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> There's a lot of surface level content on here.

I think it is a sign of the normification? normifaction? that turned teh interwebz from a business/hacker/cool kid tool in the nineties to a haven for thoughtless, normie content a la today.

Dunno that the mere fact that this process is occurring implies that nostr has 20 more years of staying power, but I doubt it will be resilient to the same market forces that destroyed the web.

I suspect that nostr is likely to experience the same sort of rise to cultural prominence that 4chan did, reach critical normie (and spam) mass, drive off quality posters (or at least drive them underground on the network), and eventually settle into a slow slide from relevance as fewer and fewer people can find good content there, and slowly stop using it.

On the other hand, nostr is run by the people who use and care about it in a decentralized way, which is different than a lot of stuff that has come before it. As long as no relay, no client, no influencer becomes too large, then there is no single point of failure on nostr. Where there is a key point of influence, either over content, or over the network itself, then there is a key point of failure, and there the powers and principalities are able to focus their ire and apply more leverage than you or I would like to imagine they had. They can chip away at each place, one at a time, running down the vulnerable members of the herd until they even the odds in a head on conflict.

Will it be different enough from Reddit or 4chan to be resilient enough to survive the onslaught of censorship from within and without if it achieves the same sort of influence critical mass? Maybe normies are what kills great tools for the spread of ideas, not flaws in the medium itself.

A follow-up point is that for the reasons above, not only are relays that become too powerful bad for the overall health of the network,

individuals who become too powerful are bad for the health of the network.

Any one person who begins to be able to direct a brigade, for whatever reason, is a threat to the health of the network. Any one person who can recommend a client, or a relay, or a group, or any other current or future part of the nostr ecosystem and protocol is a threat to the health of the network. They are a homogenizing force, and not always one for the better. Nostr will be more resilient, more healthy when you use it chiefly or exclusively to talk to your friends and colleageus, not to follow important personalities online, nor those seeking to be first-past-the-post in the race to be the first influencer king of nostr.

If I could change one thing about nostr, it would be to minimize following users, and prefer instead to follow groups, to follow topics. Usenet style hierarchies of discussion would be best for nostr to defend itself against the lurking internal threat of the influencer. The follower/following relationship is how everyone else does it, and it is worth contemplating whether that model is really for the best. It has been too long since it was thoroughly examined.

/diatribe

What a dumb thing to write from such a short post, but there's a lot in it.