Nostr has lost the battle for censorship resistance.

While WE all know that Nostr is superior because it’s a protocol, people do NOT care enough. They are more interested in what’s written ON the box, not what’s necessarily inside the box.

The people who did care about “free speech” are now placated enough with Rumble for Video, X for short form, Substack for long form. With Meta now throwing their weight behind the movement, it’s game over for this narrative - at least for the foreseeable future.

There is no way Nostr as a brand can claim that space in people’s minds, especially against multiple established brands.

That ‘censorship resistance’ and ‘free speeech’ ships have sailed (even though they were fake), and the people who cared enough boarded.

The normies who never cared, still don’t care, or they found their way to the anti-platforms, like Threads, BlueSky or Pornhub.

The small minority of us still here on Nostr…are well…still here. We’re building, which is great - that MUST happen before anything else.

But if the goal is to grow the network effect here and bring in more people, then we need to find a new angle. Something more compelling that is a “running towards” value, not a “running away from” value.

I’m not 100% sure what that is. My instinct is that a “network of incredible applications”, that don’t necessarliy or explicitly brand themselves as Nostr, but have it under the hood is the right direction, but it needs more experimentation. Also needs more really well-build apps for non-sovereignty minded people (especially content creators) and people who don’t necessarly care about the reasons Nostr was first built.

We’ve been working away at this Satlantis thing for almost a year now and it’s coming along - albeit WAY slower than I would’ve liked. We’ve made a whole bunch of mistakes and at times I feel like a LARP considering the state of non-delivery.

BUT…we made some big changes in the last 2mths since missing a couple key deadlines, and I’m pretty confident we’ll have something cool to show in a month or two.

Let’s see if this approach starts to bring new interest andn activity here. Or if I’m full of shit. Either way, I’m going to keep looking for a better ngle than “free speech” because I no longer think that’s a battle we can win (we can come back and fight that battle when the time is more right, and when the winds have shifted in our favor once more).