I think the value of Nostr won't be its content, but its people and social connections. As well as its opposing values to centralized alternatives.
Between finding people you like and escaping digital gulags, people end up coming to Nostr. I think it'll be slow going with bursts of growth just like Bitcoin, which also has passive, voluntary entry points.
Right now most people that come to nostr don't stay. That is not sustainable even for the current ecosystem of users/apps/services. What will it take to retain users? My mind goes to content, but there may be other things.
I have been having the feeling that "content" is a construct created by the centralization of social media. People were erased and content took their place. Accounts became the vassals of platforms to produce content to be shown between ads. People forgot how to socialize and now know only how to engage with content.
It's hard to express, but I think Nostr brings people back to social media. We come here to hang out with frens more than we come to consume content. But when people come looking for "like and subscribe" mechanics, Nostr doesn't compute. Should we try and recreate the feel of content platforms or should we strive to be different, letting to social graphs be the real selling point?
Nostr does seem to humanize online social networking again. But will it thrive without economic activity? Everything requires time and money to build and maintain, even in the digital spaces which Nostr occupies. Content is an obvious thing that can create economic activity, although not the only thing. Nostr's potential as I see it is in removing the platforms and advertising agencies that stand as middlemen in centralized social networks. People are no longer their vassals, but that doesn't negate the need for economic activity to drive and sustain growth. That's true in any setting where people coexist.
We'll have to wait and see, because Nostr is grounded in physical reality and capitalism. What's monetized is what will survive. The clients and services that can pay their server and development costs will survive. The businesses which sell enough products by advertising on Nostr will survive. The creators that get enough zaps will survive.
I agree, economic activity is what will make Nostr thrive, because it's a necessary condition for its survival in the first place. By being a free platform and a conduit for free money, I think Nostr has the best chance possible to be where everyone ends up.
I'm hopeful and optimistic that it can be. I believe that Nostr combined with bitcoin payments creates an incredible open and free (as in freedom) playing field. I know it won't happen accidentally while simply sitting back and waiting. Some can afford to play the long game, but unfortunately many individuals can't. I hope Nostr can be a digital space where individuals can thrive online without becoming captured by centralized entities. I just wonder how it gets from here to there while remaining viable.
If we think of those middlemen as the thumb on the end of a garden hose, it's clear why the amplified reach models work. When information flows organically, it will saturate heavier near its source before spreading, then only slowly and so far. Income is time sensitive. With things like communities, the opportunity to create flow-channels for self-advertising already exists, but that part of nostr needs a whole lot of cleaning up to function properly as of yet. Even there, I don't know if the speed of audience/consumer growth will be fast enough to create a pursuable value for most creators & sellers. It's tricky to envision a system that discourages advertising but has enough economic activity to thrive. Even self-advertising gets to feeling invasive so there will be a constant audience loss & gain pattern for anyone who puts in the work to gain the follows, but then what time are they spending on creating quality content/products? 😅
Rock, meet hard place. 😂😂
i think that the mindset of the psycho corporate mind manipulators muddies the waters and that actually things will organically gel a lot better than you think in a self emergent system, just like brain cells are cooperating with each other and even two whole hemispheres with different biases cooperate in brains
the control of signal propagation exerted by the silo owners is to benefit their own interests, and it is very similar in its influence on the human social network as a tumor is to a brain - it consumes space and resources, and it gets in the way of connections forming between systems
I can't say that's inaccurate in the long game but there would need to be some sort of transitionary system to make it sticky in between. I just can't tell you what that looks like 😂
i'm looking at it right now
nostr is going to end up being the "transitional system" for a lot of things
already i came up with this idea of using nostr events as control messages for access control then i learned that nostrocket is building something like this... and maybe another project, i forget, didn't stick in my memory
nostr isn't the complete answer, it's the connection layer, there is still other systems that need to be discovered and added to the stack, fast synchronising data storage is one i'm very focused on
