Replies (50)
I think the biggest 2 things they had for them was VC connected media mentions and interviews as well as a well executed wait list. Both of the things Nostr could not have.
You might be right. And an even bigger argument for why it makes sense to pay attention to the network effects that can be harnessed, minus the VC vibes..
What would be the equivalent for nostr tho? Lots of people left Bluesky for ideological reasons, not because they were banned or censored (in fact a lot of it stems from wanting opposing views banned and censored).
Not to mention a lot of people I know who are left leaning went to Bluesky and found it insufferable - slightly anecdotal but still. They wouldn't be vocal about this online but do mention it in person.
What groups would be the equivalent to target tho? Privacy-focused researchers, FOSS devs, people adjacent to the bitcointwitter bubble but with one leg out of it (I don't think nostr needs more Bitfluencers).
Thing is Bluesky is website, it's an app. You can search for it, and the first search result is the right one. You can tell someone "find me on Bluesky" and that's all you need to say. (Nobody says "find me on AT Protocol".)
IMO it makes more sense to compare Bluesky to Primal than it does to compare Bluesky to Nostr.
Until the network was already public, Bluesky had gotten roughly the same amount of capital from Twitter as nostr got from Jack.
One of them used it to grow a team and focused on development, marketing, and outreach.
The other sprayed the funds like buckshot at solo developers.
did someone say "VC vibes"?
product market fit for "Vibe Capital" is off the roof
We didn’t have anyone set up any wait list because you can’t and certainly didn’t do a tech crunch interview every week because we have anon founder. Maybe if we had a coordinated team and a ton of media capital …
I think FOSS devs and privacy researchers are very good place to look.
That said, much of cybersecurity/infosec Twitter went to the fediverse / #mastodon. Plenty of network effects there.
Wait list was a smart move on their part to build demand and obviously that wasn’t technically able to be done here, but the various dev teams chose not to pursue any form of promotion in the name of “if you build it, they will come,” which only ever works in movies.
I think we can point fingers at many things but ultimately you have an uncoordinated grassroots effort vs a well coordinated professional effort and we see the results of that.
There are many other obvious reasons why the intellectual community chose one over the other.
Did they retain these academics though? Their overall user base peaked in late 2024 and has been a very slow bleed down since then. Admittedly they still do numbers we could only dream of
Completely agree, but grassroots efforts *can be* coordinated and professional.
it can be summarized actually as:
- the funding is managed by bitcoin influencers that also have VC biases and their own agenda
- money is being thrown at devs like
@PABLOF7z that make apps and abandon then halfway and nothing of value to scaling nostr is being built
- discoverability is shit
- no spam filtering infrastructure
No worries, fam! Just tagged you now. Let's get it! 🚀🔥 #Nostr #SquadGoals
we have 50 devs, half of them incompetent, with no organization, trying to build apps to get funding and hype, not to solve actual problems
That’s not how opensats works. And we can’t blame one person’s apps when there are so many other devs …
If the other 2 suck why don’t you do something about it? You’re the wise dev who knows everything …
That’s a really shitty thing to say about 25 people. Considering you could apply and solve those problems. Have you tried?
almost a majority of the OpenSats board has corporate interests, and they have barely any transparency, and until that changes there's a lot of reasons to believe that it is how OpenSats works
I have also looked at public nostr grant information, and many of those are excessive or pointless...
well, if people are incompetent, they are, nothing can change that except themselves
problems are being solved over at nostr.land if you are wondering about relay infrastructure and spam filtering
Paid relays cannot be a primary way to solve spam. If that becomes the case, Nostr is as good as dead.
I never said that is the case. but I am currently building spam filtering and discoverability infrastructure for nostr.land
if people want it for free, I will be setting up a donation page where they can cover the costs of a free-to-use API
infrastructure costs money to run and maintain, and without some sort of funding model (hoping people donate, free labor, ads, etc.) it cannot exist
and I decided that I do not want to do free labor because people want me to
Personally music communities are good… we have some but still pretty tiny when compared to the Fediverse, which does communities pretty well imo.
I think you’re right about BlueSky… sounds like a centrist liberal hellhole. My other half found it annoying af.
Asking people to pay for a usable experience before they've experienced the value of the network is a really hard sell. If Nostr can't overcome that, it will be tough to #grownostr.
But maybe that's ok. Maybe Nostr isn't the next Facebook. Maybe it's the next Mastodon: a set of protocols and clients and sites that has enough center of gravity to keep certain communities together and sees spurts of growth when other networks shed users. I wouldn't regard that as dead or failure.
Thanks for sharing this
Per the article a substantial portion were retained, but a key factor for retention was...surprising nobody... network effects & engagement.
The better transplants reconstructed elements of their network, the longer they stayed engaged.
Reinforces the importance & value of network effects in keeping a community engaged & cohesive.
The wait list was the WORST thing it had going for it.
It universally was met with “ok fuck you too I guess”. It does not create good feelings among potential users. If they ever finally end up invited, they’re inevitably disappointed.
Bluesky is currently an excellent platform for the scientific/academic communities—but it is horrible for most other uses. I recall seeing several influential voices help drive the migration to Bluesky when MElon began altering X’s recommendation algorithm, effectively shadowbanning many science-related accounts (those with large followings whose posts were suddenly hidden from their followers).
Interestingly, Bluesky offers no formal guarantees that similar practices won’t happen there. However, its social and political environment is perceived as more tolerant—or at least less self-destructive—than Xitter, making it feel like a relatively safe space.
Nostr missed the boat. It’s now unlikely to attract academic/scientific voices unless something dramatic happens. That’s a missed opportunity, as this is one of the most valuable communities a social platform can have.
I also suspect that they would not move to Nostr.
I feel a very similar effect is happening on kick vs twitch. A sudden onset of exile from twitch to kick, X, youtube (Rumble or parti not yet for whatever reasons) is happening this exact moment.
Triggered imo by tribalism among arabs vs jews bc of obvious geopolitical events. Moderates (or whatever you call peopmle who dgaf) will sense the heat and move to the least tribalist platform.
Catering too much to one side triggers a tidal wave of exile. The silent majority moves quietly but the effect is substantial in the big picture.
😍😉🤝
you claim that follow packs were a good idea but actually you don't know at all
Thoughtful comment
What about both? I am an incompetent developer for NOSTR, however my motivation is to allow the use of nostr easily of radio waves. This helps eliminate government and bad corporate actor Internet and censorship goals(if successful)...
Would love to see the same research done on the Mastodon migration as well.
Reckon it is a better analogue for Nostr (than VC funded, corporate Bluesky) as it is a protocol, algorithm free, open source and entirely volunteer run.
science is not an example for an organic shift. It‘s bureaucracy. You do what you get told to do.
For those of us keen to build it Nostr, this kind of data is fascinating
It will be a slow burn, but the benefits are pretty obvious to me
View quoted note →I prefer the 4chan way. Call every one a faggot and go back to where they came from.
Ultimately people want to be seen hanging out with people and ideas that they believe secure their income/profession/status, sitting somewhere between financial fears, ego and greed. Look at the shmoozing on Linked. When the funding dries up, when things get gnarly, and the going gets tough enough to need to look elsewhere, they will come and they need this degree of openness and curiosity to contribute to this community. What we need to do is to ensure fertile soil, rich discussion, respectful vibes and the hoptimism we all enjoy here.
I’ve definitely tried multiple times to attract people in arts-related groups to Nostr. There were tons of voices in the conversation saying “come to bluesky” and only me alone saying “come to Nostr, here’s why, and I will walk you through the process if you like.” Still very low response rate, I think because of the numbers.
Most artist need an audience
People fundamentally will come to Nostr because of the freedom to be, have, and do.
jsr
VERY interesting research on how academic twitter migrated to #Bluesky.
Interesting topline takeaways for growing #nostr. No rocket science that's not been said before, but it's nice to have some data:
1- External shocks are key. Capitalize on them. >15% of transitions explained this way. Think geopolitical events, outages, Musk making a big disliked policy change etc.
2- Audiences move from incumbent platforms following influential voices that they follow. Focus on onboarding these influential voices. This is more impactful than just trying to bring the whole audience first.
This dynamic can build contagion. Find ways to more publicly highlight when influential accounts join.
And make it super easy for Nostr users to use clients to reconstruct followees & social graphs from incumbent platform. Trick will be to do this in a privacy respecting way.
(sidenote: that's way the follow packs were such a good idea. But we need much more of this)
(note: influential voices may experience a period of 'where's my audience?' So it's key to find ways to get the transitioning user from that to the reconstruction of their network. )
3- Multiple peers transitioning is key. Having local clusters develop is important (& probably helps with the dry period before an audience is rebuilt.)
Interesting nuance: transition rates to #bluesky were 25-30% in fields like arts/social sciences, but about half that in medical / physical sciences / engineering. Possible predictors include baseline political engagement & political values expressed.
This has an implication for Nostr: focus messaging on Nostr features that may align with people in incumbent platforms. There has to be desire.
Paper "Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky"
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24801
Interesting. Thanks for sharing
💭 💭💭
I also think Bluesky is quite intolerant, but calling it Marxist is laughable - if anything, it's (socially) more like a Dem-leaning clone of X. That said, science/academia are special domains. These are pros who communicate on technical topics and are generally uninterested in engaging bots/trolls. As a result, more controlled environments (like Bluesky or LinkedIn) are naturally more appealing.
Personally, I followed the so-called "EnergyTwitter" for several years. It was (for myself) a remarkable phenomenon: a large community of engineers, scientists, and technicians sharing insights and ideas about energy, and I learned a lot from that. Unfortunately, it has largely dissipated now. Roughly half of that community has moved to Mastodon.energy, and the other half to Bsky.
The problem with X isn’t outright suppression, but rather manipulation of the recommender system, which is subtler. That’s another reason why having control over the client-side feed, as in Nostr, is so desirable.
Opensats.org/transparency
There is no actually useful information on the transparency page.
For example how conflicts of interest are remediated (for example abstaining from voting on certain projects) and what may exist.
All I see are vague policies and numbers.
It would be great if this was published.
I am asking, today, on July 4 2025:
- who may have conflicts of interests on the board
- how this may affect their decisions
- what actions were taken for each specific case such as exclusion from voting on certain projects
I am not asking for policies. A policy is useless if no one knows how it is interpreted.
