Important to remember that nostr simply relays notes and other stuff, from one user to another. That will always be valuable. It does not STORE data, there's other solutions for that, which are not nostr. The storage market (e.g. for notes, and other stuff, which actually was written in the original web proposal) will always be 1,000-1,000,000 times bigger. So nostr has a total addressable market of maybe 0.01% of the web. That is perfectly OK. The challenge is not, and will never be to grow nostr to 500million users. The challege is to spread ideas such as zaps, or ability to move from one app to another, or an app eco system, to the wider web. Nostr then provides realtime payments, which is the cherry on top.
Great fireside between nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx and nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m at Nostriga. I got a chance to listen to it now.
Regarding the question of whether Nostr will have more users than Twitter/X in five years (~500 million), my base case would be no, actually. And I say that as a huge Nostr fan and daily user.
In the long arc of time, Nostr's addressable market is nearly unlimited (basically everyone who uses the internet could be using Nostr in some form), but I expect somewhat of a slower burn. Infrastructure build-out type stuff. And breaching a network effect with a better solution is generally quite a long uphill climb.
To me, Nostr is successful once it starts serving tens of millions of people well. I expect it to be more of a quality over quantity thing for a while. Bitcoin is almost 16 years in and still isn't at 500 million users. But for many of those people, it was lifechanging.
I'd like to be surprised to the upside, but I also don't want people to think that if Nostr is "only" at tens of millions of people in five years, or 100+ million but still sub-Twitter, that it underachieved. It's tiny right now, and numbers anywhere approaching that would be a huge increase.
Nostr is a great improvement for everyone using it. But sometimes it takes people time to see why a given solution is better than what they have, or to realize they have a problem at all.
So in the meantime I monitor Nostr's success by the quality and quantity of developer activity, the capability of the protocol as a freedom tool or the shortcomings it still has for that use case, the quality of the conversations throughout the ecosystem, how many people consider it to be lifechanging tech compared to centralized social media, and in time, steady growth.
Discussion
That’s not how I would personally think about marketshare. I would measure market share more along the lines of “what portion of identity-based applications can I log in with via my nsec?”
When measuring Nostr’s global market share, however, we need to be aware that “hybrid” Nostr apps will not have the same freedom power as “Nostr only” apps.
If it uses Nostr as identity layer, and stores user data in a local DB, is it really freedom tech?
Hybrid apps are inevitable. Question is, how do we measure success and promote freedom tech?
I think we're agreeing. This is much more in line with an extended nostr eco system. Remove the relay part, and allow logging in with nsec identity is essentially the bridge to the wider web, for which the TAM is 1000x bigger. Relays end up being a small part of that.
Phrasing it another way. nost is far bigger than nostR. But nost itself is basically the web + taproot.
thank you for explaining.
what is Nost?... I haven't heard of that
Nost is something I just made up : Notes and other Stuff
It's much bigger than NostR which depends on relays
And adds an important element of taproot and schnorr to the web. What you could call an nsec too. This has a much larger total addressable market than the relay part.
I knew fiatjaf for many years before nostr. I kept saying to him that the data must be transport agnostic. Either by luck or design, it is in nostr. That's the path that will let it scale to a far bigger market, though most have not yet realized this. I think Lyn has.
thank you, Melvin. I'm trying to wrap my head around Nostr, and I love the idea of "Nost" as being and even bigger circle underlying the "Nostr" circle.
so i'm basically excited about this explanation from someone that
NSECs are a sort of "value-less" digital estate living on Nostr similar to how UTXOs are digital property on bitcoin network
So i'm reading you and Lyn to figure out what comes next, what that means for market, and where value accrues.
Everything online is 1's and 0's. It's all valueless until we, as humans, assign value to it.