Oh, a few wannabe Nostr thinkers are starting to worry more again about why we are not getting any of that exodus from the big social media platforms. And they think it is because of some hexadecimal IDs or other stuff that does not look exactly like those familiar big platforms. And solutions are being thrown around that all point toward centralization. So for these people, Nostr should basically be represented by just one client. And be as easy to use as the big platforms. I think they have not understood Nostr at all and they cave in too easily and actually turn back to centralized structures, even if they are supposed to be simulated on a decentralized protocol. We like to talk about a free markets here, but we want the quickest possible consolidation around a quasi platform, a quasi client for all. End the Nostr client development, let us finally do some marketing, they say. Nothing will come of that. Sacrificing Nostr's strengths just to go back to old centralized structures. By the way, we already have two examples in internet history, actually three, that show us when a platform built momentum: 1. One chose the private, college approach (Meta) 2. Another drew attention with content that had never been seen on the internet before (Weblogs) 3. And the other introduced citizen journalism and reported for the first time on things that were real but not yet in any newspaper (Twitter). Even if that trend is reversing now. It was always just about content. Content is king. Still is. None of them had to do excessive marketing, the users came on their own. What are Nostr's unique contents? We haven't created anything unique here that would attract anyone (I include myself in that), except complaining, self praise, and a general relieved "phew, finally free to post what I want". We are still too conditioned by the big platforms and just don't want to be censored with our mostly toxic content. But what is new and productive with us? Our developers are the most. Except they are still a bit too detached from the mainstream. But the potential is there. AI shows good approaches, Bitchat shows a big niche market. But our real strength has not become visible yet: crisis resilience. Because we don't have the big crisis yet where Nostr would really flourish. If all fiat ways were closed and no influencer could earn anything anymore, if all big platforms were ruined by over-moderation from algorithms, if all creativity and expression were suppressed, then Nostr would really bloom. We are already on the way, but not quite there yet. But when we get there, when Nostr becomes the only refuge island, we better should have built suitable decentralized structures that affect local life. Then we will not need marketing either, then the masses would come on their own. We need to keep evolving toward a more human network. Real communities form through free exchange of goods and services for hard money. Not through "hodlers" who stubbornly cling to their coins and wait for the right moment to trade them back for fiat and buy a yacht. Check out how many Africans and Asians are doing it. They are already benefiting from Bitcoin, from its features of unrestricted commerce free from institutional players. Western hodlers, who treat it like a long term investment and then maybe die or lose access to their coins (oops) before they could do anything with them, don't create such markets and communities.

Replies (17)

Danish's avatar
Danish 1 week ago
See, untill relays get technically and economically affordable to have mass audience, this shouldn't be issue, gradual growth is understandable. But hurdle is only that, after that mass adoption should be the goal. Because that only will solve the problem of lack of content, as in economics more people means more inventions and better way to organize and live life, same goes for social media. Without that we cant have much content. Also one of the socialist problem: "incentive to work" applies here, if we just ignore content engagement and throw it in bucket of slop. That will be solved only if mass adoption take place. Otherwise it certainly have incentive to work problem. I dont get why people against it, like mass adoption or marketing as collaborative approach is not a call for centralization or algorithm control.
I think much of the upscrolled hype will die quick. One of the founder’s involved just was talking about how they are against censorship but want to block speech that is “harmful” It’s only a matter of time before it’s more censored more than the others - it’s the centralization effect and happens every-time. Hopefully by then people will start to consider nostr
well, like i said, it is a pretty low bar of entry to run your own relay. if everyone was running their own i don't think we would have too much of an issue at that scale. so my answer is similar to what is often said with folks over in btc land - we need more users to embrace the protocol and run a btc node/nostr relay.
running other relays is more complicated than my orly relay. been thinking a lot about making curl|bash scripts to make it so you literally just log in as root, run this command, and point DNS at the server, and it has caddy set up, or the relay does its own listening/TLS directly on 80/443. need to do some work on backup systems as well, that is kinda important. the blossom blobs also need to be properly backed up, i lost a few dozen images when i migrated my relay.orly.dev to new hosting. i was running too many things on the VPS before, and the gitea instance in the set of servers was making a huge mess because it wasn't blocking all the AI code scrapers. this is another thing that has to be automated, and it's quite trivial to get it right, actually.
Suppose I just want to use HTML and some CSS without backend server applications. (Blogging etc). I've heard of hostr and nostr web
So just static files. You can get a hoster for that for almost nothing. If you use a Github repository for development than Github pages (for free) might be a good choice. Your website updates, whenever you push your code changes. Or if you want to stay anonymous and pay with bitcoin @Mynymbox - Privacy friendly hosting solutions (Europe) is great and affordable. There are lots of options.
Brother these are same folks who are "Bitcoiners" yet advocate for the USD scam, e.g. Salor.