I remember early Flickr. It was *interesting* and attracted new users like a magnet. Same for early Twitter and early Facebook.
Remember Google Plus? Died on the vine. Orkut? Caught on in Brazil for some reason, nowhere else. Ello, "the Facebook killer"? It was very pretty and artsy. Also very dead.
No amount of convincing can make users stay with a platform. You may convince them to try it, but unless it is *INTERESTING* to them, they will not stick around.
MySpace made it easier for people to transfer their data to Facebook, that's the only reason Facebook ever got popular.
Because at the time every other social media platform made it easy to share your data and link accounts.
Now sites like Facebook intentionally make it difficult for people to transfer their data to other social media.
I agree with you to a point. This was not my experience with Facebook however. I didn't have MySpace presence, so I didn't care about data transfer. I jumped on Facebook because it looked interesting. Facebook was also initially "exclusive", meaning you needed an .edu email address to join. This made it just so out of reach and because of that much more desirable for many people at the time. Brilliant marketing move, if intentional.
I remember those…RIP!
I'm sympathetic to this view and my concern is that Nostr wont grow in usage as long as it is primarily bitcoiners on here talking about bitcoin (and Nostr) which really is most of what is discussed. On the other hand Nostr definitely isn't dying, it might not be growing much in the number of users but it is growing in terms of development.
