Nostr is very very cool…but…we’re a long way from normies wanting an unfiltered, decentralised social network which doesn’t have all their favourite famous peeps.
Bitcoiners will naturally have a love for Nostr because it fits with their worldview and understanding.
Like educating the benefits of Bitcoin, Nostr will have the same challenges. Zaps, nPubs etc… won’t mean much to most people.
For now it’s a super cool Bitcoin chat room.
Agreed but it has been cool to show my friends the power of lightning. Them seeing me zap someone for $0.0002 they go wow that’s just not possible with the current financial system. Having said that, you’re right, several years away for normies.
I hope not…
It’s 100x more “normie” friendly than it was a month ago, so I can’t wait to see where it is in another month.
It may not be ready to truly take on traditional social media yet, but it will be soon.
Seems like it evolves faster than people can form opinions
I’m with ya. I do find more BTC value within NOSTR. I also feel more optimistic compared to Twitter. 🙏🏼
And that’s ok.
All new shit is rough and “not ready”. Damus is literally a few months old and many other clients just out of proof of concept.
So what; everything starts somewhere•
There is no better group of people to bootstrap a network than this°
We have done it before (twice btc and lightning) we will do it again
Elon will be seeing a very legitimate escape hatch from the bird app. Interesting to see his plans re payment there. Insanity to use anything but Lightning. He does love his doge though ..
hmm I think there is much more latent demand for this than you‘re imagining outside of just Bitcoin.
Check out Chinese nostr for a peak into that.
People have tended to trade off privacy, identity ownership, and censorship resistance where the alternative was convenience.
What happens when those things become convenient?
Agree we have work to do but it’s happening.
The value proposition of Nostr may initially require some time to comprehend, but given the current climate of social media companies engaging in speech censorship and intentional dissemination of falsehoods, it's possible that the market will place a much higher value on a project like Nostr compared to others with similar aims.
not every bitcoiner has been taught so not every nostrich will be taught. ppl who need censorship resistance communication protocol will find and learn. we need to get rid of that "watered down world" mentality tbh
Education and better tools for blogs, audios, photography, newsletters, websites,... will be key in the near future.
Decentralized and more convenient for both producers and consumers.
We are closer than many think
Agree that Nostr is a natural fit for bitcoiners and it offers a lot of benefits to us. However, given the "unique sales proposition" of Nostr is that it's a social network without corporate or government oversight or control, it will ultimately appeal to anyone who values such fundamentals.
It may not be for "normies", but there is a large enough global base of potential users to make Nostr significant. Not only that, but the "Twitter-like" experience we see how is just one dimension of what is possible using the Nostr protocol.
It really depends on who you follow - for example in my feed today I have seen at most 10% of posts related to bitcoin.
The main things happening on my feed today: #babechain, Black Holes, UFOs, Music stuff, Nostr meta stuff, Zaps, New client releases, Preston taking about econ.
Agreed, but honestly it feels like what I've wanted. Can't be paying for expensive conferences so this is the closest I'll get in a room with y'all. 😊
Have you ever been to one of the conferences?
Have not. Too pricey, and also hard to take that much time off also when needing to save vacation time for family etc. One day perhaps. 🤞
that’s all true. luckily we have elon over on the bird app making a strong case for the protocol 💜
If they normies want in on bitcoin it would be nice if they HAD to come on here to hear it.
Reminds me of comments my grandma made in 2013 when talked to her about #bitcoin
⚡️⚡️💜💪💜⚡️⚡️
Much wow. Educator dropping 'for now' wisdom.
Sounds like you could use a ⚡️
People that are intelligent enough to be on nostr don't have much to gain from interacting with normies, anyway. Subtracting normies means more signal and less noise. Normies not being here might as well be a feature.
You really need to play with it more Peter. Spend more time using it, watching the flow of updates from devs, experimenting with a range of clients so you can see the variety of user friendly features. You haven’t been here long. I looked at your latest posts: Arguing with a few trolls and posting twitter links isn’t enough to make an assessment. There’s a magic here I’m not sure you’ve realized yet and beyond that, a direction this protocol is evolving towards that you’re not going to read about it a blog post or catch on to without participating a bit more. You’re being a bit quick to define what nostr really has going on. 🫶
Bring it on, Peter. We need you
Normies aren't your friend.
That’s something I have been thinking about. How can we make nostr attractive to everyone 🤔
#[0]
Just a matter of time before the government demonstrate the use case. But yes agree with your point. Is there a way of seeing how many daily users there are ?
true, the problem is that it takes effort to curate and maintain a purpose. i am having a hard time imagining a curated purpose that is not centrally enforced on top of nostr ... like it is on top of http.
Normies have no idea what they want, and will wait to be told what that is by famous peeps.
The longer this place flourishes without them, the better.
King of Bedford is here. What more could they want?
just let them join nostr when 200K
Currently trying to convince normies getting into Facebook jail to try Nostr.
Give it 5 years for the apps and revenue streams to improve. The top podcasters like Rogan talk about control over content and not being censored all the time.
5 years of improvement while corporate socials become more & more oppressive & censored
Never change, Pete
Nostr Beach
Gotta start somewhere… :)
It's not unfiltered. It is client filtered under user's control. That's a big difference.
I wouldn’t mind if it stays this way. This is awesome!
Boring take.
It is however much easier to get into than Bitcoin. Probably equally as hard to understand the importance of though.
If it's successful, Nostr will be the most filtered social media platform ever and it is a good thing. It seems people think the removal of all the rules from social media is the goal, but as anyone who ever tried, like Elon and the Darknet Markets discovered, a game without rules is a shitty game. In fact the solution could be found in the opposite direction with an explosion of rules. But instead of rules specified in a centralized place, the rules would be best set on the edges, by the users themselves. Exactly how Bitcoin's IsStandard mempool acceptance works.
We are quick to take a dump on Jordan Peterson for speaking up against anons, and although I am not happy with his solutions, I find the points he was making about the problem rather trivial. In fact #[2] claimed the same in a talk titled: "Anonymity Is The Problem" which highlights that moderation of content/requests/API calls/etc... are the main problems us developers of anonymity systems are contending with. How ironic is that? We're building anonymity and because of that, the most amount of time we're spending designing protocols is putting ourselves to thought experience of how anons can game these systems. Anons are our adversaries :) Anonymity is a weapon everyone should have access to, but so to its defense against it. On a local, personal level, not in the form of a global governing body. Enter Nostr.
Since the nostr protocol is open, there'll be a lot of innovative ways implemented to filter out inevitable armies of bots and spam. Funny enough open source development tends to delegate difficult decisions to the end user. This is normally an antipattern, but with nostr the incentives are aligning quite interestingly: users will be able to tweak more and more variables of what kind of messages they want to and don't want to see. And guess what, you're the average of the people you interact with, so I foresee users are going to come up with strict rules for filtering content for themselves that goes way beyond the current standards of filtering out "misinformation" in a way that it finally be worth spending time on a social media (imagine that :) as the conversations there will make them better people, instead of stupider, angrier and and anxious.
Here's an example: ChatGPT can already do a decent job at assigning an "Intellectual Honesty Score" to tweets. Which means it's even possible today to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I would certainly make it so that only the highest quality content gets to mess with my consciousness, because currently it's pretty difficult to justify the time spent on social media.
What's the common between spam and intellectual dishonesty? I want none of those to creep onto my feed, nor into my life.
Interesting thoughts. Now add your LN address so we can zap you for them!
Interestingly enough my talk was actually called "Identity is the problem", so I was largely making an opposing point (or at the least, a different one) ... I think "solutions" to Sybil attacks based on identity are largely bound for failure.
I guess filtering in online discussions is another discussion (with overlap ofc). For that I'm mostly in agreement with what you say here. I just don't understand why for the whole microblogging/social media thing we don't have user-controlled algorithms for feeds. Fediverse/activity pub is in the same boat as nostr there, I see no reason why it couldn't happen other than it's fairly sophisticated engineering. I guess users mostly can't handle that cognitive load.
Personally I don't like blocking, I don't like tribalism and I'm a free speech extremist, at least people should understand that it's crucial as a principle to be upheld. So I'm mostly interested in how to block *spam*, and certainly not things like "intellectual dishonesty" ... whatever that is.
Thanks for pointing out the mistake.
On "Intellectual Dishonesty Score (IDS)" Of course you know what that is, you can often recognize it when you see it, it's just "Programmer You" has problems with imagining how the hell a computer can make such judgement. I intentionally brought this example to highlight AI innovations that even I thought previously was impossible. Anyhow, if it's easier to you, then you can just think of a robot recognizing logical fallacies. A "Logical Fallacy Score" is more algorithmizable than IDS.
Blocking and muting are similar in the sense that they're powers, users possess, however these actions target specific users and not the content itself.
You brought up a very good question of why we don't have user-controlled algorithms for feeds?
You theorized it might be the
(1) sophistication of engineering that was the bottleneck and I did alluded to that as well. If that's the case, I think #wokegpt et al. does bring the long awaited breakthrough. But on a second try, let me add two more theories here:
(2) It could also be that the platform has a great incentive to control the game to optimize the user feed for "engagement."
(3) It could also be that it has never been tried, since in context, social media is still a new thing and is still in its infancy, so such trivial ideas might have never been attempted before.
Normies thought it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated
The normies are not going to push the world forward, progress is made one step at a time. If it were to happen, that we would get an unfiltered, decentralized social network, what would the steps look like to get there? My guess is it would look a lot like this.
Yeah. I don’t know a single normie who have heard of Nostr.
It'll take time, but it will happen. When someone gets on Nostr who is outside the bitcoin space but still produces good content, I might go out of my way to give them engagement. Jumping to a new form of social media has a cost, they should be rewarded for moving
Quote: "For now it’s a super cool Bitcoin chat room..."
💯 Massive potential for many many things no doubt! 💜🧡⚡💪
Peter this should've been posted here.
Instead of publishing lil digs/trash opinions, how about you help more ppl onboard.
"I'm going to nostrica" > followed by this take is weak AF.
If you ain't about it, be about it.
note167tjwkymsmgnx3qtr4t8k9ns6npjhyw3r7t4ut8anw0cp6rau86q22tcvz
Peter's career in bitcoin has been full of missteps and hesitations.
This latest is not surprising.
If we only did normie things we'd still be locked in in a cage with needles sticking out of our eyeballs and muzzles locked over our mouths.
Libertarian-minded Bitcoiners need to learn to communicate in terms that appeal to the sensibilities of other groups. This is something I’m trying to work on.
Get someone like Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones or Joe Rogan to try it, then it will explode.
You've only seen a fraction of what #nostr can do ;)
#[2] is consumed mostly by paranoid goldbug boomers and they're already here. Also what I'm seeing is that the frontends are doing a pretty good job of hiding the complicated stuff.
I'm in ₿ since 2017, but nostr is the first time I'm using sats as payment, so there is a win
agreed with this one..unless we see more censorship on twitter or social media people won't care about nostr.
Agreed, Peter
Welcome to Nostr, Peter! Took you long enough :)
I would not get too hung up on when normies are going to show up. Nostr is the first platform I can see truly competing with Twitter or Facebook. It may take a couple of years but it's got the right technology sitting under it. The way I see it it may not even really need to compete, those other platforms will have no choice but to integrate it.
But Peter - how many different communities have concluded that they needed to build their own platform, and look who actually did it in a way that it will work for everyone
It’s not that long way as you may think. Programming against Nostr is 100x easier than against Bitcoin, so the pace of innovation will stay crazy. Zaps are totally optional. Also even if it’s ,,just’’ for Bitcoiners, we’re still talking about tens of millions of people.
The more social networks Bitcoin and bitcoiners interface with, the deeper the penetration and reach. So please do not disengage from Twitter. That said, Bitcoin needs a public dialog which can not be censored. The social layer of Bitcoin can be attacked, if communication channels can be attacked.
Zaps can be key
I’ve been censored so long I started censoring myself. It’ll take a while before I get my voice back. I suppose they got what they wanted until now. I legitimately had fears my HR department was viewing my social media accounts and out of concerns didn’t say anything for the last 5 years. Now I can finally be outspoken about the fact that I’m moderate.
Until more of the well known people join nostr, here’s a tool I built that allows you to follow people’s twitter profiles from nostr: https://nostr-twit.glitch.me/
PURA VIDA 🤙
You can do your part of educating people and take their fear of everything related to decentralisation and cryptography. For example, start using your influence on centralises YouTube to drive your viewers to decentralises video platforms such as Odysee and from Twitter to Nostr.
If not, you're just another crypto influencer monetarising on YT while talking about decentralisation instead of living it.
Even if it doesn't go mainstream as Twitter. Nostr could do very well just with #Bitcoin community.
Also, we are early. Clients app still need improvements. 🤔
