I primarily use Twitter, but I added Bluesky, Threads, and Nostr (Primal) to give them all a shot.

Between Bluesky, Nostr, and Threads, Bluesky seems to be the winner. I believe the magic is in discoverability. The feeds system works quite well for finding new content and new people to connect with.

I know Nostr design is a focus on following specific people, but the onboarding experience is poor. A user shouldn't have to work so hard to find good content or they don't get hooked. Something needs to change.

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lol no

What would make onboarding better on Nostr?

What I'm trying to describe using the term "onboarding" is the process of discovery to build up a list of people to follow, and also for people to discover your content to follow you.

In my experience thus far, the feed system on Bluesky helps this process. Perhaps there is a more Nostr-centric approach that could accomplish the same thing.

I'm new to Nostr as well, and I agree with your assessment of the onboarding. I'm going to stick it out a bit and see how it goes though, I'm hoping the selection bias of a federated, decentralized, permisionless system will lead to higher quality content once I get into it well.

I found three useful tricks. 1) was to use some of the algorithms ("DVMs") which gives you popular and trending notes. You can use these as your main feed or follow people from there. 2) was follow hashtags, 3) was fine some more curated relays, such as Nostr wine or web of trust ("WOT ") relays and read the "global" view there.

Lots of power here, lots of good content, but yet to become user friendly!

I was unaware of curated relays. This sounds like it could be an avenue that could be expanded on.

The global view has far too much junk to sift through.

Oh, and this. There is a brand new thing called an algo relay, some clients support them already. Check this out (note it only works if you're logged in): https://jumble.social/?r=wss://algo.utxo.one/

try primal search for discovery

And the immediate next question is "search for what?"

If you don't know what the topic are that have a lot of good information on Nostr, then you don't know what to search for. It's an onboarding problem.

Then use the trending feeds in primal and dig from there. You sound lazy or uncurious.

Everything you are describing is the exact reason why Bluesky is growing far faster than Nostr.

you should spend more time over there.

Bluesky feeds work amazingly well, it must be said. Plus they've got numbers on their side. The chances of finding Other Topics is much higher there.

But the blocking culture and he eral 2010s left twitter atmosphere makes it totally unusable to me.

Twitter is still on top all things considered imp

Censorship and left extremism is rampant is terrible there, but to be fair you can just ignore it and then move on to feeds that don't contain any of that.

Bluesky has numbers on their side because they did something right. I believe feeds are where they are winning their users. They allow you to dive right into great content quickly, then start connecting with other users.

What authority would present new users with a list of hashtags and ask, "what do you like to read and post about?". Would you trust that authority?

There will always be conflict until we understand the phrase "how to server man" similarly. Surely man will have been served by then. Perhaps being served is not the point, and conflict is necessary for discovery.

I'm well aware of the arguments in favor and against central authorities becoming gatekeepers. It is a problem for which I have not seen a perfect solution.

However, I believe that omitting any form of tool that aids the user in procuring a positive experience is not realistic in a time when information flow is so high it is unmanageable and constantly increasing.

Absolutely. Bluesky solved the discovery and cold start problem. They’ve made users and accounts work in a way users understand vs how Nostr does it which is very complicated.