Nostr Web Client

This is their methodology:

https://trust.nostr.band/

Keep in mind this is not measuring Nostr to something else, it's measuring Nostr to itself over time, so while methodologies might be flawed trends over time can still be informative.

Growth is important in terms of ensuring survival. Decentralised protocols like Nostr do collapse. Secure scuttlebutt, which had 30,000 users spread across several clients at the peak and was arguably even more decentralised than Nostr, is no more. Devs need to feed families and take on other work, every morning something that used to work fine stops working, and a spiral sets in. Many such examples.

If a point of sustainability has been reached then I agree that measuring growth is not so important. But if that point has not yet been reached then often times the only alternative to growth is collapse, as seen time and time again. So growth in that context is just a synonym for survival.

I'm optimistic on Nostr, I think it's very much alive, and building for it makes sense. But it's definitely not immortal "just because".

CptKook 10mo ago

Of course growth is important. My point is that growth “just because” isn’t. The method you referenced is fundamentally misguided. It’s impossible to accurately measure the growth or “success” of a distributed network like nostr because it doesn’t have a global state. For example, zaps can be sent out of band: privately, anonymously, or directly over lightning.

It’s safe to say that vibe coding obsoleted professional human nostr devs months ago. This isn’t safety critical code, everyone is a dev now.

The name “secure scuttlebutt” is bad marketing lol. It sounds like some gay underground fight club. From what I can tell it differs from nostr in that its protocol is complex, documentation complicated, and wasn’t integrated with the Bitcoin ecosystem. So it appears more difficult to build on and bootstrap a community to run relays.

Finally, I never said it was immortal. It will persist until the last human OR machine falls

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