If you want wider adoption, yes, more or less it’s what I’m saying. If you’re targeting cypherpunk mentality, you will probably have success appealing to them with technical details and strong code fundamentals, but when it comes to normies (mainstream adoption), priories shift rapidly. You can argue that’s why the “crypto” industry has been successfully attracting dumb people with shiny toys for many years, while Bitcoin is more popular among critical thinkers or people that have the ability to learn from past mistakes. What initially attracted people to Bitcoin wasn’t its solid fundamentals, it was the potential for outsized returns. They only had to learn the fundamentals after some got burned by the shiny alternatives. Nostr users are still early on the journey. Almost no normies use the protocol right now. But if that changes in the future, would you bet that most of them will be onboarded by the cypherpunk clients or with the Primal-likes?
Discussion
> would you bet that most of them will be onboarded by the cypherpunk clients or with the Primal-likes?
I see where you're going with that, but I would go further, sadly... I don't even think the Primal-likes are enough to attract the normie at the moment. Their brains are too fucking cooked with megacorp social media garbage and they are frogs-in-boiling-water wrt realizing how dangerous their situation is.
I don't talk about this much.. but I think the most durable - and unfortunately very, very slow - adoption curve is community-specific software (sure, social feeds, but also "Other Stuff" apps that achieve local goals) that serves hyper-local needs, at low-cost, low friction, and while preserving sovereignty (ie. "why should we host our town message board with Zuck or Elon? and while we're at it, lets include community payments and a job board for local babysitters, I can just fork this repo and point it at our relays...!"). That will have to bake-in for a while, and then one day these communities will realize they can actually opt to "federate" with other communities who are doing something slightly similar; communicate and make payments across communities without permission or restriction, etc.
Depending on what else is going on in the world at that moment, eyes may finally open.
Simply: what normie X user is going to switch off of X for something even 100x prettier than Primal?
It’s crazy that you mention that — just yesterday a colleague of mine (not a Bitcoiner) pitched me basically the *same* app idea. I told her she could build it on Nostr. She had no idea what that was, so I gave her a 15-minute rundown and showed her how it works, lightning payments and all. She got it immediately and was actually excited. Today she told me she slept on it and thinks it’s a genius idea that could totally work.
So yeah, normies can figure this stuff out with a bit of direction. We just need to get them into the community using the best tools available and let them take it from there. Freedom doesn’t need coordination — it happens naturally. Normies stick to platforms because their friends and heroes are still there. Once that changes, they’ll move too. They’re followers by nature.
LFG buddy
A note that was initially intended as a troll ended up as a great conversation and a new follow. Possible only on Nostr. 🤙