my biggest issue isn't even that they could sway protocol dev (they don't even do protocol dev). its that if a large number of people join and the app goes down, then people will think nostr is unreliable and then it will have a permanently bad reputation.
Discussion
There are various issues, i was just stating the one that impacts me the most, as someone who goes out in public to discuss Nostr.
Nostr is way too small to even use the word reputation. Pick any megachurch in the US and more people will attend services at that one single megachurch than are on all of nostr.
Bluesky is a pretty small network and it's 100 times bigger than Nostr.
Nostr is just teeny tiny, all this back and forth you'd think there were real userbase stakes here, but there aren't.
It already has a bas reputation. Hundreds of thousands have tried nostr. >99% ceased usage. The proof in the pudding would be comparing Primal's retention rates to the whole ecosystem
if the solution is "just build a centralized app again" then this misses the entire point of nostr and we should just go back to centralized apps.
I agree, but with open source software anyone can use it how they see fit right, thats why we're here. So that leaves doing better yourself, helping out, forking, finding a solution together, etc
We have actually had that happen, repeatedly. Whether it was them being too slow to moderate malicious spam on their relay, the website going down, the relay going down...
Always resulted in a mass-exodus of people who couldn't figure out how to adjust by moving to other clients and relays.
The users with the most staying power seems to be my "generation", which arrived after the initial building phase and before Primal, so that we tried out different clients and figured out what relays and NIPs are, and stuff. It was a steep learning curve, but we're much more resilient.
It felt like learning how e-mail or SMS or telephones worked, before everyone used WhatsApp. The Primal onboarders are clueless and helpless, like the WhatsApp onboarders. If Primal goes down, they think Nostr is down. If WhatsApp goes down, they think all mobile communication is dead.
It was really palpable. Everything would be hopping, for days or weeks, then suddenly the thread counts would drop like a rock and it'd get eerily silent.
Where is everybody?
Primal's down.
Oh.
I think there is this assumption that 'good UX' and 'good onboarding' actually means preventing new users from learning anything, for that only implies confusion and friction.
This notion IS true, but only for the idiot masses. And however much we want it to be the case, those will not get onto Nostr anytime soon. There are many many many many maaaaaany millions of non idiots that are more than capable and willing to do the basic learning. Those people are far more likely to get onto Nostr. I like to look at the population numbers of the Roman republic to conclude you don't need that many people to be meaningfull.
Subsequently, once all of those people are on Nostr, and the idiots come, those idiots can ask their nephew for help when things go wrong.
I.e. get the nephews first. "Mass addoption" is putting the cart before the horse.
Yeah, I think we're the Linux of social media.
Can I just say, as a fully qualified idiot, we can do it!
People always give us idiots a hard time but I pressed all the buttons and here I am.
😂
I have a hard time believing you are a sub100IQ / left of the bellcurve individual.
To be clear, my words are a bit flippant, but the intentions behind them are not mean spririted. I care for those people, i have no intent of excluding them or that we should not facilitate them. Frankly they are on my mind a lot of the time when considering the supposed wisdom of cryptographic keypair based systems.