Keychat is indeed niche. But it is an example of how payment for every event sent can work in practice, and how an app designed on that principle would approach UX. If nostr had financial compensation baked in at the protocol level then all apps would have to make the choices they've had to.
I don't think people are bad at prioritising what matters. People are generally quite good at prioritising what matters ... to them. What trade offs matter to them. This often means they're bad at prioritising what matters to others, but such is life.
I agree with most of what you say about nostr attracting a generally self-sabotaging crowd in terms of being able to grow to any serious size. I don't know if nostr 1.0 can make it past 50k daily actives to say nothing of 100k to say nothing of 1 million, to say nothing of 100 million. It's hard to get across how small nostr is. Bluesky is over 100 times smaller than Threads, and nostr is over 100 times smaller than Bluesky. And nostr hasn't really grown in 3 years. And there's no indication it'll grow by any real degree in 2025 (it'll likely shrink). Or in 2026. And nostr is bleeding $1m a month in grant funds, which is a little unfair to all but the most sanguine of donors, they should be seeing their donation flower by now, with daily actives up to least 50k. (I mean maybe they're all all very long-term and chill about numbers, but if I was a donor I'd be looking at the numbers regularly.)
As with anything there could be a deux ex machina in the works. But overall I think there are great lessons learned and a nostr 2.0 stands a much better chance at success.
