Ultimately people want to be seen hanging out with people and ideas that they believe secure their income/profession/status, sitting somewhere between financial fears, ego and greed. Look at the shmoozing on Linked. When the funding dries up, when things get gnarly, and the going gets tough enough to need to look elsewhere, they will come and they need this degree of openness and curiosity to contribute to this community. What we need to do is to ensure fertile soil, rich discussion, respectful vibes and the hoptimism we all enjoy here.
VERY interesting research on how academic twitter migrated to #Bluesky.
Interesting topline takeaways for growing #nostr. No rocket science that's not been said before, but it's nice to have some data:
1- External shocks are key. Capitalize on them. >15% of transitions explained this way. Think geopolitical events, outages, Musk making a big disliked policy change etc.

2- Audiences move from incumbent platforms following influential voices that they follow. Focus on onboarding these influential voices. This is more impactful than just trying to bring the whole audience first.

This dynamic can build contagion. Find ways to more publicly highlight when influential accounts join.
And make it super easy for Nostr users to use clients to reconstruct followees & social graphs from incumbent platform. Trick will be to do this in a privacy respecting way.
(sidenote: that's way the follow packs were such a good idea. But we need much more of this)
(note: influential voices may experience a period of 'where's my audience?' So it's key to find ways to get the transitioning user from that to the reconstruction of their network. )
3- Multiple peers transitioning is key. Having local clusters develop is important (& probably helps with the dry period before an audience is rebuilt.)
Interesting nuance: transition rates to #bluesky were 25-30% in fields like arts/social sciences, but about half that in medical / physical sciences / engineering. Possible predictors include baseline political engagement & political values expressed.

This has an implication for Nostr: focus messaging on Nostr features that may align with people in incumbent platforms. There has to be desire.
Paper "Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24801
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