Replying to Avatar ₿en Wehrman

This is the third or fourth time we've seen a MASSIVE wave of attention hitting the social media censorship problem worldwide—enough to catalyze MILLIONS to delete a major legacy app and download a new one—yet Nostr has received practically zero new users from the exodus.

I've been posting all over X trying to pull people to the freedom protocol, but it's become a waste of time when there's literally less than ten of us who are consistently sacrificing our time/energy trying to generate Nostr buzz on the legacy apps.

At what point do we direct serious resources away from building a million new Nostr apps everyday that nobody uses, and focus 1000% on marketing, so we can show the world the awesome shit we've been building here?

I don't have a strong handle on the inner workings taking place behind the scenes (especially when it comes to grant money and other funding mechanisms), so I'm asking honestly:

What are the main blockers we have right now that are preventing us from making a significant, organized marketing push aimed at bringing new users to Nostr? (Paying big creators to make videos about Nostr, reaching out to big podcasts to platform our best Nostr educators to a bigger audience, clients hiring commission-based outreach reps that pay based on bringing new users that sign up for Premium, etc.)

Is the problem 100% a lack of money within the ecosystem? I know there have been rumblings in the past about an OpenSats-type funding mechanism to help boost Educators and Content Creators, is that still in the works?

Is it a lack of strong business models among clients that would make new user acquisition a strong enough benefit to allocate resources toward hiring people to go out and hunt down new users to bring over?

Lack of purely marketing-focused entities that could act as a centralized hubs for organizing such campaigns?

If it is one of the above things, what steps do we need to make as a community to clear out the obstacles?

Or am I completely off base on all of this, being too impatient, or focusing on the wrong things when there are more important upstream problems that need to be fixed first?

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts, because this recent UpScrolled saga has been a disappointing signal that we are failing at positioning ourself as the perfect solution (WHICH WE ARE) to the problem millions are facing worldwide. #AskNostr

nostr:nevent1qqs8vnwuuqrll7sqv6memeqhfdxury94xpslp5c85s9sqs4wj3vn5vqpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtczype9ac7tzwl4nfmnmnvfg9r2ug0p3wxul6k73rmsq59uw8va056zzqcyqqqqqqg0l8xc9

nostr:nevent1qqsqcyeg5zpvlgfk3xtyw2qmsu24pcvgn0qqhm8kuqrl37cuemjmp5gpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtczype9ac7tzwl4nfmnmnvfg9r2ug0p3wxul6k73rmsq59uw8va056zzqcyqqqqqqg25vg29

100% agree, even though i'm mainly a developer/designer, this is now my #1 priority. what's the point of developing more and more stuff if there isn't a sufficiently big and active community to use it? like you alluded to.

i don't think there's 1 sure-fire way to make this work. i do think some of the methods you outlined might help. i'd be curious to know exactly what upscrolled and farcaster and some of the other guys did to get traction.

for my part, i'm experimenting with commerce. dissident soaps, black rifle coffee company, etc seem like companies that are already pretty closely aligned to the bitcoin/nostr mindset, which is the hard part. what if we set up a retailer that sold some of their wares? moving units might get them to pay attention, join nostr, and become active. and perhaps being their customers along with them (over time). this is what i have in mind with my reboot of nostr:npub1ckwzuka977ac2qme9dq6cjxzwz6e3lncnfncn8kc90hryz9k8vxs0ekn0w.

my other follow-on initiative to that is to create a lifestyle brand to promote open-source software. make foss look cool, not nerdy. another big problem we have is that these tools we like are nerdy and fiddly, and that's something most people don't want to deal with. getting rid of that image, and emphasizing the driving purpose of FREEDOM in all of foss is paramount imo. freedom is cool af. it needs to be branded that way, particularly with respect to software.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Well Said.