Replying to Avatar Derek Ross

If Nostr is truly easier and more flexible, why don’t people use it or talk about it? I’ve listened to every one of your podcasts and loved every episode, but it’s frustrating to hear nearly every guest praise ActivityPub or AT Protocol. When you bring up Nostr, perfectly, in context, it gets no real discussion. To me, that signals they either don’t care about it or don’t really believe in its potential.

I agree we could improve in this area. I thought we were moving forward after the discussions at Nostriga, where clients started experimenting with managing keys and bunkers for users who wanted that option. It worked like the familiar email/password login flow, but since then, those clients have either shut down or moved on, and no further progress has been made.

Someone has to lead the way. Right now, most of the content is “yay Bitcoin” or “yay Nostr” because those are the core communities. We branch out into topics like art, music, cats, homesteading, carnivore, and health—but it often circles back to Bitcoin in some form. What we really need are genuine content creators producing original content beyond Bitcoin adjacent topics.

I don’t think it’s entirely true that all content is Bitcoin related. While much of it is, I’ve seen people share music, artwork, surfing videos, and more that resonate with our smaller user base. So there is variety, it’s just not the dominant flow yet. Bitcoin remains king and will remain king until someone else consistent posts content that resonates well within the community or brings their own community here.

Algorithms themselves aren’t the problem, it’s closed, forced algorithms that are. I think we agree here. What we need is better discovery through feed marketplaces and DVMs. Primal is currently the best at this, hands down. Still, DVMs aren’t perfect. They can be slow, offline, or unreachable at times. I also like Damus’ local first approach as a viable alternative.

people on tiktok actually love the concept of nostr: https://www.tiktok.com/@kyle.siftree

the problem with nostr is the marketing: it's typically too focused on the tech for the avg person to care (because they don't understand it) and typically too focused is on things the avg person doesn't usually think about (censorship, btc, permissionless, etc.)

stop selling the tech; start selling the benefit / the feeling

seriously think: why do people care about anything? what gets somebody to stop on a video and not scroll past? what gets somebody to keep watching a video once they've started?

we need to meet people where they are (not on nostr) and relate to them on an emotional / aesthetic level

nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzq0mhp4ja8fmy48zuk5p6uy37vtk8tx9dqdwcxm32sy8nsaa8gkeyqqsf7z3hclwgu0cdgy6s2zz7kte08up028y5ruj5urc83w2lww9wdyqn67rcq

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stop naming everything after nostr, stop using nostr in the marketing, etc.

it confuses people and lacks aesthetics

just build things that natively use nostr, focus the messaging on things the avg person cares about, and nostr will do just fine