I think the biggest 2 things they had for them was VC connected media mentions and interviews as well as a well executed wait list. Both of the things Nostr could not have.
VERY interesting research on how academic twitter migrated to #Bluesky.
Interesting topline takeaways for growing #nostr. No rocket science that's not been said before, but it's nice to have some data:
1- External shocks are key. Capitalize on them. >15% of transitions explained this way. Think geopolitical events, outages, Musk making a big disliked policy change etc.
2- Audiences move from incumbent platforms following influential voices that they follow. Focus on onboarding these influential voices. This is more impactful than just trying to bring the whole audience first.
This dynamic can build contagion. Find ways to more publicly highlight when influential accounts join.
And make it super easy for Nostr users to use clients to reconstruct followees & social graphs from incumbent platform. Trick will be to do this in a privacy respecting way.
(sidenote: that's way the follow packs were such a good idea. But we need much more of this)
(note: influential voices may experience a period of 'where's my audience?' So it's key to find ways to get the transitioning user from that to the reconstruction of their network. )
3- Multiple peers transitioning is key. Having local clusters develop is important (& probably helps with the dry period before an audience is rebuilt.)
Interesting nuance: transition rates to #bluesky were 25-30% in fields like arts/social sciences, but about half that in medical / physical sciences / engineering. Possible predictors include baseline political engagement & political values expressed.
This has an implication for Nostr: focus messaging on Nostr features that may align with people in incumbent platforms. There has to be desire.
Paper "Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24801
Discussion
You might be right. And an even bigger argument for why it makes sense to pay attention to the network effects that can be harnessed, minus the VC vibes..
Thing is Bluesky is website, it's an app. You can search for it, and the first search result is the right one. You can tell someone "find me on Bluesky" and that's all you need to say. (Nobody says "find me on AT Protocol".)
IMO it makes more sense to compare Bluesky to Primal than it does to compare Bluesky to Nostr.
did someone say "VC vibes"?
product market fit for "Vibe Capital" is off the roof
Until the network was already public, Bluesky had gotten roughly the same amount of capital from Twitter as nostr got from Jack.
One of them used it to grow a team and focused on development, marketing, and outreach.
The other sprayed the funds like buckshot at solo developers.
We didn’t have anyone set up any wait list because you can’t and certainly didn’t do a tech crunch interview every week because we have anon founder. Maybe if we had a coordinated team and a ton of media capital …
Wait list was a smart move on their part to build demand and obviously that wasn’t technically able to be done here, but the various dev teams chose not to pursue any form of promotion in the name of “if you build it, they will come,” which only ever works in movies.
I think we can point fingers at many things but ultimately you have an uncoordinated grassroots effort vs a well coordinated professional effort and we see the results of that.
There are many other obvious reasons why the intellectual community chose one over the other.
Completely agree, but grassroots efforts *can be* coordinated and professional.
it can be summarized actually as:
- the funding is managed by bitcoin influencers that also have VC biases and their own agenda
- money is being thrown at devs like nostr:npub18a5dah5p2jwvppz04ljj3u2hfdg7p908fy05dz7edz0cwaumhqwsqjpzjs that make apps and abandon then halfway and nothing of value to scaling nostr is being built
- discoverability is shit
- no spam filtering infrastructure
we have 50 devs, half of them incompetent, with no organization, trying to build apps to get funding and hype, not to solve actual problems
That’s a really shitty thing to say about 25 people. Considering you could apply and solve those problems. Have you tried?
well, if people are incompetent, they are, nothing can change that except themselves
problems are being solved over at nostr.land if you are wondering about relay infrastructure and spam filtering
Paid relays cannot be a primary way to solve spam. If that becomes the case, Nostr is as good as dead.
I never said that is the case. but I am currently building spam filtering and discoverability infrastructure for nostr.land
if people want it for free, I will be setting up a donation page where they can cover the costs of a free-to-use API
infrastructure costs money to run and maintain, and without some sort of funding model (hoping people donate, free labor, ads, etc.) it cannot exist
and I decided that I do not want to do free labor because people want me to
Asking people to pay for a usable experience before they've experienced the value of the network is a really hard sell. If Nostr can't overcome that, it will be tough to #grownostr.
But maybe that's ok. Maybe Nostr isn't the next Facebook. Maybe it's the next Mastodon: a set of protocols and clients and sites that has enough center of gravity to keep certain communities together and sees spurts of growth when other networks shed users. I wouldn't regard that as dead or failure.
What about both? I am an incompetent developer for NOSTR, however my motivation is to allow the use of nostr easily of radio waves. This helps eliminate government and bad corporate actor Internet and censorship goals(if successful)...
That’s not how opensats works. And we can’t blame one person’s apps when there are so many other devs …
If the other 2 suck why don’t you do something about it? You’re the wise dev who knows everything …
almost a majority of the OpenSats board has corporate interests, and they have barely any transparency, and until that changes there's a lot of reasons to believe that it is how OpenSats works
I have also looked at public nostr grant information, and many of those are excessive or pointless...
Opensats.org/transparency
There is no actually useful information on the transparency page.
For example how conflicts of interest are remediated (for example abstaining from voting on certain projects) and what may exist.
All I see are vague policies and numbers.
It would be great if this was published.
I am asking, today, on July 4 2025:
- who may have conflicts of interests on the board
- how this may affect their decisions
- what actions were taken for each specific case such as exclusion from voting on certain projects
I am not asking for policies. A policy is useless if no one knows how it is interpreted.
The wait list was the WORST thing it had going for it.
It universally was met with “ok fuck you too I guess”. It does not create good feelings among potential users. If they ever finally end up invited, they’re inevitably disappointed.