Yes! So far I’m finding it remarkable how little actual communication and sharing happens here. It’s a bit like Bitcoin band camp with posts of a broader appeal the exception rather than the rule.
Discussion
I think there is an effort to expand the interests on here. It has to happen organically. It can't be a duplicate of whatever happens on the other networks. My hope is that the band camp feel will go away as people find other things in common beyond Bitcoin.
Yes there needs to be more slices of life, stories, history and opinions from people who are genuinely not looking for fame.
It’s already happening. It’s a matter of being able to find it: When actual useful search engines start deploying on the network, it’ll really start diversify in content.
I’ve seen early hints of this. Posts about permaculture and horse poo, more and more about cooking and food, travel and outdoors is growing too. Lots of new languages than six months ago too.
I expect once we get a few passionate accounts in each area, that continue to share, their following will grow and Nostr diversify. I’ve noticed people even mentioning now as the best time to grow as a future top following for that content - there is definitely interest in building communities here.
What do you think would make nostr search engine more useful and help with diversification, on top of the primitive keyword search?
That’s an interesting question. From a ultimatum perspective I’d say having ways to organize post topics into communities would be helpful for enduring social connection. Hashtags help, but an actual group would be better after a certain point. I don’t know enough about search functions to have any suggestions about that.
Realizing I’m so algorithm trained that I don’t know how you operate w/o it. I.e. friend suggestions etc.
Back in the day of Usenet news, it was effectively a group. Each group/channel became its own ecosystem. People surfed across them as like changing channels.
There was generally a weekly automated post of group basics - culture/rules, Admins, faq, how tos etc.
Thank you for your perspective.
On nostr there are also relays, many people wish relays to become the topical hubs. Problem is that clients don't allow users to choose where the posted note is published, which means it's distributed to some semi-random selection of relays w/o any consideration of the relays' rules. And relays don't have good tools to moderate/curate the notes they receive.
As for the groups - if a group is open then it's equivalent to a hashtag. If it's closed then... you kind of get the same question of 'how to moderate this thing', it needs to be supported at the protocol level, and there should be admins willing to do that.
I'm excited about lists (NIP-51), and emerging apps like listr.lol. I'd say you could create custom lists and then let people subscribe to them (when that's supported on the clients), this way people would create custom lists of profiles and clients could suggest the most popular lists for new users. This seems like the simplest way to enable crowd-sourced creation of custom feeds without centralization, algorithm, or huge resource requirements.
A chat AI trained on nostr notes data
Would open up a whole new world of search queries
Would even enable features like "show related notes" or "show profiles with similar interests", etc
I don't think these features require ChatGPT specifically, and I'm not sure ChatGPT could point you to specific notes - it could probably summarize stuff or answer questions. But I've never used it, so it's just a speculation.
Besides, people are quite hostile to algorithms here, and ChatGPT-based algo should totally freak everyone out :)
Agreed. More and deeper sharing will come and it will. I realize It’s also on me to share more and be more of what I want to see in the world. Both will come. Glad to be opening the topic here with all of you. 🥳