“Normal people are referred to dozens of clients with questionable usability by a simple search” is enough to know that the user retention is trash. It’s a detail in itself. There’s no encouragement for people who are the top ranked search results for “Nostr client” to be actually referring people to specific clients. Gossip, for example, is functionally broken for any normal user on Mac, in that you have to read documentation, open a terminal, and run a chattr command to get it to work. How many people are going to do this? Yet it is still generally referred to people who are Desktop users. Nostur.com is a good client that people like for Mac, but it generally is not present in these pages referring people to clients, or is listed as a Desktop client and not a Mac client. How many clients are normal people expected to try? Hint: few try more than one. When they are told to use Gossip, and they run the Application package and it returns an error with no indication of how it may be solved, they are going to quit immediately. The user retention of Mac desktop users is likely a single digit percent.
Discussion
You are describe a search result issue not a Nostr client issue (except with gossip). Client devs can’t fix what a searcher sees. We need to know which website they come across to know what they see. Then we can approach that website to try to recommend better clients.
If Gossip has remained broken on Mac all for years and the dev is completely unwilling to make his app conform to the normal unsigned app security exception workflow of MacOS, demanding users read a README file they have no indication they should read and execute a terminal command, that means that glaring usability issues are considered no big deal for user onboarding. There is zero effort to make an onboarding experience that makes sense from someone doing a web search for “Nostr” or “Nostr client”.
This screenshot is the first DDG result for Nostr clients, nostr.com — it specifically recommends Gossip of one of only 5 clients to Mac web browsers. Gossip is glaringly broken for any normal Mac user. The most usable client for Mac users, nostr:npub1n0stur7q092gyverzc2wfc00e8egkrdnnqq3alhv7p072u89m5es5mk6h0, is the fifth result, right after the client that throws an error on execution with no hint of solving it. This is normal in the Nostr ecosystem.
I understand that a dev can’t solve this, but “follow me on Nostr” always leads to a massive, multi page long chatlog of people saying “this client doesn’t work, this client doesn’t work, I can’t figure out how to follow you on this client”.
We can try to curate better client recommendations on nostr.com
Maybe nostr:npub1c878wu04lfqcl5avfy3p5x83ndpvedaxv0dg7pxthakq3jqdyzcs2n8avm can help?
As specifically for Gossip - I agree that if what you describe is still the current process then we should not recommend this client. But I don’t know if nostr:npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c is even getting further funding to make it easy to use … a lot of this depends on developers ability to continue working on clients.
I’ll look at nostr.com closer soon to see what can be done - but ultimately depends on nostr:npub1c878wu04lfqcl5avfy3p5x83ndpvedaxv0dg7pxthakq3jqdyzcs2n8avm
Normally when I go to get some kind of client software in any category, it uses my browser’s user agent to make an immediate suggestion of what I probably want to download. Number of pages for a search for Nostr client that do this: 0
We should probably not recommend “other stuff” clients and limit to timeline use case otherwise it’s too confusing. 🫤
It has a terrible onboarding flow I got a feed first time I tried but have no patience for the unclear ui. I know from experience native apps are a huge pain and radically different between platforms.
My suggestion is consider organizing to donate an old but current enough MacBook or Mac mini. I'm open to that too. Building for windows can be done on Linux, but neither macos or iOS. You must have a Mac to test and build properly. I'm pretty sure Mike doesn't have one. Neither do I but I have less options for ui libraries as I refuse to use c/rust
Gossip developer here. I mostly agree with you. I've stopped developing nostr things because I've gotten busy with other parts of my life, but also I'm less hopeful about nostr's future. Nostr devs don't flock together, they scatter like cats, and argue that the people will choose. Well, it is likely that the people will choose none of the above because of the lack of compatibility and clean experience.
My personal opinion is that while the software should be very strongly distributed and censorship resistant, there should still be a centralized group that maintains a centralized standard that evolves very slowly. Sure, that centralized group could become captured...in which case people should leave nostr for whatever replaces it. And it probably wouldn't happen for a very long time. Sure, there will be people that bitch about such a thing (I wont name names, you know who I'm talking about) but they can just be ignored... if they don't like nostr they can just start another protocol (like I am doing in my spare time).
As for gossip on Apple, I'm not the right person to sign my soul away to the late Steve Jobs. And because I won't sign their developer contract, by law I can't make the user experience smooth. At least I made it available. I might have simply said "sorry, it doesn't work on Apple".
Gossip shouldn't be the go-to nostr application for Apple, or honestly, for any platform. I'm just one guy with developer-centric sensibilities. Devs like all the settings and feedback, and a big-screen interface. But it doesn't offer as much hand holding or simplicity that normies are going to want. I have nothing to do with any lists of clients, though. If gossip is demoted or removed from such lists, my feelings won't be hurt. Like I say, I'm not even developing it anymore.
> Gossip shouldn't be the go-to nostr application for Apple, or honestly, for any platform
Unsure of this statement, it is still the best native client for Linux desktop users.