Replying to Avatar jsr

VERY interesting research on how academic twitter migrated to #Bluesky.

Interesting topline takeaways for growing #nostr. No rocket science that's not been said before, but it's nice to have some data:

1- External shocks are key. Capitalize on them. >15% of transitions explained this way. Think geopolitical events, outages, Musk making a big disliked policy change etc.

2- Audiences move from incumbent platforms following influential voices that they follow. Focus on onboarding these influential voices. This is more impactful than just trying to bring the whole audience first.

This dynamic can build contagion. Find ways to more publicly highlight when influential accounts join.

And make it super easy for Nostr users to use clients to reconstruct followees & social graphs from incumbent platform. Trick will be to do this in a privacy respecting way.

(sidenote: that's way the follow packs were such a good idea. But we need much more of this)

(note: influential voices may experience a period of 'where's my audience?' So it's key to find ways to get the transitioning user from that to the reconstruction of their network. )

3- Multiple peers transitioning is key. Having local clusters develop is important (& probably helps with the dry period before an audience is rebuilt.)

Interesting nuance: transition rates to #bluesky were 25-30% in fields like arts/social sciences, but about half that in medical / physical sciences / engineering. Possible predictors include baseline political engagement & political values expressed.

This has an implication for Nostr: focus messaging on Nostr features that may align with people in incumbent platforms. There has to be desire.

Paper "Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24801

What would be the equivalent for nostr tho? Lots of people left Bluesky for ideological reasons, not because they were banned or censored (in fact a lot of it stems from wanting opposing views banned and censored).

Not to mention a lot of people I know who are left leaning went to Bluesky and found it insufferable - slightly anecdotal but still. They wouldn't be vocal about this online but do mention it in person.

What groups would be the equivalent to target tho? Privacy-focused researchers, FOSS devs, people adjacent to the bitcointwitter bubble but with one leg out of it (I don't think nostr needs more Bitfluencers).

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I think FOSS devs and privacy researchers are very good place to look.

That said, much of cybersecurity/infosec Twitter went to the fediverse / #mastodon. Plenty of network effects there.

Personally music communities are good… we have some but still pretty tiny when compared to the Fediverse, which does communities pretty well imo.

I think you’re right about BlueSky… sounds like a centrist liberal hellhole. My other half found it annoying af.