Asking people to pay for a usable experience before they've experienced the value of the network is a really hard sell. If Nostr can't overcome that, it will be tough to #grownostr.

But maybe that's ok. Maybe Nostr isn't the next Facebook. Maybe it's the next Mastodon: a set of protocols and clients and sites that has enough center of gravity to keep certain communities together and sees spurts of growth when other networks shed users. I wouldn't regard that as dead or failure.