I'm not convinced, either way.
Nostr is niche, but it's the only protocol that works well for communities, and that's a very large niche. It's all niches.
Communities have their own internal network effect, as they migrate as a group. Communities can be small, like a family, medium-sized, like a parish, or large, like a school system.
For instance, #GitCitadel moving from Slack to Alexandria is immediately a lively community of about 15 people, tendency growing.
Most communities aren't "fanboys sitting around, passively, waiting for someone famous to post something on Twitter", they're "bunch of people hang out and chat because they have something in common".
It's much easier to move that "bunch of people" than "fanboys" because they don't need heavy advertising and monetizing, to have a reason to exist. And they don't care about visibility, they just want to see _each other_.
Agree, most of us abandoned traditional social media platforms because the conversations there are always "politically correct", "one sided" or "peer pressured".
When users want to have real human interactions they must resort to smaller, private communities or niche platforms where people speak freely without fear of mob backlash, censorship algorithms, or the constant performance act of “curating” a public persona.
It’s ironic — social media was meant to connect us, but the need to appease the leadership of the loudest voices has turned it into a place where genuine thought is often replaced by safe, pre-approved scripts.
This happens on kind 1 here too, look at the OP.
Only on the public mega-relays. I sometimes aim stuff I post at that "Primal" audience and it's sorta influencer-y or corporate-y because that's just the way that market works.
Writing for TheForest is more intimate and personal, in tone, and the private communities are where you can really let your hair down.
So, it's less the kind, than the relay the event is meant for.
A lot of people on Twitter or Instagram and etc. actually have private accounts. They use them like community apps.
But they have the problem that those corporations are administering/moderating their community and mining their community's data. One of their private community members could get banned for something they say publicly, and then they are also prevented from accessing the private community. And anything you post on there gets hovered up by their AI Datenkraken.
Instead of simply trying to make connections, we should first learn how to make them. Every user on this protocol is a human being—and if they own Bitcoin, they’re already valuable. The key is to learn how to be valuable yourself; only then will others see you that way.
On Nostr, I had to throw away my convictions and connect with people I’d never met before. It was difficult at first, but I quickly realized: the more valuable my content was, the more valuable my connections and overall experience became.
You are on point. Communities, smol and large, is one of the markets we can compete for. Not the TikTokers, Instagramers or Xers.
People are underestimating the attractiveness of a truly one-stop-shop app for Groups (private and public).
The more normie, the more useful this is.
My grandparents are freaking tired AF of needing fifteen different Big Tech apps just to stay in touch with their closest.
Nostr is the only thing that let's you put the Community central, not the content-type.
There's like a dozen people that get this.
Most just keep putting themselves in a content type box, for no reason.
Yeah, I think it's an artefact of those mainstream apps. You go to Twitter to microblog. Substack for longform. Instagram to post images, etc.
So, everyone came over here and started building
Twitter... in purple
Substack... in purple
Instagram... in purple
Wikipedia... in purple
GitHub... in purple
Amethyst and Nostrudel actually started the Great Kind Migration by just adding everything and the kitchen sink, and letting you actively manage your relays, and Chachi and Alexandria and Jumble and ZapChat are heading the same way.
Just give me an everything app, tailored to my community or communities. Then people are choosing among designs and workflows, rather than by data type.
Yup, I'm building an (ugly) Community Everything App in Material/Dart now to have as a baseline for fixing my performance bottlenecks in Zapchat.
There will be choice!
