Brutal but true...however...Systems like mastodon also had a small pool of regular users to begin with. This is a stronger core group than I have seen in most social. It functions waaay better than most others I've tried and the dev speed is amazing. It just needs another community to onboard.
Discussion
I’m not sure mastodon is a great example of a successful network.
Here’s a great blog post on why mastodon failed to retain users even when so many people actively wanted to leave Twitter. Not all of it applies to nostr but a good portion does: https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/
It's dated and the federated model is a cluster- too difficult to use.
You may not be aware but there are ways to link fedi and nostr- so to some extent the two are interlinked.
Nostr has some of the same problems with onboarding.
I am a fan of going in the direction of customisable clients that can start off with recommended packages of starter relays-follow lists that people can share around. This would be good for other niche communities that want to be here.
Nostr already seems to me to have more functionality built out than fedi.
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