one of the expectations people have of social media has to do with a distributed systems property called "consistency"
specifically, it is sometimes described as the "lack of boundaries between groups of people"
several of the projects i have had close dealings with including one i was working on were based on this mistaken perception of how social networks should be, based on the way that most of the popular ones, facebook, x, instagram, have such large userbases that it looks like there is no partitions between them
this is creating a negative feedback loop that is causing users to avoid new experiences that have too small a span of topics and smaller populations where they percieve this as a deficiency in the platform because of the friction of sign-up and sign-in between them and the problem of cross-posting being so difficult and many times platforms actively prevent it working, and the final problem being that you tend to get followers in one place but not in others and there is not really any point to this attempt to bridge the islands in the net
the primary thrust of #nostr is all about creating a single identity that doesn't have the friction between the islands for moving from one place to the next
yet most of the app developers are building on the assumption that they want to get as many people in one bucket as possible, but the problem with buckets is the crab bucket problem where the more embedded you get in one pool the harder it is to get out and see others
this "muh free relays" bullshit also is working against nostr's principal advantages as well
people will eventually figure it out, and it doesn't matter that we have these rushes of refugees arriving, which most of them back out because they don't understand the whole advantage of nostr because mostly they just get thrown at one app that is tied to one set of relays and one little group of people who mostly are following the same old influencoors due to the effects of #primal and #damus clients - clients that are very intensively trying to mimic the old ways and not leveraging the low friction advantages of nostr's independent identity system
people don't learn things easily especially not after being conditioned and brainwashed for decades into a particular setup
nostr is for niche groups and people who want to have the low friction movement between islands in the net
not for people who want access to the most popular things and the largest groups of users
it's the exact opposite, in many ways
