This a really good post from Jack.
Part of the answer might just be time. The tech is real, people are building on it, and it takes time for people to be burned by permissioned systems to discover permissionless ones now that they exist.
I do think that bitcoin wallet + social graph is a big combo in the long run. The fact that you can just look up and pay anyone you know without that person taking action to tell you their payment details, especially in an open source and international environment, is a pretty big deal. Not just zaps as tips on posts, but zaps for Nostr marketplaces or for saying “pay me on Nostr” for products/services unrelated to Nostr per se.
And for the social network part, I just like the fact that Nostr is permissionless and open. Twitter has a huge network effect and I have plenty of friends/connections there, so I still post there a lot and use it for research as well. That is irreplaceable until it is not. But Nostr feels different. The tech feels right, the group that adopts that tech early feels right, and so to me it feels right to post things here that I would not otherwise post to 675k Twitter followers. Less filtered, for better or worse.
I used to be involved with individual small forums back before widespread social media was a thing, and was an administrator for one to help run it, and that type of smaller community was valuable. In fact, I inadvertently met my now-husband there 13 years ago, who was also an administrator. The forum had fewer than 50,000 people, with only a few thousand active at any time, but in context that is the size of a significant town.
But while Nostr still has the “feel” of a smaller forum now, its open source and permissionless nature gives it enormous expansion opportunity. While programmers do their best to build new features and capabilities, I try to seed this current smaller version of Nostr with unique content that doesn’t feel right to post in a larger centralized setting but feels more right for a smaller decentralized community of adventurers.
Because I want permissionless and open source tech to win.
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?
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