What’s better for the long-term success of nostr, attracting users, or attracting builders?
Discussion
Users, get enough users and the builders will come.
Agreed. The way Nostr allows you to “take your identity” with you to other clients/platforms means that users will bring the network effects for builders to have worthwhile effort.
Builders. If you build a bridge people will cross it
This is my leaning as well. “If you build it they will come” or whatever. Want to hear other viewpoints though. Steve jobs would say “start with the product and work backwards from there”. But that is also the philosophy that ultimately led to creating a giant centralized entity which is now trying to censor what we do on nostr. Prioritizing UX may bring us “success” but at what cost?
Agree. The ui is key big tech has made people lazy
#nostr over kademlia is the next. WebRTC failed to give enough freedom layer for censorship resistance. Kademlia seems also to look like OpenDHT which also isn’t seems to be a good model for the ‘notes’ but they are the starting point over some guys who have win over the last establishment. Hollywood were a good first adversary. Now it’s the Imperialism of state. A much bigger face.
Every good app involving money have been meet with FED very quickly til now.
users? Ain influx in users would bring an influx in builders. No?
There's probably an ideal ratio between them.
Do you mean to atract now?
Yes. We need both obviously. But what should be prioritized at this early stage we’re in?
From my perspective development is already at break-neck speed, but 'average joe' users are declining. That's what I precieve but this could be wrong. So I'd say prioritise users.
What do you think?
One can go at it from both directions. Either build, build, build and see what people use and what survives. Or research userbase or hypothesized customer segment to build what they want/need.
I think #nostr ecosystem should make supply before demand.
Devs must know the pain points that users don’t have painful so much.
Devs should make users feel happier when the apps is lunched.
If it's easy for builders to built social applications that provide superior experience to existing walled gardens, users will come. If Nostr is all about being censorship resistant, not enough people will care. There's so much potential here with frictionless content monetization, micro apps and super apps to cater to different sensibilities
Yea I feel like for now it’s up to builders and the current community to demonstrate the benefits of adoption. Otherwise decision fatigue sets in and users just stick with good enough (Twitter, unfortunately). Not enough users will get convinced to switch based on concepts like decentralization or freedom from censorship. Once good, user friendly onramps to different nostr use cases have been built, network effects and word of mouth should help with users imo.
This article on Mastodon’s failure to seize the moment because of poor UX drives home the point: https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/
attract non bitcoiner
Why not aiming for both? 😃
I think if people are interested, progress will come with it. There is definitely a argument to be made for the build now populate later strategy though. But with that system the whole conversation becomes about the product, pushing away the layman.
back in 1990 what was more important for the internet ? Builders or users ?