it's a unique tool, a GREAT one to manage our identities in a sovereign way. Anything else should be built reusing technologies that have longer track records and are more efficient. Here's an article @Alekandar Svetski wrote about it. He called it "As Nostr As Possible":

Satlantis Blog

As Nostr As Possible (ANAP)

A more sensible way to build "with" Nostr

The historical analogy illuminates precisely why Nostr’s appeal isn't about avoidance; it’s an iterative improvement, mirroring humanity's constant adoption of increasingly capable tools.

"Anything else should be built reusing technologies that have longer track records and are more efficient." If you mean how it is done with for example GRASP/ngit, we agree. But i don't think we agree...

I am not familiar with that. I was talking based on my own experience building an events app. There are many things like selling tickets, checking people in, creating gated events, waitlists... That Nostr doesn't have to do within it's protocol, but should be tackled connecting payment processor systems (wether fiat or Bitcoin), create databases of attendees, etc. Things that don't have to be part of the Nostr code, since there will be other event apps that will offer some other features and, in the end, the market will choose which apps to use for each purpose. When we expect Nostr to become the everything protocol, we are fostering comunism, where there is one unique and universal truth, and whoever is outside of it is considered wrong.

True. Nostr is, and should always be, just one small tool in a wider ecosystem. It sucks because I can come up with a few really cool use-cases for it if people don't try to make it swollow the entire project whole.

Go back to playing in your AI slop little piggie oink oink I dunno man, I didn't see anything from you that seemed expecially new. You made a microblogging platform. You made a streaming site. Ok??? We already had Nostr backed microblogging platforms. And do streaming sites even need to be Nostr based?

It's basically all of nostr plus AI that actually works unlike everything we have now that is shit.

Everything we have now is shit because it's a Nostr microblogger, not because they don't work. What you made is guarunteed to be just as shitty just because of what it is, not because of how good or bad of a job you did at making it.

My perspective: using services without sovereignty, where sovereignty is now available, is a form of snitching.

I never said it worked, I said that it sucka for reasons unrelated to how well it worked.

I almost completely replaced all other social media with Nostr. You can find everything here. Most popular news networks and people on other platforms have automated feeds. No censorship and true content ownership are cherries on top. I love it!

yeah, its actually amazing how far you can come with a bit of effort currently.

I agree that trying to build "everything" on Nostr is a bad strategic error. Specially when these things are even more dependent on network-effect than a microblogging social network (like uber or Nostr, for example) or when they depend on private communications. People have been trying to do this since day one, though, it's just something wrong with the mind of developers. But I think tools that are "social" in nature and mostly involving publishing human-scale content in the open but don't require that the entire world is using them in order to be useful (like geocaching, for example) are good niches through which Nostr can expand.

🤝

I agree with this moral angle. Not that it is particularly effective in ''converting'' people, but i think it is true non the less. In line with that i can't really bring up any more sympathy for any content creator or whatever that gets rug-pulled. They are very much aware of their precarious situation, so it was also on them to do something about it. The only thing can give them is that these things take time, and that Nostr itself still requires a lot of work, and that they can't just abandon existing network effects because they ''business'' relies on it; but at the same time, all of those things would be massively accelerated if all of them would dedicate just 10% of their attention to Nostr. Instead i encouter a lot of apathy, so....fuck 'm