I respect your opinion but couldn’t disagree more. Actually, I’m on a one-man war against Nostr’s real, palpable incentives.
People are just bad at prioritising what truly matters. Most people on Nostr will give grand speeches about freedom, anarchy, and building your own roads, then proceed to zap bitcoin memes and behave exactly like they would on Twitter, Gab, etc. On average, the palpable incentive is to keep Nostr as a safe space for the Bitcoin Twitter bubble.
Funding developers who aren’t aligned with, onboard with, or sponsored by the BTC Twitter use case is what Nostr needs in order to evolve. This goes against the same incentives that brought many of its users here in the first place. To stay relevant Nostr needs to outgrow its early-day priorities for the greater good.
I don’t use Keychat, and to avoid falling into the human tendency of criticising what we don’t understand, I won’t say a word against it. That said, based on the project’s own landing pages, their scope seems to be to become the "everything app" for Maxis. So, by definition, I can’t see it as much more than a beloved niche tool.
I’m not disagreeing that ultimately Nostr may exist as an experimental protocol for Bitcoiners, a transitional evolutionary step toward something better yet to come.
That said, I don’t think my points above are wishful thinking or addressing some utopian, unsolvable problem. We just don’t like to face the reality of our real problems. As I like to say, there’s no technical solution to moral problems. Ultimately, people have to choose... And for the vast majority of Nostr users, there’s a lot of theoretical talk and very little to show that they’re ready to actually build and fund a real alternative.
By definition, they’ll either buy or be the product (here or elsewhere) regardless of the technology powering it. Once people truly understand this (and I mean really understand it, beyond grand speeches and doomsaying), hopefully healthier palpable incentive like owning your data and controlling your feed will be taken seriously. And there's no other way to take it seriously other than voting with your wallet and time.
As hard as the technical and organisational problems are (and yes, Nostr has a bunch), the real challenge is getting people to truly understand why we should build something like Nostr, and to have genuine skin in the game.
