Explaining nostr to traditional folks:
Nostr has no team, no leadership, no funding, no foundation, no token, no Blockchain, and no one has ever seen the creator of the project.
And yet, it's the fastest growing network of humans the world has ever seen.
It's simply an idea - some very simple words written in a markdown document. It can't be stopped, it can't be controlled, it can't be owned.
There were less than 50 people using it when I first started dabbling about a year ago. I had solid reasons for believing it would work, and that turned out to be right. Today there are around a million people using it.
It's open and permissionless, so don't trust me, go and verify these numbers yourself. Look at everyone's data, and see for yourself they are real living humans interacting with other real living humans. See the economic activity for yourself as you witness money moving though this human network.
There's no indication that this is going to slow down, and every indication that it's already started eating all other forms of social graph.
Traditional social graphs like facebook, twitter, Spotify, Uber, TikTok, Telegram, etc cannot leverage off each other's network effects because their business models prevent them from being able to share data and users. They believe this is a feature that protects their feudal estate from all the other feudal estates.
Nostr is the opposite. When you build something with nostr, the network effects of what you build are *multiplied* by the network effects of what I build - and there are currently about 20,000 developers building all kinds of crazy things. It's like a super app that anyone can build on without asking permission.
If you're a half-decent developer and you've got an idea to test out in the market, building anywhere else is a total waste of time (unless the idea is very specific).
The chicken and egg problem is solved because the users and data (and the payment mechanism) is already there ready to use. I could never go back to the old way of doing things, it would be soul-crushingly frustrating after building with nostr.
At the core of nostr is a very bright and hopeful view of the future. We as a species are approaching a variety of non-trivial challenges. The institutions we used to rely on for sensemaking and problem solving at this scale are in liquidation, there is *no hope* for them, it's *over*, there is *no coming back*.
Nostr is the rallying point for people who are completely unfazed by this. It's for people who believe in the human spirit and understand that we have have all the tools we need to handle whatever challenges come at us, and if we need new tools, we'll figure it out and build them.
