Why? :)
Discussion
It's a feeling I have today, not based on any real research.
But now that you put me on the spot, I can offer some weak reasons:
There is a lack of incentive for the casual user to use nostr over whatever else. Censorship resistance isn't smtn ppl care about. The greatest asset nostr has is that it can house many different types apps. E.g. twitter + blog + git patches + anything really. That adds a social aspect to any app, which is valuable.
However, developing on nostr is too difficult. There is too much burden on the developers. Things break often. Would not be a problem in the long term, as stuff gets fixed for good (in libraries), but this isn't going to be race of long term.
My main counterpoint is what Elon Musk is already feeling: he really wants free speech, but he already lost lot of money losing advertisers, and he quickly got in the situation that he has to stop doing what people want and started lying about who is owning the data.
The 2 big things outside lots of UX improvements missing in Nostr that in my opinion can be fixed are
- fast retrieval (that's why I wrote relaypool, but still needs a fast rendering engine with great caching layer to make everything both instant and correct).
- good ranking that doesn't just compete with Twitter / Facebook, but it's actually better. I started working on it a few days ago (I should have started with that, because nobody else has been working on it).
Many people have a dream / think that the only alternative to Twitter / Facebook / TikTok ranking algorithms is old school manual follower based, but it just doesn't work, as managing follower feeds manually is too hard.
I like the usual algorithmic feeds (and have been working on reproducing them), just want to get rid of the clickbait part / have some overrides (less images than what the algorithm would predict and much less clickbait, because I'm wired to click on it and I don't want to see it in the first place).
To see how the ranking algo works, you can see my posts (and also look at my light-client :) ):
https://rbr.bio/npub1dcl4zejwr8sg9h6jzl75fy4mj6g8gpdqkfczseca6lef0d5gvzxqvux5ey