We’re all daily users of Nostr, so it can be easy to see things through an advanced user lens while forgetting what it felt like to be a newbie. I thought I would take some time to go over major client from the start in hopes of evaluating what it might feel like for a new user.

The other reason for running this review is to hopefully improve the overall nostr retention rate across clients. As it stands, according to nostr.band, retention of trusted users 30 days after signups trends to 0 for recent cohorts. This seems to be supported by the lack of growth in daily active users, with the average remaining in the 10,000-12,000 range for “trusted” pub keys.

The following report consists of several criteria which I felt were essential to basic first-time social media experience:

1. Ease of signup

2. Ease of logging in

3. Ability to understand what you are looking at (sufficient explanations)

4. Seeing a good initial feed

5. Ability to follow something of interest

6. Minimizing technical /dev lingo

7. A fast scrolling experience

8. Ability to easily upload media

9. A good search experience overall

10. Good keyword searching

11. Hashtag searching

12. Ability to follow hashtags

13. Easily accessing followed hashtags

14. Good experience reacting to notes

In total there are 140 points, 10 for each category. This is by far not the most comprehensive score card, but I felt it did a decent job covering most things you’d want to do in a social client.

Some notes of caution:

1. This report and score card are meant to be a general quick glance at where your client may stand in overall UX. It does not differentiate between the intended target audiences.

2. The criteria that I deem important may not be important to you as the founder / developer, so take it for what it’s worth. Adding your desired criteria may increase your score significantly. For example, I did not evaluate the zap experience, or thoroughly test nested replies.

3. This report is not a substitute for proper user testing. It’s just one person’s observations. While we have done some user testing in the past, I highly recommend doing your own. You can do so by approaching and interviewing new users (if you are able to distinguish if they came from your client), or via other user testing software. Talk to me (@karnage) if you need some help getting set up.

4. People’s reported experience regarding usability may vary greatly depending on their familiarity with cryptographic concepts, their background, and technical experience. What I may deem as a great score of 10, may not be a 10 for others. I have seen user tests where “obvious” things were not obvious to testers.

5. This report only looks at the English language version of the client. The actual user experience for someone on a different language version of the app could be totally different from what is graded here. It’s worth considering geographies of where users are coming from and how they experience your client.

6. I did not test re-activation of new users. Meaning, once they close the app, I did not test if they are pulled back by some notification or other means. This is a crucial aspect of any new app usage that should be considered carefully.

Tested Clients: Damus, Amethyst, Primal iOS, Snort (web), Iris (sort of), Coracle, Nostur.

I also tested Instagram and X/Twitter for comparison.

Results, highest points to lowest:

Primal iOS: 136

Twitter: 125

Instagram: 109

Nostur: 108

Coracle: 99

Amethyst: 93

Snort: 90

Damus: 87

Iris: N/A

Facebook: could not test.

My main takeaway was that among all apps (including Twitter and Instagram), the traditional apps win simply by having much better content selection. You get to see a variety of interesting things that Nostr simply can’t match. Going forward, this is an area I would probably recommend focusing on - how to engage people to post more interesting content, onboard creators etc… Nostr is lacking in content and I believe this could be the primary reason people are not sticking around after trying it.

### Other Nostr Notes:

There seemed to be little of interesting topics to follow or stick around for. The experience of joining nostr doesn't feel special or different in any way opposed to X for example. Twitter has interesting accounts, TikTok has interesting videos, what does Nostr have? The lack of "popular" conent due to the generally low number of users is probably to blame. In a way we suffer from the chicken / egg problem where new users are needed to generate more content, and more content is needed to retain new users. Going forward, I think clients should think about ways to encourage users to share content (whether that be their own, or posted from other platforms). Nostr also does not seem to have any external growth loops. For example, there is no way to invite people to the platform by email with a single click (by accessing the address book). Even if a friend does manage to join and you can find them, they are in no way notified when tagged (as far as I know). People have to have a habit of opening the app to know if something is happening. The habit formation of using a new app is important in the early usage phase and nostr seems to have a weak spot here.

American politics is weird and broken. We have a system that, by design, is a duopoly. If a new party emerges, it either dies or replaces one of the existing ones. Because of that, we end up with these big tents containing lots of different constituencies and contradictory coalitions.

Take, for example, how conservative black evangelicals are pro-family, pro-life, and pro-business, but most vote Democrat because they’re turned off by Republican racism. Or consider gay Republicans like Peter Thiel, who vote in their economic interests despite it being against their safety and the advancement of the gay community.

There are many ways in which a two-party system doesn't make sense. I’ve lived in two countries with proportional representation, Uruguay and New Zealand. Both have much more stable politics and better systems of coalition-building and compromise. They’re smaller, too, but you can see the US system broken at a state level where the numbers can be similar to those in Uruguay and New Zealand.

Forcing everyone to fit their values and political aspirations into a single party is a mess.

What’s interesting is that as the US becomes more partisan, party members are more likely to adopt the party’s platform, even if it would otherwise not be in their personal or community interest. Only a small and shrinking number of true independents can focus on issues across parties.

Running Tidal

(but on web because I can't get the app from Uruguay 😢 )

No wayyyy

Good morning, I made a new nostr client: keypub.coracle.social

The goal of keypub is to help surface posts by infrequent posters. It takes the approach of summarizing the content before displaying it to you so that you can more easily get an idea of what you'd like to look at, without having to scroll to the bottom of your feed.