Nostr feels like it's in a catch 22 right now. Nostr needs good content, but creating good content needs incentive. Will nostr have a "gradually then suddenly" moment, where all of a sudden it's the place to be and there's this massive influx of users and content? Or will it be slow and steady growth? Or will it simply remain niche among the techie crowd that likes to tinker (the "Linux of social media" as I saw someone aptly describe it yesterday)? Incentives like zaps can scale with enough users. But putting in the massive amount of time needed to build a reputation and repertoire of material is exhausting if there's no eventual growth and return in sight. Unless you're simply doing it out of boredom or have nothing better to do with your time, I guess. We can only say "we are early" for so long before we will have to accept that it's too late for Nostr if it continues at the rate it's going.
Discussion
Nostr, because you can never be shadow banned, demoted or banned. YMMV
I love it for that. I think most of us active here now do. If it remains only within that niche then that's not inherently a bad thing, but it does have major implications on how much development Nostr will see. Eventually apps and relays will cease to see updates at this rate.
The ones most afraid of being banned or censored are the ones that make a living online. With no revenue on Nostr I think itβll take some time.
I think Nostr will continue to exist as a place for people to go that want to escape big tech surveillance or censorship.
This means that itβs a matter of how bad it gets in traditional social media before people migrate to Nostr. I donβt see a strong enough incentive for people to just naturally want to come to Nostr.
Also, if the existing social media company integrate with Nostr that could be huge for the protocol
That's true, Nostr growth doesn't have to necessarily be from users coming into the protocol, but could be the protocol going into the places where users are. Interesting if we see that happen.
I think the value of Nostr won't be its content, but its people and social connections. As well as its opposing values to centralized alternatives.
Between finding people you like and escaping digital gulags, people end up coming to Nostr. I think it'll be slow going with bursts of growth just like Bitcoin, which also has passive, voluntary entry points.
Right now most people that come to nostr don't stay. That is not sustainable even for the current ecosystem of users/apps/services. What will it take to retain users? My mind goes to content, but there may be other things.
I have been having the feeling that "content" is a construct created by the centralization of social media. People were erased and content took their place. Accounts became the vassals of platforms to produce content to be shown between ads. People forgot how to socialize and now know only how to engage with content.
It's hard to express, but I think Nostr brings people back to social media. We come here to hang out with frens more than we come to consume content. But when people come looking for "like and subscribe" mechanics, Nostr doesn't compute. Should we try and recreate the feel of content platforms or should we strive to be different, letting to social graphs be the real selling point?
Nostr does seem to humanize online social networking again. But will it thrive without economic activity? Everything requires time and money to build and maintain, even in the digital spaces which Nostr occupies. Content is an obvious thing that can create economic activity, although not the only thing. Nostr's potential as I see it is in removing the platforms and advertising agencies that stand as middlemen in centralized social networks. People are no longer their vassals, but that doesn't negate the need for economic activity to drive and sustain growth. That's true in any setting where people coexist.
We'll have to wait and see, because Nostr is grounded in physical reality and capitalism. What's monetized is what will survive. The clients and services that can pay their server and development costs will survive. The businesses which sell enough products by advertising on Nostr will survive. The creators that get enough zaps will survive.
I agree, economic activity is what will make Nostr thrive, because it's a necessary condition for its survival in the first place. By being a free platform and a conduit for free money, I think Nostr has the best chance possible to be where everyone ends up.
I'm hopeful and optimistic that it can be. I believe that Nostr combined with bitcoin payments creates an incredible open and free (as in freedom) playing field. I know it won't happen accidentally while simply sitting back and waiting. Some can afford to play the long game, but unfortunately many individuals can't. I hope Nostr can be a digital space where individuals can thrive online without becoming captured by centralized entities. I just wonder how it gets from here to there while remaining viable.
If we think of those middlemen as the thumb on the end of a garden hose, it's clear why the amplified reach models work. When information flows organically, it will saturate heavier near its source before spreading, then only slowly and so far. Income is time sensitive. With things like communities, the opportunity to create flow-channels for self-advertising already exists, but that part of nostr needs a whole lot of cleaning up to function properly as of yet. Even there, I don't know if the speed of audience/consumer growth will be fast enough to create a pursuable value for most creators & sellers. It's tricky to envision a system that discourages advertising but has enough economic activity to thrive. Even self-advertising gets to feeling invasive so there will be a constant audience loss & gain pattern for anyone who puts in the work to gain the follows, but then what time are they spending on creating quality content/products? π
Rock, meet hard place. ππ
i think that the mindset of the psycho corporate mind manipulators muddies the waters and that actually things will organically gel a lot better than you think in a self emergent system, just like brain cells are cooperating with each other and even two whole hemispheres with different biases cooperate in brains
the control of signal propagation exerted by the silo owners is to benefit their own interests, and it is very similar in its influence on the human social network as a tumor is to a brain - it consumes space and resources, and it gets in the way of connections forming between systems
I can't say that's inaccurate in the long game but there would need to be some sort of transitionary system to make it sticky in between. I just can't tell you what that looks like π
i'm looking at it right now
nostr is going to end up being the "transitional system" for a lot of things
already i came up with this idea of using nostr events as control messages for access control then i learned that nostrocket is building something like this... and maybe another project, i forget, didn't stick in my memory
nostr isn't the complete answer, it's the connection layer, there is still other systems that need to be discovered and added to the stack, fast synchronising data storage is one i'm very focused on
That shown, I think first-mover advantage is a big deal. MySpace and LiveJournal and whatever have been supplanted, but it takes time.
I suspect a centralized gateway/app to nostr that's more normie-friendly (but allows people to migrate their nsec out) would help adoption, but mostly we just have to wait for disillusionment with facebook and especially twitter.
Doing my best with daily #artstr content 
The zap stats I saw were sobering but then again, nostr:npub17u5dneh8qjp43ecfxr6u5e9sjamsmxyuekrg2nlxrrk6nj9rsyrqywt4tp had achieved some staggering amounts in zaps, so I suppose it is possible. He certainly brought a lot of following over from Xitter, so you can't compare his "start from zero" here with other people that started from zero.
I think, we need to have some visibility on nostr's growth. I bought the domain nostr.info to provide exactly this but as we say here in Chile ... no soy pulpo - I'm not an octopus. If anybody wants to work on this, please let me know. I'd have value for value ;)
But in the end I think nostr will not win because of zaps. It will win because it's open to be integrated everywhere and it already provides value where it is being integrated and the more people that use it, the more services will integrate it and the more services that "just work" with your nostr account, the more people will start using it.
Nostr is a free speech virus that will infect every digital social space.
the strength of nostr is that it is censorship resistant. speaking from my own situation, none of my friends, acquaintances, or colleagues are likely to ever be in danger of being censored. they will never have the incentive to come here. zaps are awesome, but only if you are into btc/see it as more than just a speculative investment opportunity. most do not fall into that category. in countries like russia or north korea or myanmar or shit even canada more and more these days, there could very well be huge growth opportunity for the protocol. skeptical it will happen tho.
Someone woke up with a sad face.
Haha quite the contrary π€£ I love using Nostr and interacting with people here. I want it to be booming with activity and content, and I think more people would love it if they could spend enough time using it, but I think that hope has to be balanced by the reality that it's pretty barren around here recently.
What exactly kind of "good content" do you need? Examples, please.
Is my IMEI editor code list good content?
If I repost my gopher posts, docs and articles here, would it be good content?
Zaps are irrelevant to me as long as they are not in Monero or at least Tron.
Valid point that "good" is relative. Like genres of music, everyone has different overlapping tastes. Depends on the diversity of the user base I suppose, and some genres are inherently more niche than others. I'd say an IMEI editor code list is fairly niche π When I say "good content" above, I'm referring less to a specific genre of content, and more to the quality and dedication of the creators. There is a fair amount of chitter chatter on Nostr, and that's fun to a point if you get along with those people, but there simply isn't a lot else for anyone else to want to come here for, and there is little incentive to come here to create it. Zaps are relevant because they provide incentive. They also present a challenge, just as you pointed out, because bitcoin itself has a small user base within the context of social media users.
This challenge is not something everyone is ready to go through. For instance, I need my wallets to be available at least on both desktop Linux and Android. And they must be FOSS in both cases. And I cannot find a single LN wallet in F-Droid that would be actively maintained. Don't send me to Google Play, I don't trust it, at least for this task. What do you suggest?
I don't use f-droid so I'm not sure what's there.
But which FOSS LN wallet would you recommend for Android?
For simple sending and receiving lightning payments, look at Breez, Phoenix, and Zeus. If you're looking for something to use to receive zaps on Nostr, a custodial LN wallet like Alby or Lightning Tip Bot are far easier but also require an email (Alby) or Telegram (Lightning Tip Bot). Zeus can receive zaps non-custodially, but the fees they charge make it not worth it.
Looks like you can get Blockstream Green wallet from both F-Droid as well as an AppImage
Regarding Android, if you install the Obtainum APK, you can then easily install the APKs for Phoenix and/or Blixt wallet, both actively-maintained open-source Lightning wallets.
Obtainium checks for updates, so it acts like a personal app store. For what it's worth, I love Obtainium!
- https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium
- https://github.com/ACINQ/phoenix
- https://github.com/hsjoberg/blixt-wallet
The only maintained Linux bitcoin wallet with Lightning, that I know of, is Electrum wallet. I don't know how up-to-date their Lightning implementation is.
10k daily active users
25k weekly active users
Feels like a good start.
Seeing more "let's go to Nostr and avoid censorship" lately on DedBird.
Yea, not meaning to sound pessimistic or "doom and gloom." I don't think Nostr is dead and I think it has great potential. And I'm going to continue using it. Just wondering which way the trend of adoption goes and what it will take to drive that upwards.
For sure. I recognized the "big picture" thinking.
Just reminding others we've come a long way.
Not to diminish your valid point.
Nostr today is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was a year ago, at least in functionality and user friendliness. It feels like overall user activity is much less though than it was a year ago. But I also believe that some ebb and flow is natural, so maybe this is just a moment of "ebb" π
What about being cancelled on another platform as an incentive? I don't really buy that Elon has turned #Twitter into a free speech platform that will live happily ever after. The fight for speech is just getting started. What will happen if #bitcoin moons this year or next, USD inflation soars, bank runs occur? Will bitcoiners be allowed to freely criticise the Fed, encourage people to buy bitcoin and ditch the dollar? At that point, bitcoiners will flee to #nostr and other apps, and it will come down to the robustness of the tech.
Personal take is some people need to accept others won't always agree with them. That is part of being an adult & growing.
Explaining: The moment I've kindly & respectfully disagreed with someone they have immediately labeled me as an "other" & told said followers they muted me. π€£
Cool. Labels work to separate. Does it mean they are "bad actors", "bots", or any other negative term? It's part of being human.
If the goal is actual growth then some of the "influencers" here should consider how their following will change.
Bluntly, if you want an echo-chamber it won't grow as fast as it should. π₯°ππ«
Didn't Georgia guide stone mention 500 Mln target population? We might get close, but not with the slaves that globalists expect to have, many of those 500 Mln will be Nostrarians!? Respecting people's choices also means respecting their jabs to shorten their existence, their Main Stream Media and continuing FB, LinkedIn, Fiat etc. 2020/21 showed the deplorable state of mankind, and we do need a cleanup. Globalists may have a point there.
Nostr has been discovered, and barring a civilization-level destruction event, it cannot be undiscovered. The knowledge is what matters. When people need censorship-resistant communication they will use it.
(Slightly unlike bitcoin, which also possibly needs the state of the network to be preserved).
the anti-censorship nature of nostr is, without question, going to continue to draw people in as censorship continues to get worse on legacy social media platforms