ten years into the future:
nostr didn't make it, no one uses it, no relays exist
what killed it?
Discussion
Trade-off of relay costs vs the urge to centralize social data
Or problems cause lack of ossification around a clean protocol definition - that’s another potential hurdle I see
regulation
Low scalability
Low usablity
Those coming from #reddit messed it up xD
Solar flare wipes out all tech on earth
Recurring Solar Micronova Maximalist, here.
Due for a micronova sometime in the late 2030's or 2040's, but the next Carrington event could wipe out all electronic infrastructure literally any day now even before the Megaflare/Micronova
People.
It's always people.
the Winkelvoss twins.
nuclear
Nobody was willing to spend their sats in quantities sufficient to sustain a viable decentralized economy on the network. KYC’d fiat payment methods and ad-supported revenue models crept in and the economies of scale led to centralization of relays/servers until users realized they were now just using a shittier version of the major social networks with a smaller user base so they went back where their friends are.
Already seeing zap droughts
Yup
💯 definitely has fallen off. Hard to incentive content creation if all people are willing to tip for it is a half-penny worth of sats here and there, lol. Bridges between fiat and sats could. Services like Strike can pay directly from your fiat balance to a Lightning invoice and the recipient can receive it in sats. Something like strike allows people who don’t want to deal with bitcoin to still use it where needed, and it allows bitcoiners who prefer to spend their fiat to do so, while still allowing the network to be interoperable via sats. Still run into some kyc that way though.
*could help.
Can’t blame them. V4V economy seems expensive. That’s why advertisers bore the cost traditionally. They could afford to.
Can’t state it enuff that if the "influencers" can’t make a living off of "the nostr" that they won’t stay & their followers won’t either.
Doesn’t matter though, Nostr is complete free-speech. That itself has value with or without influencers.
I agree but it seems the majority of people don’t agree with that yet
Relays and apps require resources to be run and maintained. Where does the money come from to sustain them?
True fans. Supporters who want to see this thing take off.
We need a big influencer media company to point all their content to a zap.steam pay to access only type thing for it to really catch on & only post content on though nostr
I agree. I think the limitations of the size of the bitcoin user base adds an additional challenge. Any new project (app, artist, creator, etc) seeking to monetize is going to run into struggles at first and need to rely on their biggest supporters to get them off the ground. When the pool of potential supporters is limited to only people who know how to use bitcoin, that shrinks the available funds for new projects. The catch 22 is that bitcoin is perfectly suited for a decentralized network like this. More people have fiat to spend, but that also introduces kyc and other potential regulations.
Taibbi for example
Content is king.
The community is still so small that everyone is competing for a tiny portion of a small group that is willing to pay for anything. This has led to having to build huge offerings in order to gain customers.
Unless you’re willing to roll out a global network with additional features at this point being an operator is a passion project.
What’s the solution?
I wish I knew nostr:npub1lrnvvs6z78s9yjqxxr38uyqkmn34lsaxznnqgd877j4z2qej3j5s09qnw5
I lack my usual snark on this subject for the simple reason I think it’s super complex. I don’t see ad supported services as being that way out of malice. I believe some smart guys wanted to build something and get paid for their troubles, and found a way to do so.
It’s a cultural issue. We are used to things being free. People (in generality) aren’t going to pay for something that they can get elsewhere for free, unless they have some other more ideological reason - or as others have mentioned, the service is much better (premium). Among those services with premium offerings, it is a very small percentage of people who opt into this, and overwhelming majority stay free and are carried on the backs of the small premium base. It’s still a mutual benefit, since nobody would want premium if there weren’t tons of people to interact with.
That’s the societal issue with a v4v economy. The majority of users will not give value, since value is provided by others for “free,” and many things of value are also fairly invisible. I posit the average user will not give a damn about your average relay until it’s gone - because it’s invisible.
It’s also worth noting that almost every service that has a premium tier survived *years* of financial loss and riding on VC money to get to that threshold of user base where the 1% of premium users could turn a profit.
There is a solution to all of this and it’s just a transaction fee - even if voluntary. You can also scale it by % instead of a fixed number. Higher transaction value = higher fee. Many may not pay but if you achieve decent scale that may be enough to cover costs and even turn a profit.
Coming with paid tiers it may be sufficient to sustain clients and relays and even content creators. You just need scale.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the cultural issue part. People expect things for free on the internet.
Even though I think most of us on nostr understand this, it's not actually free you're paying with your data. And I do think people are starting to wake up to this fact. But until a larger population of people wakes up to the fact that on these "free" platforms you are actualy the product a Sustainable value for value style, economy will not persist for long.
Sir it's a bear market
Yep. It’s a catch 22 for people who simultaneously want a decentralized social network while also wanting to scrimp and save every satoshi they can.
This is why I believe what's needed is to help us all learn how to establish multiple satoshi income streams every way possible. For our goods, for our services, and for our ideas, we establish "bodies" of work attached to our Nostr accounts that are continuously streaming sats into our wallets.
Only then does sending them back out again become less painful. It must also become normalized to be on zero fiat (or or close to near zero), transitioning back to slave debt-notes ONLY when necessary to interact with those still in the fiat plantataions.
It's also FAR easier to spend anything once full stack sovereignty over nearly all daily basic need has been established. As in clear title to land/house and energy, water, food, and waste management ALL managed on site. Siege proof sovereignty enables a higher velocity of money flows through our wallets.
This is the Way.
Fucking developers only talking to developers again.
Nailed it
🥲
☝ how not to kill nostr. this should go up on a wiki or something for reference of things we shouldn't do.
one of my talks at Nostrasia will roughly be about this
💜
I think services like Strike could help to some degree. Strike allows you to make payments directly from fiat to sats. People that want to send/receive sats can do so, and people that would rather deal in dollars/fiat can do so. It does introduce some kyc into the payments side of things, but only for those users who choose to use those services. Solutions like that would at least give more non-bitcoiners the option of participating economically in the network.
This 👆
nostr:npub1w0eevj0l78j6vtzmzcc4t8lplvy0ejrrzq2sc3we46y3sjna2lwshd4ejv launched a token.
😂😂😂
Developers not listening to users on what they prefer. Developers made a lot of stuff but its not organized into one cohesive system. Needed better onboarding, and very importantly it needed a better way of retention to new users. Try coming onto different clients with 0 followers and talk into the void. New users need to be asked about 8+ things they may be interested in.. bitcoin, privacy, photography, art, live audio chats, decentralization, etc and those that they choose, link them up with those groups so they have a base of like minded people to start from.
Nostr needs a directory. Lists.
Developers seem to only want to talk to developers. I appreciate it when they ask questions like this to the user base.
The sausage ratio
Bluesky Alf-memes landed.
The airdrops integrated with AI and persuaded people that this time it’s different 😅
Relay operators forced to give up all user data or face execution.
Rats jump ship.
apathy.
I think many people like myself would be happy to have free relays but are also happy to pay for paid relays!
I think devs getting paid to use their premium services is key. I am happy to pay for an upgrade. It is wise to have a free version and also components that users can opt into if one chooses that are paid. Value for value.
This is the way. ⚡️
@`jack`makes friend again with Mr E. the living god and comes back to twitter as CEO ( renames it back as it should be ) .
He's sorry but he had to kill "The Nostr" !
It was a too efficient competitor .
Mr Pablo is CTO of Twitter now
People didn't run their own relays. It's no different than a Bitcoin full node.
Elon
Loss of zaps, or an effective loss. Either due to a big governmental crackdown on Bitcoin, or maybe the price of BTC getting to a point where people want to hodl every last Satoshi.
Or
Regulation of nodes.
Or
Nostr getting to a large enough user base that someone starts analyzing the network to either de-anonymize us, or use the data in some horrible, dystopian day.
stop scaring people 🤣 aint happening. Nostr is as inevitable as Bitcoin and you know it.
Elon musk transforma o X em uma rede mundial acessada por seus satelites gratuitamente.
Ninguem pagara para usar internet, pois havera starlink.
Lol at least the nostr lasted about 9 and half years longer than xitter!
Maybe regulation. Onerous privacy and safety laws coupled with mandated backdoors make it impossible for small operators to comply (or build the thing we came to nostr for in the first place). This has a chilling effect, killing the network effect.
NIP conflicts? ;-)
no internet connection 😃
what is the point of this extremely unlikely hypothetical?
you could say http was dead 20 years ago too but it just mutated and the same base architecture has continued on.
in fact, nostr's not really that innovative for architecture, what is great about it is that it's a relay/broadcast system that is so simple that anyone could join the network with minimal work.
so, yeah, who cares if nostr doesn't make it, its babies will.
Too much choice can create complexity and parts of the technology could have sharp edges. Sovereignty can be scarry and it may not be for everyone.
Perhaps most users didn't really want sovereignty, never really wanted to have to understand the tech to some extent to use it. And they were perfectly comfortable with other options available, where everything was done for them:
* "So many clients, each with their own caveats. Does this client accept this NIP?",
* "So many algorithms to choose from, which one did I try last again?? Ughh, I just want it to work."
* "Is this the right account for the person I wanna follow or is this an impersonator?",
* "If I wanna test a new client, how do I know I can trust it with my Nsec?",
* "Oh God! What if I lose my Nsec??".
"Ughh, I guess I will just stick with Meta, where it is safe and comfy and all my friends are there".
That along with the alternatives not melting down. It turned out that somehow X, Meta, YT, etc didn't become completely unusable to most people, just barely useable enough that people can justify sticking to it and not have to learn something new and foreign.
It turned out that CBDCs didn't really suck and worked ok for most people, so the masses didn't rush to Bitcoin. Which meant that many were first introduced to it when first using/hearing about Nostr. So now they had to deal with the complexities of Nostr and of Bitcoin... And it was a tough learning curve for most people.
Global warming
No use cases were born beyond social media.
So long as social media isn't the only reason to use nostr, it has the potential to live a life more like TCP/IP than like Twitter.
the
the lack of frogs
Not enough Pablos 😵 🪦
Apathy. Here we are 14 years into #Bitcoin and most of our friends and family still don’t use it. If they can’t get excited about the hardest money there ever will be, how can they do so for social media?
People sharing notes stolen from Twitter.
I'll still be here posting by myself. It won't be dead
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish
Snipers
A lack of standardization across a given type of client causing wildly different implementations of a given feature in one client to be unable to be loaded in another client. This leads to the loss of interoperability and ultimately causes enough frustration for devs and users to abandon nostr outright at worst, or completely fracture userbase based on the client of choice.
The Nostr killed nostr
The asteroid of course
Unauthorized protocols not allowed under the Hamilton Convention of 2028.
In years leading up to it, governments failed to contain their perception of misinformation through policy. The agreement of 2028 formulated the groundwork to all internet access using full KYC, smart card enabled identity for access. Only authorized protocols allowed, vanquishing even Tor and consumer encryption as illegal.
sha256 ended up being no match for quantum computing
As far as I know, there's currently no known quantum algorithm that could effectively help cracking sha256.
Lack of decentralized infrastructure.
We need a mesh network of decentralized satellites.
Make every person in the world capable of launching satellites to low earth orbit.
NIP Bloat.
- Implementation possibilities are specd with less and less consideration for each other.
- many overlap in functionality but none are removed or deprecated for “backwards compatibility”.
- Some old school devs pull weight and don’t wanna change.
- some younger devs have no patience for discussion and “patient” integration of “good” ideas.
- devs are burnt out with the “bureaucracy” of maintaining a swamp of standards.
- nips are treated as standalone “islands” serving single use cases.
- inconsistency and inoperability creep across clients and relays, as gate keepers “give up”.
- Users become disillusioned with “the dream” of decentralized cooperation, as nostr dies a slow death due to dwindling adoption.
So, like, the collapse of any wide scale organization. I can see this happening.
That sums it up
Nostr is going to Tower of Babel itself then. No need for government intervention.
I understand your points but I don't think to a user, interoperability is that big a concern, unless it messes up basic TL big time.
Even now, threads are a mess across clients & NIP 94 images created on Amethyst are not seen on many clients & it's not caused a hullabaloo 🤷
I'm guessing most people will try out maybe 2-3 clients & stick with the ones they like.
If you are honestly concerned, take a look at the proposal below to define a process. I have some experience here as an early editor in the fediverse's FEP process. There FEP-a4ed defined a process that handles proposals from submission to deprecation.
It might be interesting to collaborate on a submission process tailored to issues and challenges of the current NIP space.
Issue (which looking at all the NIP-XXs in the repo seems to have uptake): https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/545
Pull request: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/560
the lack of new friendly documentation
Skynet
If the current mainstream social networks continue to work the way they do, (you know how they work otherwise you wouldn't be here) nostr won't need to be appealing at all. All in all, clients still need to be encouraged to improve features and create new ones. I don't think nostr is gonna die in 10 years, I think it is just a slow burn. So let it burn!
Nostr 2.0
Missing economics and opportunity cost - like lightning ⚡ 😢
Nuclear war.
Missing real use cases that serve needs strong enough for people to pay sats.
relay costs
nostr 2.0
the naive but easy way to solve a lot of nostr's challenges is to go back towards centralization, at which point you may as well not bother
difficult onboarding only to see shitty content
Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Reddit exist together even though they all are almost the same. And most of the people who use internet have an account on each one of them, and they often share the same information, sometimes transfer one image or tweet from one to another. Having a Unique feature and then being open to all made them survive. Closing doors to an idea or a form of content, or not finding novelty in naivety, not being able to ignore minor transgressions, and being too rigid is demotivates almost anyone.
Us
p2p