I get the point about scale, but we’re mixing up growth with arrival. Healthy networks don’t show up fully formed. They take shape through shared culture, trust, and repeated interactions. Humans evolved in tribes of about 150 people. That’s roughly the maximum number of relationships we can genuinely maintain. Beyond that, systems need time to build norms, roles, and identity before they become something larger.
Nostr is still in that tribal phase, and that’s not a weakness. It’s how meaningful systems always begin. First you get depth, then diversity, and then scale is a side effect. If you jump straight to “big,” you get noise without connection.
Bluesky and Mastodon don’t introduce a new mental model. They feel like the social apps people already understand, just with different plumbing. Nostr asks something different. It changes how identity and connection work. That shift takes time because it creates culture before it creates scale.
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All good points...
I guess this kind of mirrors the discussion about Bitcoin adoption where people make the argument that, you have a "front-end" fiat, but on the backend it's BTC... (C.f. square terminal)
I fully believe that this strategy, similarly to Mastodon bridging, will lead towards people making the "paradigm shift" towards BTC and Nostr respectively.
Mastodon users will eventually come to appreciate the value of self-soverign identity, just like the vendor who can now accept BTC on their existing square terminal will inevitably see the value of self-soverign money.
At the same time, I love the eclectic little community culture of Nostr today. But if we really expect millions (billions?) of users, it's sort of inevitable that "Nostr culture" will go away just like "internet culture", which was a thing in the 90s, basically doesn't exist anymore...
That being said; just like phrases like LOL, etc, originated in 90s chatrooms, I agree that we have a chance now to define cultural norms _before_ crowds show up... Which is very important
