Replying to Avatar ₿en Wehrman

This is the third or fourth time we've seen a MASSIVE wave of attention hitting the social media censorship problem worldwide—enough to catalyze MILLIONS to delete a major legacy app and download a new one—yet Nostr has received practically zero new users from the exodus.

I've been posting all over X trying to pull people to the freedom protocol, but it's become a waste of time when there's literally less than ten of us who are consistently sacrificing our time/energy trying to generate Nostr buzz on the legacy apps.

At what point do we direct serious resources away from building a million new Nostr apps everyday that nobody uses, and focus 1000% on marketing, so we can show the world the awesome shit we've been building here?

I don't have a strong handle on the inner workings taking place behind the scenes (especially when it comes to grant money and other funding mechanisms), so I'm asking honestly:

What are the main blockers we have right now that are preventing us from making a significant, organized marketing push aimed at bringing new users to Nostr? (Paying big creators to make videos about Nostr, reaching out to big podcasts to platform our best Nostr educators to a bigger audience, clients hiring commission-based outreach reps that pay based on bringing new users that sign up for Premium, etc.)

Is the problem 100% a lack of money within the ecosystem? I know there have been rumblings in the past about an OpenSats-type funding mechanism to help boost Educators and Content Creators, is that still in the works?

Is it a lack of strong business models among clients that would make new user acquisition a strong enough benefit to allocate resources toward hiring people to go out and hunt down new users to bring over?

Lack of purely marketing-focused entities that could act as a centralized hubs for organizing such campaigns?

If it is one of the above things, what steps do we need to make as a community to clear out the obstacles?

Or am I completely off base on all of this, being too impatient, or focusing on the wrong things when there are more important upstream problems that need to be fixed first?

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts, because this recent UpScrolled saga has been a disappointing signal that we are failing at positioning ourself as the perfect solution (WHICH WE ARE) to the problem millions are facing worldwide. #AskNostr

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Nostr isn't ready for an influx like this first of all. Relays would fall down, and how would clients handle posts with 30k likes? We need to figure out caching and aggregation strategies that are better than just checking all relays. And unfortunately this is hard to do without centralization. There are lots of unsolved problems, decentralization is hard.

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on the other hand client developers aren't going to optimize anything until they see shit happening

Yes, also very true

We are probably overthinking the decentralization. Just being able to switch from one relay to another is an order of magnitude better than centralized platforms already. I say bring them on. When everything starts breaking down we'll be forced to solve real world problems as opposed to eternal bikeshedding in the NIPs repo.

Sure, it's a chicken/egg thing, I have not problem with us getting hammered with traffic. We're probably just going to fail a few more times before everything is up to snuff

is there tooling to stress test / benchmark relays for load?

There are a few I think. I know divine has been looking into scaling their relay nostr:nprofile1qqs8nsk2uy2w529fs8n4tx60u7z553e4yx5dy2nxhw4elgjgawpqlas9waufq

yes please.

Funny enough, I explained this to my partner the other day. 🤣

Until someone seriously look into the architecture of #nostr handling new users at scale is going to be a challenge to onboard.

Hell thread is an example and we are only using existing users.

Imagine 1 Million users active at the same time? 😬😅

#asknostr #devs #nostr #plebchain

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Decentralized gopher servers (nodes) ultimately used centralized indexing servers or clients to make externally-hosted content searchable and retrievable. Maybe something similar is needed to make finding content across nostr relays similarly easy and familiar.

The technology as it stands can handle it, IF it remains decentralised and if we accept it becoming increasingly subculture-fragmented like #Fediverse.

The supply of "Uncle Jims" able to spin up new relays is the bottleneck, but #Nostr has a major edge over Fediverse there - simpler relays with lesser hardware requirements.

I am not a developer so can't understand how much effort in this direction, but do you think without having such influx, clients will ever be tested for that?

I do think pain can help. It's a chicken and egg problem.

What do you think about economical side of such large user influx, will it be survive without ads, and do you think ads necessarily against the principal of nostr, like we all agree that ads are bad, but without that only relying on volunteerly contributions will work? It will be kind of the "incentive to work" problem to creators as well. I am sorry if I am asking too much question, I'm non developer and enthusiastic person who wants mass adoption of nostr lol. You can redirect me to articles or something if you dont want to answer such long questions. Thank you

I think advertising ia bad, but it will happen anyway, but nostr's architecture limits how bad it can be, and those of us who are principled can still find business models that work, especially with bitcoin in the mix. Maybe I will write about this, I have some ideas.

Would a hybrid approach work? Centralize the likes, follows.... etc and decentralized the more critical stuff?

Maybe, I bet there are ways to get better guarantees via zk proofs or something