I was looking at the apple App Store section for iOS apps for social networking. And I noticed a few things, first, Meta apps dominate. Second, somehow apple mixes in social media and dating apps in to the same category… odd. Thirdly I noticed that bluesky is ranked #99 out of 100 for Aotearoa New Zealand, where I’m based.
There are dozens and dozens of apps on that list I’ve never heard of. There’s almost no press about them, yet clearly lots of people use them and more are installing them every day. In some way, instagram, twitter, mastodon, bluesky, nostr, threads, t2, post.news, and all these other apps are a kind of high brow social networking.
The kind of projects that get written up in the Colombia journalism review, Forbes, the New York Times, and even TechCrunch.
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/bluesky-dorsey-musk-twitter.php
Then there are tons of other apps, which are used just as widely or more, which nobody every talks about. For years discord was one of these underground apps, millions of users but gamers don’t count, so the press didn’t cover them.
Commanding the public narrative is good, useful, causes folks to want to try new protocols like nostr, but let’s not forget that what matters is folks using it and getting value. Not the press coverage. Twitter didn’t start out with lots of press attention, instead it started out being useful and fun to use for the people on it, ignoring the rest of the world.
When TechCrunch first covered twitter, the big question was, is it interesting at all? Was this the stupidest idea in the history of startups?
Agreed - should not be about the user count in these early days, but instead about the feature set and usefulness.
Just like your Twitter example in that long YT interview a few months ago...
Early Twitter had 100 active users but 100,000 active tweets p/mo.
Also, less people now means easier avoidance of any functionality ossification, as iterating/pivoting paths is more digestible by passionate early adopters.
#nostrponder
To a Nostr newbie in 5 lines:
- Imagine you post a video in Instagram and it immediately shows up to your followers in YouTube.
- Imagine Facebook gets shutdown and so you open up TikTok for the first time and immediately your profile and all your connections and post history are present.
- Imagine Twitter allowing you to choose from a menu of content-filtering algorithms to fit the mood you're in at any given moment.
- Imagine apps having to constantly innovate to keep you satisfied because it's so easy to switch to another app.
- Imagine Nostr.
#imaginenostr #nostrponder #nostrtheory #nostrnewbie
Reminds me of Bruegel's Fall of Icarus, where humanity is indifferent to his tragedy and the mythology just as Nature here seems oblivious to the violent horror subdued down towards the diminutive bottom of the scene.
Although, on second look, I guess the beauty here is that everything is depicted with equal emphasis and therefore equally natural... flowers, leaf, rising sun, and death.
#nature
Appreciate the great pics and art. Definitely need more of this on Nostr to humanize and balance the initial heavy tech lean.
Some weeks ago I was reading Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" aloud at bed-time to my son, who of course does not understand it but appreciates the sound of the words all the same, when I discovered that its famous title was in fact not the original! The original title was significantly more radical: "Resistance to Civil Government."
It's quite short, and I would encourage everyone here to read (or re-read) it. It is still tremendously relevant. Re-reading it with the original (un-sanitized) title in mind, it lands even harder.
These days, Thoreau would probably get his door kicked in.
Here's a free link to the Project Gutenberg copy: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm
Share your favorite quotes, after reading.
This pairs tightly with Emerson's "Self Reliance":
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16643/16643-h/16643-h.htm#SELF-RELIANCE
Thoreau was more about action and Emerson more about ideas, so they complement each other well.
Some quotes from the above:
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist"
"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius."
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."