I'm hopeful and optimistic that it can be. I believe that Nostr combined with bitcoin payments creates an incredible open and free (as in freedom) playing field. I know it won't happen accidentally while simply sitting back and waiting. Some can afford to play the long game, but unfortunately many individuals can't. I hope Nostr can be a digital space where individuals can thrive online without becoming captured by centralized entities. I just wonder how it gets from here to there while remaining viable.
Discussion
If we think of those middlemen as the thumb on the end of a garden hose, it's clear why the amplified reach models work. When information flows organically, it will saturate heavier near its source before spreading, then only slowly and so far. Income is time sensitive. With things like communities, the opportunity to create flow-channels for self-advertising already exists, but that part of nostr needs a whole lot of cleaning up to function properly as of yet. Even there, I don't know if the speed of audience/consumer growth will be fast enough to create a pursuable value for most creators & sellers. It's tricky to envision a system that discourages advertising but has enough economic activity to thrive. Even self-advertising gets to feeling invasive so there will be a constant audience loss & gain pattern for anyone who puts in the work to gain the follows, but then what time are they spending on creating quality content/products? 😅
Rock, meet hard place. 😂😂
i think that the mindset of the psycho corporate mind manipulators muddies the waters and that actually things will organically gel a lot better than you think in a self emergent system, just like brain cells are cooperating with each other and even two whole hemispheres with different biases cooperate in brains
the control of signal propagation exerted by the silo owners is to benefit their own interests, and it is very similar in its influence on the human social network as a tumor is to a brain - it consumes space and resources, and it gets in the way of connections forming between systems
I can't say that's inaccurate in the long game but there would need to be some sort of transitionary system to make it sticky in between. I just can't tell you what that looks like 😂
i'm looking at it right now
nostr is going to end up being the "transitional system" for a lot of things
already i came up with this idea of using nostr events as control messages for access control then i learned that nostrocket is building something like this... and maybe another project, i forget, didn't stick in my memory
nostr isn't the complete answer, it's the connection layer, there is still other systems that need to be discovered and added to the stack, fast synchronising data storage is one i'm very focused on