“What are the biggest obstacles for NOSTRs success?” h/t #[0] https://twitter.com/ck_snarks/status/1652661119650000896
Discussion
having to pick and manage relays
yeah this could be hidden a lot more. I don’t touch my relays much anymore.
There's potential for that to change, say if there were specialist interest relays ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but yeah atm sort of should be background maybe
IMHO, the relays listed in NIP-05 should be taken more seriously. Also https://nak.nostr.com/ that Fiatjaf pointed out the other day solves a lot of the relay issues, but not all of them.
NIP-65 is better defined. NIP-05 is great fallback though.
private relays shouldn't be forgotten. I think they will become much more common in fact. So, relay management should never be something clients pick for you or take from your control (looking at you Primal).
If clients slowly just steer towards hiding it from users, they'll just end up coalescing around centralization - with a finite list of 'chosen for you' relays.
Network effects, different look and feel.
once nostr can be implemented in git communications, it will boom trough the roof.
I used to believe that... https://github.com/colealbon/git-nostr
“The feed is people all talking about how awesome Nostr is all the time” fair 😅
geez there was no need for Mr Hat to make SNARKY replies .. he he (been waiting to make a pun on ck's very esoteric username 4 awhile)
It is awesome Will ya should be proud dude seriously I haven't been on Twitter since I joined up here and that's mad cause I rejoined Twitter cause Elon bought it this is a place I don't feel invisible and that's down to you #[3]
True dat 🤣
agree hahA
Onboarding issues are huge. It's FAR too complicated for average folks to get up and running. Nostr makes them feel stupid. Ideally we'd make them feel powerful.
The other issue is critical mass - or the appearance of critical mass. It needs to be FAR easier to find people who are interested in similar things.
Agreed.
1. Most new people are said hi to by a handful of people.. those people often do not follow the new person. So it is not substancial.
After that the idiot is left on his/her own.
They may discover most content is about bitcoin. They then decide if they want to try hard and stay.
2. Some more hashtags or ways to find similar interests would be key.
This is really we need answer it honestly, despite all successes, I think there is one obvious we can't get rid of it with this protocol, blinking issue, kind of unreliability due to natural of websocket. More R&D is needed to find much optimizef alternatives!
It's amazing to me how people make assumptions about how nostr works as if they didn't spend < 10 minutes reading the protocol doc.
Unfortunately it will always be judged from the time they try it. They write it off as a failure, even though the ux progress improves every day. Everyone has their different tolerance levels for buggy crap, and some people don’t care to be products in a corporate machine I guess. Surprised there are so many twitter bitcoiner holdouts considering this is pretty much the ideal social network for bitcoiners.
Another thing is that people on twitter consider nostr noisy, they see the algorithm as the signal over there. Interesting indeed 🤔
Herds follow. Plenty of bitcoiners use the twitter algo to get their attention fix. Aren’t actually trying provide real value, just value for their ego.
Everytime I open the bird app it shows me the “For You” tab: basically people I don’t even follow. On Nostr I can find what’s going on quickly and have control of my data.
Lists on Twitter are really useful. When I switch to one of my lists, the tweets are time-ordered, similar to nostr.
Hopefully the concept of lists (groupings of followers) will come to #nostr soon.
By noisy you mean real.
I get people like convenience and to be spoon fed what they “like”. But I can’t wait till more people get sick of being programmed by centralized overlords. It is the main driver in causing division and societal collapse.
More people are waking up to it everyday and will eventually choose decentralized social media over state sponsored propaganda that uses Big Data algorithms to elicit emotional responses from users. If they do not, they will turn into compliant social robots 🤖
It'd be nice if we can point to a few npubs that don't talk about Bitcoin at all, and only occasionally about meta-nostr.
Said pointing is also a problem, since there's no permanent URL.
Maybe just setup an AI to bootstrap such a group :-)
Check out the hashtag #grownostr it is designed as a specifically no Bitcoin feed. People don’t always follow.
I had an idea a long time ago where you can mark a post as a general topic (meta-nostr, bitcoin, functional programming) and for people who don’t want to see your posts about those topics can opt out of them in their feed. Or they can choose to follow specific topics from you.
This would allow me to post about the things I want to post about without alienating people who don’t want to hear my bitcoin posts.
This is great. I have lots of interests and enjoy lots of topics of conversation, but fear the wide variety may impact followers who may only be interested in a single or few of those topics. Especially useful for people who just want to see my photos and not hear me ramble about random stuff they don’t care about.
Enabling follow hashtag helps with the “find me non-nostr non-bitcoin” threads/topics https://github.com/damus-io/damus/issues/606 cc #[6]
Very much like this idea. 🤙💡
Yes please!
#[5] and I had a similar convo about topic based relays in Uvita.
It would be sick to have that much control but at the same time I wonder if you’d miss out on some serendipity as well.
Like sub reddits
Interesting idea. I would never use it. If someone doesn’t like all of me, then they don’t get any of me.
I would definitely use that! Right now I'm trying to think of the best way to create an isolated experience on a Twitter style client for a discussion on building a new Nostr app. The only way I can think of with existing tools is for every participant to create a new Nostr profile.
I think it’s good. it sounds like the ability to follow hashtags + regex, no?
Are you doing this with hashtags or something else? If more than hashtag, please take a look at something I came up with this weekend for labeling posts…
https://github.com/s3x-jay/nostr-nips/blob/master/68.md
Once I get nostr:npub1wmr34t36fy03m8hvgl96zl3znndyzyaqhwmwdtshwmtkg03fetaqhjg240's feedback, we'll put it up as a PR. But the "unstructured labeling" section would handle the use case you're talking about. Would even let people label things after the fact if they forgot to label it when they posted it.
It could be hashtags but without a #hashtag in the content. Could add another label next to the hashtag to mark it as a topic (could have multiple as well)
So you’re using a `t` tag. That works, it just can’t be corrected after the fact if they don’t get the tagging right (which admittedly isn’t the end of the world or anything).
Sounds good. Something simple, unstructured, and generic. Hashtags don’t have to be in the content directly - just makes the UX a little harder to find.
I found regex/keywords/hashtags extremely good for twitter filtering out content. Unsure you need much more in reality - but that alone doesn’t help you find/follow content/topics. I think Nostr views/lists work well for that.
Custom filters on feeds all throughout the app is a better approach. I should be able to filter out any posts by x npub(s) that include whatever keyword I choose. For example if I want only short form #[6] content I could set up a filter on his npub hiding ‘lopp.net’ so all his article posts aren’t shown. Or could do same for #[7] and ‘meat’ or ‘walk, walking’
Right this filter could work across your whole feed: “hide posts that have the bitcoin topic or hashtag, etc”
But reader defined categories/filters or hardcoded categories posters must tag posts under?
the posters would have to categorize the post during composition. Keywords work too but I feel that is kinda hacky
Can be more than keywords too. Can filter down to notes that include only defined npubs to view conversations only between them, with or without keywords. With or without media etc. I’m imagining going to #[5] ‘s profile and changing the filter to only show posts that include both his and #[6] npubs and “nostrasia” to view any convo you’ve all had about this topic
Ah yeah def want that as well.
This sounds like a multiple filter request.
Added multiple filter/advanced search with multiple criteria feature request: https://github.com/damus-io/damus/issues/1075
Would allow muting words not work? All the bitcoin haters could just mute the word bitcoin. They’d see all your notes except those containing the word bitcoin.
It would work to some extent but not all bitcoin posts have the word bitcoin in it. Sometime I would want to explicitly mark it so people who don’t care about those posts can reliably filter it.
Mute note with presence of keyword: https://github.com/damus-io/damus/issues/856
Multi-channel feeds for profiles is an interesting concept. One person’s noise is another person’s signal. And vice versa.
Hmmm yes. I like the idea of adding additional (poster defined) feeds. Then users can just enable or disable various feeds when viewing a profile’s content. #[7] unit default feed on profile would include all notes but you could define various sub feeds that you can add *or remove* posts from. Idk if this can fall under a currently existing nip/kind. You can, while drafting a post or afterwards, add a note to one of your custom feeds. And later remove or recategorize (update the sub feed list of note IDs?).
Users could subscribe to your default feed or modify what they see it to exclude certain of your sub feeds
I was always under the impression that eventually there’d content specific relays that do some filtering for you, and I imagined a way to choose which relays to post content specific notes to, and which to read from (which Damus already allows in global).
Would this be the equivalent of Reddit flair?
i was thinking about ways to distill the feed down to only topics a user would like to see and i came across an open source machine learning model by facebook research. the use case would work by having the user define a set of topics they are interested in, and, given a post, the model would assign probabilities to each of the topics. the post need not contain the keywords explicitly. the post would make it through to the users customized feed if it passes a certain threshold for the likelihood the post is relevant to the user’s topic of interest.
model reference and examples: https://huggingface.co/facebook/bart-large-mnli?candidateLabels=urgent%2C+not+urgent%2C+phone%2C+tablet%2C+computer&multiClass=false&text=I+have+a+problem+with+my+iphone+that+needs+to+be+resolved+asap%21%21
was thinking about building a simple client to test this idea
Guess I have little faith in the posters tagging their content well or consistently. In favor more of reader side keyword filters
Well we will have that too but making topics first class has lots of interesting use cases and makes it easier to let people discover people with similar interests without littering your post with hashtags every time.
Add a local image categorization ML model and you could also events with certain image types.
Of course, the images would have to be pre-fetched, which wouldn’t be ideal for bandwidth.
This only works if it's semi-automated on the sender side. The app should add tags based on keywords, which the author can delete before hitting send if they're wrong. That way, as a follower, I can have some confidence of not seeing the stuff I opted out of, without having to build such a filter myself.
[Insert AI buzzwords]
The more manual alternative is to have multiple identities (subkeys?) and have the app keep an eye out for when you post baby photos with your Bitcoin persona. But this is inflexible and requires the sender to decide on how to split things.
Some reader-side filtering based on other heuristics is probably still needed though.
[Insert AI buzzwords]
Or we just reinvent social norms about which topics are taboo in public spaces. Meh.
Maybe add a field in profile metadata called interests that accepts a list of 10 or more/less user-interests?
Users can then create a post that is tagged to a certain topic/interest from their profile.
Would make discoverability on #Nostr a lot easier for all communities.
Não seria um bloqueador de palavras chave com tem no Twitter?
Convince septic tank YouTube to join nostr: https://youtu.be/EMpkE4uMCM8
Though with nostr's poor video support, that might (not) be a shitty idea.
Bitcoiners alienating everybody else who would use it, with cult like fanaticism. This is why people think nostr sucks
Yes.
The doom and gloom of this twitter thread says it all: that’s what they love and won’t let go of.
The success of #nostr is somehow related to clients. Clients seem to lack in design, functionality, performance and hype. We should wait, report bugs and define papercuts. Protocol and clients will evolve in their ecosystem by time.
That no celebrity of the show or politicians or technology tycoons talk about #nostr and his goodness. It is still a very niche protocol, the mass of users opts for entertainment networks and where their idols are. 🤷🏻♂️
I think the biggest issue is content discovery. Making it easier to find people with similar interests, coupled with easier relay configuration, would fix the echo chamber “problem” many are referring to.
#[3] talk about coincidence 😂
Lack of consensus between clients, which isn't bad at this stage in the game, and user experience. Also, people aren't used to curating their own content. I think people saying bitcoin maxis are gatekeeping is just a ridiculous cop out because I've never seen it.
I still heavily use Twitter but under my following tab. I've curated my following for diverse information and viewpoints. Many people just want an algo to do this because they just want something "that just works right away." the algo is the doomspiral not the users themselves. It's designed to keep you coming back and will show you content you interact with most, even if that content is negative political views you disagree with. You have to be smarter then the algo and not give in.
tiktok has ruined the idea of curating a feed. Its just too much work for most people. They just want to open an app and be shown the best stuff on the network. I get it.
1-Ux/Ui not attracting normies. Basically always remaining a niche a bit like Fediverse is.
2 - The possibility of too many Nips making the protocol more complex and less interoperable. Although I think these are the main obstacles I think the underlying ease of the protocol and the open network nature will overcome all of this.
Every nip is optional except for nip01. You you really only need that and perhaps nip10 and the new mentions spec if you’re building a social media app.
Being able to find ‘your people’ quickly and seemlessly for new users. Relays are fine but for most new to nostr / damus, they don’t mean much.
- there’s no easy search to find channel/topic relays
- it’s difficult to curate your own feed
- Sats over likes is great, but clunky. Tapping ⚡️ and getting a box to type the number of sats and enter with everything else done in the background would keep the flow going
- images taking a long time to load
- word of mouth/marketing/people knowing it’s more useful to them, or more fun, or more web3 or whatever than other places
- if it becomes too much like twitter/fb/insta/tt/snap etc it loses. Perhaps if it’s the place where w3 gets built it 🚀
Difficult to find others will similar interests (outside of Bitcoin and nostr itself)