What Nostr needs for network effect / grow:
* Increase diversity - attract different hobbies and opposite views
* Decouple from Bitcoin/crypto - the protocol doesn't require it
* Make payments blockchain-agnostic if needed at all
Discussion
This may be true, but in itself not actionable. Do you have any thoughts, proposals, ideas about how to move the needle with any of your 3 points?
Yeah, I'm just diagnosing problems for now. But actions can be obvious from it - for example, implementing topical channels or feeds could greatly help with diversity (of topics and respective people). I'm sure there are a lot of ways to improve this.
Topical feeds and channels exist, both as communities & DVM. Both are somewhat supported in Amethyst. Flotilla.social is a community oriented client.
Curated user lists based on various criteria are available at following.space and included in many clients.
Amethyst is cool, but it's one mobile-only client. Flotilla is more Discord-like. I'm talking about this functionality in most microblogging clients to actually be useful.
Following.space is good direction. Would be best integrated directly into clients.
Following.space *is* already integrated into many clients. Amethyst, Damus, Primal are the more popular ones, and there are others.
A good client on iOS that includes many extended Nostr features is Nostur nostur.com It also features lists that can be public, allowing other users to share, copy, and modify them. This feature is also available on Amethyst and some other clients.
A web client with many advanced features can be found at nostrudel.ninja
dont interrupt the genius of diagnostics while he is enumerating problems
the doctor house of social networks
Very cool. But still thats just lists of profiles (starter packs) that you can follow, not feeds that contain only specific thematic posts - that was my main point. Most people today are multi-disciplinary (i think?), interested / writing about many topics, so this will only help partially.
what client are you using?
Primal, Jumble/Fevela, Coracle the most
you could try relay communities like wss://spatia-arcana.com
I can invite you if you want
I just upped the number of member invites to 5 each and all members can now claim a @spatia-arcana .com nip-05 address. A couple of us are starting to do some content curation on wss://spatia-arcana.com/favorites .
This pyramid relay is only about a week old, nostr:nprofile1qqst9ge7953et4c854glcpp7ctdcke2ml0jf2m4dltdav9dppalp5usppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qyfhwumn8ghj7mmxve3ksctfdch8qatz9uq32amnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwv3sk6atn9e5k7tcywv3cf but you are welcome to explore what we're doing at https://spatia-arcana.com
These also exist. Some clients integrate DVM feeds (Amethyst, Primal). Some clients let you view specific relays as a feed (jumble, coracle, yakihonne), and relays can be created for any topic. You can even run one, either on your own hardware or on hosted instance. relay.tools is a simple way to get started.
I'd advise to get a broader taste of what Nostr offers, you seem to be unaware of a lot of what already exists. You may need to find a better client.
I think this conversation stopped being productive, because your answer will always be "that already exists somewhere." You're solving for technical completeness. I'm talking about why growth isn't happening even despite that completeness.
Yeah you're probably right, I offer the tools that already exist and you just move the goalposts. Do you have plans that could fix these issues you see? What concrete steps would fix this?
You could start building it with Shakespeare right now. shakespeare.diy
"topical channels or feeds"
Which leads us to hashtags, which leads us right back to Mostr, because any time you do a hashtag search for anything that's not #bitcoin or maybe #plandemic, you get nothing but Mostr posts.
Then users interact with these posts thinking they're talking to real people on Nostr, which they aren't.
I'll say it again: either fix the bridges, or put a big sign on them saying "out of order" 🚧⛔🚧
point 1 and 2 are the same
I know that you are coming from Ethereum. And I've said in previous threads to others that creating a version of Nostr that runs on ETH, or Monero, or any other blockchain is certainly possible, and desirable. Making all of these different systems work together including zaps would require an exchange protocol where I send sats and you receive eth. That's also possible.
But it would be a nightmare to implement. And not worth the effort, in my opinion. If you want to try, be my guest, but I just can't see it working, at least not at scale.
There is no way to implement any of this stuff.
If you're going to diagnose then you first need to start with the ability of the protocol to collectively implement any major changes to spec. Once you diagnose that as being non-existent (as is the case for nostr), then you quickly see that diagnosing anything else is a waste of time.
The cement dried for nostr about 1.5 years ago, at least as regards core spec (which is what you're looking at). What we have and don't have right now is pretty much what we have and don't have forever, besides decorative stuff.
You're right - without collective implementation capacity, diagnosing is performative.
But maybe if we understand why Nostr ossified so early, we could find a way to restore that capacity?
What's your read on why the cement dried so early?
There is no way, it's just social physics. In a max decentralised system, which is what nostr is (there is no "nostr core"), it doesn't take long before the ability of one energetic person or team with a solid idea and proof of concept to spread the energy far enough to get that implemented in any way we might call "protocol wide" is completely nullified by the sheer amount of conversations that would have to happen, the sheer amount of nudging, helping, guiding, prodding, poking, the sheer weight of the burden of persuasion. It quickly becomes one of those "it would take longer than the predicted age of the universe" physics things.
You might get one or two years in before the weight of the burden of persuasion is too heavy, but after that there's no going back. Nostr is 3+ years old, and existing in that malleable state for the first 1.5 only.
Take the fact that posts and replies are the same kind. This cases a lot of problems and it's very easy to argue it's not optimal. But even if everyone "sort of mostly agrees" on something like this, the laws of social physics in max decentralised environments make it impossible for anything to be done about it.
The way (the only way) to restore the capacity is a hard fork. Put another way, Nostr's value is as a starting point for hard forks, a sort of build your own hard fork hardware store.
I agree with this, but a hard-fork that replicates the same mistake just recreates the same environment.
This is exactly why I asked why it cemented so early - if we understand what made Nostr ossify prematurely (before reaching completeness), maybe forks could be designed differently to avoid repeating it. Otherwise we're just building a hardware store of equally frozen protocols.
My understanding is that decentralized protocols need some centralization at the beginning to become truly decentralized later (sounds like a paradox) - something to coordinate people and give them the focus needed. That's why we had Satoshi, that's why I think it's good we have Ethereum Foundation.
We need some institution to bootstrap these protocols, but we also have to work to make these institutions irrelevant later. Maybe Nostr's problem wasn't max decentralization itself, but premature decentralization before the protocol reached sufficient completeness?
Those control levers will never be irrelevant. If bitcoin was as decentralised as nostr it'd be dead already, there'd be no way to move to post-quantum. Things will always come up where you need a core or a foundation or *something*.
Depends what the hard forks are for. If they are for ring-fenced deployments with some central control, such as for certain B2B or community environments, then nostr is a useful hardware store. The deployment context is what prevents the current problems from re-rearing their heads.
Think how linux was designed as a consumer desktop OS but the business server market is where it found its footing. Its problem was crappy graphics and awful UX, but in the business server context who cares about that.
That's what I see the nostr hardware store as useful for. Not for an "open world" hard fork, which is the context we have now, but for hard forks (or soft forks too) for controlled, ring-fenced environments. Nostr, Farcaster and the like are not the way forward for open world.
As for how it ossified, everything this decentralised does. The same way SSB ossified. The same way as XMPP ossified. Recommend this article for a deeper dive on XMPP https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/