Nostr will forever fight a losing battle of user acquisition because the other places pull all the tricks to get people to stay as long as possible. Since this user base is virtuous and wonāt go down that terrible path, weāll always struggle against the massively addictive platforms with cemented walled gardens and network effects.
Only new and interesting use cases and approaches might work. Otherwise youāre limited to a tiny drip of disgruntled users who eventually come here.
Guys, a few years in and this guy can tell us our future. Wow incredible forsight
Why fight it? Just as with any addiction, the addict won't want to make a change until they have a very good reason. If more countries go in the direction of the UK, we could have more of a scaling problem than an adoption problem?
I doubt it. People have not put up any fight against the erosion of privacy. If anything, theyāll comply. Some might leave - as is usually the case
Im cool with it for now.
Maybe Nostr fixes this with a New Users Timeline option š¤.
Keeping, and Retaining New Users is the most critical time frame, instead of promoting the 100,000+ followers elites with 50 podcasts, and books maybe we should cause small accounts to gravitate towards each other, make Nostr a self propelling engine, rather than a grifty echo-chamber for wealthy wholecoiners.
Nostr needs a Follow Pack + Topic Relays combination that helps reduce the friction of discovering the ecosystem initially.
Once they've learned how the protocol works then they can explore through trial and error of different follows, and relay, etc. combinations that will further refine, and finetune their experience.
>Once they've learned how the protocol works
The protocol is hopelessly complicated. Nothing this complicated is going to work for anyone outside the fringiest of the fringe.
I made lists / followpacks. Had a hard time getting sharing to work
Nostr will win on the long run. tbh it's likely that the most successful client pull exactly the same tricks. atm we don't have a slick client competing with tiktok/instagram/X in speed and UX. Eventually it will come, having frictionless payment and reusing your profile accross apps will be a massive selling point.
In its current form, yes. But it is a new (or rebirth of old) internet paradigm and the possibility of emergence of compelling new use cases is high. It is much higher on nostr than the tired old user data monetizing walled garden model, where they are defending their castles, not innovating a better internet. The openness and selective privacy of nostr are things no walled garden can ever achieve. The future is in technologies like nostr.
never DID the others, nostr is 1st exp. 4 me but a little hesitant to pill sum younger yet >< process is progress-ITz early/*
Maybe we already have enough frens here. For example I think I have too many followers...
Use-cases that drive economic engagement and "local" systems in some form are the way. Global, social-first applications are largely tired and saturated.
No it's not that. It's that it's insanely complicated for the average person and on top of that it doesn't have basic features that the average person expects.
Yeah. When I tell people about Nostr, they seem to find it interesting. But then I mention that they really need to secure their private key because it canāt be recovered, and at this point, they lose interest š
It seems to be a big deal for many that they have the option to recover their account, which is just not possible in the Nostr protocol. At least not if you want it to be decentralized which is the entire point of Nostrā¦
Moderated topic based relays and the ability to filter the feed to a combination of relays and follows will help retention. There are a lot of people speaking into a void.
We should target community groups to provide a relay exclusively for group members. This will help establish a web of trust for newcomers.
Bingo!
#summary we need new cats, we can't always stay with these four cats
Bullish on more interesting apps being built
Why do you want higher noise and less signal?
Do you think a temple should be turned into an unconscious play house?
If people have the awareness they will come. It's a protocol. We don't need to generate exploitive revenue to survive.
Social media doesn't need to be sticky to be valuable.
I don't doom scroll on Nostr, I get in check posts of preferred identities and any receipted zaps and get out and on with my life.
Quality != Quantity.
I agree, but you also need to have the preferred identities here. What you prefer may not be relevant to what others prefer. This requires a large pool of users.
I've found my tribe.
All others can talk a long walk off a short pier as far as I am concerned ;)
fwiw I am involved with building a niche Nostr project. Hopefully attractive to normies and those that inhabit the Cellartracker and Vivino sites. V4V and creating a virtuous circular economy. Advanced enough to talk about, but not demonstrate... quite yet.
Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come!
Maybe the goal isn't to have everyone on nostr.
We all romanticize the early days of the internet, when it was good.
But that wasn't the mainstream internet.
(That said, if nostr ever gets significant traction, then people catering to those incentives will probably come and develop on nostr too.)
Nostr isn't ready for universal adoption.
There's no point promoting it until this community learns to listen to users, some devs, and fix basic infrastructure without looking down on them as "dumb users" or "addicted to algo".
Failing to understand and listen to users' needs and creating multiple clients with little user input is like shooting in the dark. Non-functional requirements like security are not a priority, let alone basic filtering and searchable feeds ā or decent notifications.
I find it ironic when people say you curate your feed and interact with people more, so you are not talking to a void ā granted you can see the feeds of the people you follow or the content you want to see.
It's not because people are dumb or addicted to algorithms. We want to be jack-of-all-trades.
I left Nostr last year for hibernation, and sadly, I'm still seeing the same concerns unresolved. I don't expect miracles, but that doesn't mean I won't voice my observations. I'm willing to pay for a product that understands my needs. Eight years of tech subscriptions haven't bothered me because they delivered. Why assume Nostr must be free just because it's maintained by volunteers?
Until then, we'll keep talking to a void and missing opportunities.
Thanks for your time reading this āŗļø
#primal #amethyst #nostr #plebs #plebchain #asknostr
Itās an interesting one
It doesnāt have the same number-go-up virality of Bitcoin
But the similarities are so clear in terms of adopting a protocol
The trust angle, the platform risk, the censorship, people are over it, and are looking for a way
So even if IG etc pull out every trick in the book, truth wins, and in my view the Nostr traction is already validation
Watch the s-curve kick in, and in particular āother stuffā get built, we might well see a bigger market share (or an entirely new market opened)
š¤
Very true man. People come here to escape the algo so far.
But you get the algo even worse through influencers
i think about this a lot
fortunately we do not need āmass adoptionā for nostr to be a success
that said, there is a lot of work to be done to ethically increase adoption, we have mostly failed on this front so far
I feel like our onboarding is a tweak or two away from sparking a snowball effect
NGMI until itās no longer considered āonboarding.ā
Explain. It just feels like downloading any social media app now. Just we don't make it obvious enough that you auto follow people when selecting an interest.
Just think the whole onboarding mentality needs to go soon. If people have to learn something or āget on boardā in order to monetize pictures of cats, clever thoughts, music, whatever, weāre still doing something wrong. It should just work as seamlessly as most everything else online while still showcasing that interoperability magic between clients and apps. Still feels pretty disconnected to me personally āļøā¤ļø
I'd guess it's people ethically aligned with what nostr aims to be that will stick around. That's who to approach, in my opinion
I just got two people to install Nostr clients. One is a developer that has submitted large swaths of commits to Tcl. The build and user experience was so frustrating for this person that despite getting them to try 3 clients he gave up.
Another is an international media personality. She tried one client and gave up.
Honestly, even people who are eager to hear from me and willing to give something a shot that I recommend are turned off by the user experience. Every client seems idiosyncratic or has glaring problems. I myself have settled on Nostur.com ā a client whose navigation icons obscure typing in DMs (screenshot attached) because it is the client with the *least frustrating* user experience for me.
Point being almost nobody is seriously approaching any Nostr client with a lot of thought and QA. Gossip is listed as a suggested client on every single page when I do a web search for āNostr clientā. On Mac, to get it working, you have to read the documentation and then open up a Terminal and paste a command from the documentation. Virtually zero people are going to do this. The developer is openly hostile to the suggestion that a minor build tweak to make it conform with the install process for other unsigned apps on Mac is prudent. And yet this is, by search, one of the most prominently featured clients to new eyeballs.
I do support the idea that this should be like email and there shouldnāt be a singular client. But I also think that there should be a client that does not seek to communicate a personal message form the developers, but that should be committed to 1:1 replicating the UI/UX of the Twitter app circa 2010. And that the communityās efforts and funding should crowd around this app.
I would say that 'nostr' is in the same state as Linux, now it does not feel easy to use and many of its advantages are out of reach of someone who has never touched a text editor.
so that's something I've said since I first tried this, it's necessary to make its use more comfortable for the average user, because many are surely going to be overwhelmed when they first hear that they are relays, servers mirror, nips, pay with zaps understand how clients work.
I also think the focus on zaps is incredibly foolhardy. Most people using social media applications are not expecting to get financially compensated for posting. They are there to either connect with their friends or find sexual partners.
I say this as a relatively early Bitcoiner ā both my entire net worth and income were Bitcoin in 2014. ( In case someone an observer thinks I am exaggerating, here is an article from 2015 mentioning me: https://m.wabi666.com/news/12675.html )
But Bitcoiners are subject to a specific kind of myopia these days, where every bit of software has to orbit around Bitcoin. I think it not only makes the software in question less relevant and usable, but it gives Bitcoin an Amway kind of varnish socially.
You sound like me 2 years ago š¤£
sounds like you just grew content with the fact that all this software is fucking trash lol
Itās much better now than it was before. If you have some criticisms, please be specific.
Most criticisms people here make are comparing to a centralized system and donāt understand how nostr canāt be that and shouldnāt be that.
I'm not comparing it to a centralized system at all. Iām saying that every post being accompanied by a tipping button is innately terrible UI that does not exist on any centralized service anywhere. It would be *easier* to implement on a centralized service. It is not because that is not a feature that normal people would use. It fails the multivariate test every time. It is not in line with how social media is used anywhere. Large swaths of Nostr are inherently poisoned by the idea of āhow can we put Bitcoin in this?ā instead of āhow can we make this attractive and useful to real people?ā
There are and were clients that never had zaps but they didnāt see any adoption either. I was in exact same camp as you until I realized this is not the issue.
Sure. There are even more halfassed clients that donāt have zaps. But thereās still been monumentous effort put towards zapping and not much effort put towards ājust make the simple old Twitter iPhone app from 2010 when people loved it.ā
I want a usable and uncensorable microblogging platform I can convince my friends to use. They arenāt going to be sending me Bitcoin, but even if they intended to they wouldnāt get past the basic onboarding and user experience being so fucking bad that they give up.
See, you want a twitter and Nostr canāt be that for many reasons.
You can disable all zap features by default and your friends wonāt stay.
"you want software that doesnāt have glaring UI issues. Nostr canāt be that!ā
Thereās no reason why there has to be completely incoherent user interfaces, or majorly promoted clients asking people to open up terminals to get them running. This is solvable if people accept that it should be solved.
I donāt know of any client that asks you to open a terminal. Like I said, disable zaps and it wonāt matter. Try it for yourself, clone jumble, remove zaps and try to get people to come and stay. Wonāt happen.
Copying and pasting myself from upthread:
> Gossip is listed as a suggested client on every single page when I do a web search for āNostr clientā. On Mac, to get it working, you have to read the documentation and then open up a Terminal and paste a command from the documentation. Virtually zero people are going to do this. The developer is openly hostile to the suggestion that a minor build tweak to make it conform with the install process for other unsigned apps on Mac is prudent. And yet this is, by search, one of the most prominently featured clients to new eyeballs.
Thatās not a UI issue lol ā¦ just dont use gossip. I havenāt used it once
This is exactly like fat Linux nerds in 1995 that were like, āyour sound doesnāt work because you are still using Obongo. You need to install Blumpkin!ā As if the solution to a giant ecosystem problem was to try installing another distro.
If normal people are given a large list of clients they are not going to iterate through all of them. Maybe theyāll try one. If 3 of them are bad, they are likely never going to use Nostr ever again.
There are a million and a half ways to onboard to nostr. Youāre referring to your personal experience which wonāt be everyoneās personal experience. You canāt draw conclusions on one personās generalization.
okay. I posted a screenshot upthread of a glaring issue in a client I am currently using because it is the least bad on Mac desktop and my networking situation. Navigation icons over the DM input field that makes seeing what you are typing impossible. And this is the least bad thing! Itās better than Damus!
Everything seems halfassed to me. I hear a lot of people being like āNostr is still being actively developedā but people make sexy apps with nice feel in a matter of months. Itās been years now. But you are acting like all these problems are nonexistent, and condescending to the concerns of normal people about it. It is completely not true. I love Nostr and the protocol is good, but the experience for normal people is currently hot garbage. I would like it to be better, but saying ātheyāre not using the right clientā is basically saying āNostr is only for crypto nerds or people whose time has no value.ā
Where is it?
If thereās a glaring issue itās likely that there are limitations youāre not aware of. Iām happy to take a look if you point out on a non-garbage client š¤£
I just woke up and Iām super busy and typing short responses on mobile. Wish I could write a more thoughtful response - donāt mean to be condescending.
What are glaring UI issues here besides zaps? Name them.
it's like the metaphor of the frog in the listener, it's not hot enough yet to want to leave those pages. even with all the things that they continue to impose, for many it is still comfortable to use those pages, but once the laws and the first police officers who were monitoring their publications arrive and they also feel the censorship that they have been imposing on them, it is likely that there Many now will want to look for other alternatives to conventional platforms.
in addition, I also recommend that you should be prepared for any attack that companies like Google, Meta, Amazon or entertainment companies try to impose, because if you think about it, the things that 'nostr' offers can ruin the businesses that they all have with the sale and data collection, and if what 'nostr' allows is for one to have control over their own data and not have to upload everything to a single central server, surely that is something that does not suit chatgpt, google or twitter as they need hundreds of data. just to train your AI
The seekers will find us
I found Nostr and it was like jumping into my desired reality!
We refuse to trick, trap or manipulate people. This is a good thing.
I donāt think soā¦ This is still the separation between smart and dumb
I'll believe that when an update comes & then you can get notifications that your note was deleted by relayowner@relayaddress. Also being blocked from a relay that your post don't show there. Till then!
https://video.nostr.build/da4811e38f34e14d20c7d9b0c2b891a3447d759825ceeb399740e2ce7e4d9bed.webm
If fiat worked, we wouldn't need Bitcoin.
Similarly, if legacy centralized social media "works" and keeps "working", then there's no need for Nostr.
Do they work?
Lose the battle. Win the war
I think we're ahead of the ball here. We just need to wait for the rest of the world to catch up. And in the meantime, enjoy our nice little niche with a highly selected group of people.
No idea why anyone would be disgruntled. Nostr equals freedom from the social addiction economy. Sure, you spend less time on Nostr and get less attention, but isnāt that a good thing? Centralized social media is excoriating societies around the globe, polarizing and enraging people who drool for their next dopamine hit. While here we are on Nostr with our own tight, genuine little communities talking, for the large part, in a humane and civilized fashion. Iāll take the latter any day of the week.
#X doesnāt hook me, itās a good progress
#grownostr
Tyranny from platforms require constant effort
seems like a pretty good place to post quality content
Itās been a long game for sure. I sometimes have to remind myself to take a breath and just appreciate that all of this exists. So many puzzle pieces coming together to get here. These will be the good old days.
Nostr should be swarming with journalists and activists who appreciate the censorship resistance.
That's who we need to retain.
The use case is being able to speak without risk of censorship. We just need more important people saying more important things here. Journalists breaking big stories that otherwise would be shut down on centralized platforms for instance.
The problem isnāt so much the protocol, itās the people using it.
If you want more people to use NOSTR, create an environment for people who would otherwise be silenced to be free. And Iām not talking about niche Devs.
How Reasearchstr, a place where academic papers can be published that maybe arenāt going to make the lancet because the findings arenāt to the fancy of proctor and gamble or unilever.
Or Teachstr, a place where teachers can get together and form real curriculums outside of the confines of what federally funded public schools can provide.
The value is rules but no rulers right? The natural product-market fit is to cater to environments that thrive with minimal oversight.
I come here for the tiny drip
Sending money through notes are interesting use case.
But since normies can't wrap their head around this, they will disregard this as gimmick/lies.
I believe the initial draw to the platforms was the idea that you were able to make your space on the internet, free and easy. The name MySpace couldnāt have summed it up better.
exactly!! I mean, ahem *this*
Content specific relays similar to subreddits
Wow. This is as āfiatā a lens as I could imagine.
More users isnāt āwinningā if itās all noise and nonsense.
If people value the benefits of this protocol, they will use it. If they donāt, they will stay captured in clown world. š¤”
All freedom tech is opt-in by design, so I donāt see what the problem is.
Unless, narcissistic āfollower countā is oneās primary goal (instead of high signal engagement). Then it sucks here š
Users are the lifeblood of any social application. All social media has attrition. Eventually you get to a point where you have no users left. It's not rocket science and has nothing to do with fiat. Yes this tech is opt-in, requires proof of work, and can be made better (it already is in many cases), but we're still competing with personalized algos coming from centrally curated data -- something we don't really have in nostr unless you have a massive caching server that mimics a behemoth server.
Nothing fiat about this - just stating facts. Maybe think before you try to insult next time.
Youāre rightā¦.its overā¦.hopeless.
It was a good effort thoughā¦.thanks for playing. š
That wasnāt the point of the note but I can see how it can be interpreted that way. The point is that we should not try to compete on that which weāre disadvantaged at, and focus on things that set this protocol apart. Itās a cup half full type of note unless one has a cup half empty type of attitude or mood at the time of reading it. š¤·āāļø
āNostr will forever fight a losing battleā¦.ā Sorry brother. Thats not a ācup half fullā kinda note beginning.
However, I FULLY agree that it is futile to expend energy competing where āwe are disadvantagedā.
I just donāt see Nostr development as a global competition for SM users. I see Nostr (and Bitcoin) as high signal tools for the co-ordination of building a new secure and decentralised civilisation from the bottom up.
As should be obvious to anyone paying attention, our current centralised, control systems (globally) are in their final stages of complete collapse. IMO, we will need all these āfreedom techā tools (and more) to begin to build this new, infinitely more coherent and co-operative world. Yet, we wonāt need the whole world using them. At first. Far from it.
Anywayā¦.my responses were pretty low-vibe to start. Sorry for thatā¦.šš»
Thatās a good thing. Addictive platforms are junk.
Disgruntled user checking in š«”
Fighting the good fight always prevails
āOtherwise youāre limited to a tiny drip of disgruntled users who eventually come here.ā hahaha š
isnāt the solution always to have peopleās favorite celebrities join?
If the craze about ID and age verification keeps going, and doesn't spill over too much to Nostr clients, we might get some more privacy oriented people here. But given what I've seen so far since the internet surveillance insanity started about two decades ago, it won't be too many, unfortunately.
Donāt worry ā Nostr is like a final refuge. Until governments start showing truly repressive behavior, it will inevitably remain a niche platform with a small market share. But it will never disappear, and when the time comes, itāll be ready to deliver a decisive blow.
The right people will find nostr and thatās all we really care about.
