On that note, Farcaster and Nostr both seem to be victims of community capture.
Bluesky is at risk of corporate capture, but not so much community capture, as there's no one community you can point to as owning the place.
ActivityPub seems to have avoided both, so good for ActivityPub.
Bluesky isn't just Twitter refugees/liberals that hate Musk? Couldn't imagine who else would be there and never cared to look into it.
Besides that, I think there has to be some initial "community" on a platform, so it might not be fair to classify one by that in the early days. Are we still early on nostr? š
See reddit's default subreddit list that targeted the 2010 internet man's interests. Now it has grown into some kind of mainstream platform with everything.
ActivityPub does seem to have diversity but mostly based around tech stuff. The good and maybe bad thing is how some federations get completely cut off from the rest.
Bluesky started out as a controlled environment in ādecentralizationā but it never really delivered on that. Itās still a company with a CEO and investors and developers. Its community is overwhelmingly far left ideologically, and favors heavy content moderation. One of the first groups to establish a presence there was the trans community, and itās also become a place where scientists and journalists moved to after Xwitter went full Musk and MAGA.
>Bluesky isn't just Twitter refugees/liberals that hate Musk? Couldn't imagine who else would be there and never cared to look into it.
Bluesky is great for indie open-source game dev, Godot engine and such. You can be in that world and never have to venture out.
Also I don't buy the initial community thesis. (I actually first came to Nostr doing research on this topic.) Every scaled social network I've looked at has had decent community spread from pretty close to the start. To date I've not been able to find a single example of a social network that was able to shake off community capture (as defined by having a single dominant community at least 3 years on from the start). If the network branches out before the cement hardens then it can be okay, but after the cement hardens then it seems to be very hard to grow.
You might be right. I was just speaking off the cuff.
Do you think it's the difference between a marketed platform/protocol (like how nostr:npub1aeh2zw4elewy5682lxc6xnlqzjnxksq303gwu2npfaxd49vmde6qcq4nwx mentioned Bluesky has a CEO and corp, or Pubky) versus something like Nostr that needs hoisting somehow without a marketing budget - bitcoin influencers, builders promoting their products on the platform, etc?
I'm not sure, it's a good question. When you look at Facebook it quickly had university versus university communities, that friendly rivalry, almost from the start. But none of that was steered.
This logic also seems to hold for clients. With Nostr you had a healthy variety of clients pretty much from the start, and maybe that's the only way to end up with a healthy variety of clients. Farcaster had one dominant client at the start, with the hope that things would balance out as more clients entered the picture, but that never happened.
There seems to be some general law of social network physics where if you want multiple whatever then you need to have that multiple whatever from pretty close the start.
I canāt imagine why anyone would use Farcaster. Apparently thereās no way to access it without the official app and you have to attach an Ethereum wallet to create an identity. Yuck. Why would we want those kinds of users here anyway?
Farcaster is more of a cautionary tale, alongside maybe Nostr too.
The moral of the story seems to be that if you want variety, you need to start with variety.
For Farcaster, it may be too late for variety of clients.
For Nostr, it may be too late for variety of community.
For Bluesky, it may be too late for variety of control.
Meaning if we ever do a Nostr 2.0, we get client variety right from the start once more, we get control variety right from the start once more, and we make sure that we get community variety right from the start too (like we didn't this time).
Why do you insist that Nostrās community is a problem? We arenāt a platform like the other things you mentioned. We are a community of builders, not doomers or scammers. Itās taking more time to grow because we donāt have a marketing department or a corporate board. Weāre here for the long haul. Most people simply havenāt figured out why they need it yet.
It's not a problem if you see Nostr as essentially the current community. Or as an example of a community that has coded itself. Then it's a success. It just depends how you see Nostr.
The slow growth (now shrinkage) isn't due to the lack of a marketing department or corporate board. It's due to people coming in, going "not for me" and leaving, never to return. All a marketing department would do is increase the volume of people coming in, going "not for me" and leaving, never to return.
The answer I think is a Nostr 2.0.
The point about people coming and not staying cause they see the bitcoiners and whatever else might be true for folks just wandering in. I just think those people just prefer the centralized social media alternatives since they are well established and have a huge amount of content.
It's a bit different if an entire community tries to move to a platform/protocol though. Like many FOSS users moving over to Mastodon from Twitter and to Matrix from Discord in order to follow their "leaders" and peers. I would guess that those bring the huge numbers and cause people to stay.
Whatever, I have no plans to leave. I donāt want to talk to most of those people anyway.
I think most do see bitcoiners, and think this is a bitcoin group, and that's it. No more complicated then that. Just someone told them try nostr out (you can own your account, etc.), they came, found out it's all bitcoiners, they don't care much about bitcion, so they left. That simple.
If someone told me to try out a social network that "lets you own your account", and I jumped in to check it out, and all I saw it was all Warhammer 40,000 people posting Warhammer 40,000 things, I'd be like 'well I guess this is a Warhammer 40,000 club', and I'd jump out.
I don't think big picture stuff like how this compares to the centralised experience even has time to enter the picture. People are out before they've even kicked a single tire.
I think I'm 50% in agreement. Not sure of the magic formula for retaining that type of person who comes for sovereignty and leaves cause Bitcoin. Is the answer corporate management, marketing, removal of zaps from a solid client?
Still unclear how organic diversity is cultivated other than having a "killer app".
I'm pretty convinced organic diversity is cultivated by having organic diversity from close to the start of the protocol. Not by a killer app, or by centralised servers, but by raw timing.
Which means the best option might be a full restart.
I think it's a decent argument to the extent that I can't really think of a counter-argument.
One anecdotal thing is how I recently came across a whole other type of user (non-bitcoiner or non-obvious) by searching relays instead of discovering users via my follows.
I also think that a "killer app" would push nostr on other communities that are looking for a place. This is where I agree with John about the hackathon mentality, but also understand this because there is really no incentive (minus jack and opensats funding) or corporate structure. I digress...
