His perspective on nostr resonates with how I feel about it. Nostr may have the bones to be a very powerful tool on the internet, but it has yet to find a first product market fit to drive people to use the protocol. I don’t think a replica of current social media will do the trick, it needs a novel use case or a novel form of social media. You have cool ideas with nostr+bitcoin, but that also won’t drive adoption much because very few people are sending bitcoin around.
For those of you who are still on Twitter, I had a long debate thread today with Parker Lewis about Nostr. I'm a big fan of Parker, so I figured I'd share it here for shared learning.
Here's the latest post. I'm not sure it'll be the last or not but it's the latest one as of this writing. You can scroll up to see the exchange from the start.
https://x.com/LynAldenContact/status/1828553130717442443
Linking to my own post in isolation is bad form and the thumbnail is awkward depending on what client you're using, so I'll also provide a pic of the start of the debate too, with two posts of his and one of mine.
I'd be open to any thoughts about this debate.
Discussion
Nostr is immensely useful where governments or corporations are heavy handed with censorship. It is more difficult to censor.
Why can't that be the novel use case?
I think difficulty to censor is a great feature for a communication network that already exists, but I don’t think that feature is enough to drive mass adoption to the protocol in the short term. Most people don’t have an issue of being censored on social media. Maybe over enough time there would be enough censoring to drive more and more people to the protocol…. But it’d be better to have a positive reason to come here as opposed to waiting for enough negative reasons to accumulate.