Social media is the first step in bootstrapping the "trust" network and proving the utility of Nostr. The problem is that social-first is highly saturated and honestly not that interesting; the "global" view and town square models have largely been captured and also don't seem sustainable and reliable over time as AI fills more and more of the content landscape. Unless the focus is on more niche and nascent communities, this is not what will allow Nostr to grow; we can see this with the relative lack of user inflows during outage and censorship events (though those tools are obviously much better served on Nostr than siloed platforms, so it's still a very important thing to work towards freeing the town square).

What will supplant standard social media as the driver for greater adoption will be placing the movement of money at the front and center of applications. This means marketplaces, yes, but also more UX focused on encouraging and reducing the friction of social monetary movement, like baked-in wallets, zap-first feeds, and (of course) nuts in emojis. Money makes the trade-offs between the silos and open networks much more obvious and incentivizes users to learn to care. Owning the social graph and content itself is powerful, but not convincing enough; the capital flow that the social graph unlocks is key.