Social networks are something intuitively graspable by normal people - you post, you follow, you interact. But Bitcoin or any other crypto isn't. That's literally the opposite of what people are used to - it's a complex paradigm shift that needs weeks or months of studying. Tying these two things together closes the door to far too many people.
Bluesky showed that people ARE hungry for alternatives - it grew from 40k users to 40M. Nostr could have caught a lot of these people, but didn't.
Blue sky was also pushed hard by the MSM and had a huge astroturfing campaign on Reddit. Nostr didn't have this, while having funding levels that are a couple of orders of magnitude less.
I came to Nostr with zero Bitcoin knowledge of history. I stayed because I found people I liked. If ask you see on Nostr is Bitcoin Maxi's, that's on you for who you follow and interact with.
It's not just about who you follow. The whole ecosystem is tied to Bitcoin, clients are Lightning-only, zaps, payments, everything. Are there even Nostr developers who aren't bitcoiners? I believe there are maybe some exceptions, but that proves my point a little.
And I'm not advocating to replace Bitcoin with something else, I'm saying separate the protocol from monetary systems entirely and welcome diversity.
There have been forks of various clients that included other currencies, mostly Monero. It's not inherently tied to Bitcoin, though most apps include the feature because it's what their users want.
Some clients don't even have zaps x21.social & nos.social for instance.
I wasnt a bitcoiner when I started on nostr if I became one thats just a testament to bitcoin, should we force people to believe what is not true?
I run formstr.app which has nothing to do with bitcoin, except that you can buy custom URLs with it, but you'll also be able to do that with FIAT soon.
