Unpopular opinion: internet memes are actually a force for bad in the world. They are basically just digital versions of the kinds of group signaling mechanisms that breed tribalism and dangerous in-group/out-group behaviors.

I wouldn't say "for" so much as "best suited for"

I think it is a mistake for anyone to use it to build a brand, chiefly. The alternative is something more like email, something mostly for interpersonal communications, less for mass broadcast Tthough mailing lists do exist, and newsletters, I posit they are grafted on, a special use case, not the main one. I think nostr is a really resilient way to do one to a few rather than one to many or one to all style communications.

I'd like to see a nostr future where each relay was more or less independent of the others, or maybe a neighborhood of associated relays, rather than these big, disordered, firhose collections of "PV :shakabra:" positivity posting etc etc

> I'm using it wrong

Almost certainly

> Global is fucked

Yeah, but so is global on fedi. You can still open it up and find a few good accounts in an hour of doom scrolling. After you block a handful of constant spam bots on here, you realise the paucity of active posting going on (at least based on what I'm seeing in my client).

Part of the above may be just the client messing with things though. When people are posting I still don't seem to get it in my feed most of the time and have to check individual accounts to see posts. Also I don't think the relays are syncing properly. I have been reading posts while connected to say 15 relays and then the client connects to additional relays so I'm connected to 30 relays and the posts disappear. I unfollowed an account on here when I realised it was a fedi account rather than a nostr account, but 1 week later sometimes on certain relays it will be dropped into my feed. I only got a notification of your reply once it was nearly 30 mins old.

Having said that I'm not running away yet, just having a whinge.

Not that I'm saying you're using it wrong, but I think you might be using it wrong.

Global is fucked forever, and will eventually morph into an algorithmically curated wasteland because the current hellscape was unmanageable, as all social media global/semiglobal feeds seem to.

I think nostr is best suited for you to talk to people you already know, not to build a following out of people who discover you, or vice versa on global.

Build a "good" follower/ing list, which is subject to an unfortunate chicken and egg hump of bootsrapping a followed/follower list.

High quality posts are low frequency, you aren't likely to stumble across them on global anyway, as they are badly hurt by poor signal to noise ratios (in which I count antagonistic bitcoin posting, PV posting, jerking off about how nostr is surely going to change the world guys). I trimmed all that out of my feed and even when including replies, I see a few posts per hour max. I think the gossip UX is tailored to this relaxed form of browsing and posting, where there is a clear "I've caught up on and replied to everything in my feed" point. Huge props to its author for this decision, it encourages what I think is a more grounded, less terminally online method of online interaction. It turns nostr into a resilient usenet-style medium (though I am one to talk about usenet, having not been around for that).

All that said, I'd encourage you not to quit using nostr, just to alter your usage patterns and expectations. It shouldn't be used just like how you use twitter, something I think a lot of the slicker more mainstream clients and users are pushing it to be. It is different, and can be in reality different, but the onus is on you, the user, to allow that to happen through your different expectations and use.

Just seems like a lot of people have stopped posting. Of the free speech relays, one guy quit altogether and took his down, another hasn't posted in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure any of the free speech advocates are that hot on nostr post nostrica and if the userbase is anything like me they're probably not terribly happy with the experience.

I've not given up yet, but when I scroll through global I'm not seeing a bunch of interesting accounts I want to follow to replace those that have left.

Iris is completely unusable for me at this stage, which is a shame because I like the interface better than any other web client I've tried. #[0]

Gotta catch up!

I need to catch up on Mando. I missed the last episode

Esp since it doesn’t censor my posts with literal lies and deception as excuses.

I think my gripe is simply a lack of separation between reporting spam and muting. Reporting spam is useful across groups, I agree. But not so good with a mute list of genuine users, where muting is done for any number of personal/political disagreements.

Have you tried nostrus(?) I heard it’s a better android client.