According to nostr.band (all of Nostr):
Best day in Jan, around 21k trusted keys
Best day in Feb, around 19k trusted keys
Best day in March so far, around, 18k trusted keys
Back in August 2023 it was 20k, that's as far as I could dig. So seems numbers are down about 2k since the summer.
Very minor shrinkage, and an nice bounce could be just around the corner—maybe this is just Crouching Tiger stage. But when he says Nostr isn't growing at the moment, technically he's not wrong.
Technically, on one ambiguous measure lol
What less ambiguous measure would you prefer? Total zap amount by week?
How did you get count those keys? Who or what is behind them? Also, measuring the success of a 100% uptime network by zaps during Bitcoin’s early monetization phase is flawed from the start. I don’t zap bc I know sats are generational wealth. At this point, I’m not willing to give one sat for some hot take or meme. The point of nostr is that devs, users etc are unruggable. Idc if I’m the last one standing. This is the best shot at achieving free information flows in the era of AI. Measuring growth is a symptom of fiat syndrome trying to grow at all costs
This is their methodology:
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".
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
