The amount of backend stuff for various systems that Nostr can improve is immense.
Decentralized social media is a big deal, but that use case goes up against very large existing network effects. If you judge Nostr’s success based on not gaining traction on that front quickly enough, you’ll likely be disappointed. That’s why a lot of people come to Nostr, post a bit, and then leave for a while, and then come back when there’s some sort of catalyst, post a bit, and then leave again. That’s fine. It’ll take time. It’s a slow burn.
But in the meantime, the amount of development going on under the hood for all sorts of things is huge. In particular, I think the open-source social graph aspect is under-appreciated for how important it can be beyond just socials. Payments being the next obvious one, and probably bigger than people think. And many other things.
https://pippellia.com/pippellia/Social+Graph/Navigating+the+social+graph 
backend is mandatory to reliable tech and to build trust, and if i were in charge i’d probably want to make sure the promise i make to my community, is actually backed with tangible tech, but to get people to use a product, you need good ux. relays, nodes, private keys, NIP-05, RNURLs i think i just squinted. as a user i want to log in and enjoy, not go through docs to get started. once we have good ux, we’ll get people coming, history seems to rule in our favor. i totally fall into the “post a bit and then leave” category for ux reasons, i want to grow here much more than i want to grow any insta or tiktok, but shit is HARD to grasp!
i agree with everything you say, especially when considering adoption. too much harm has been done to the words crypto blockchain and so on. my only concern is how to monetize nostr social network, aka how do you reward client teams maintaining and updating their products, and the content creators who actually rely on zaps today. maybe automation much like youtube and twitter? i’m not even sure that’s doable i’m not tech savy i’m just thinking out loud. my thought is nostr needs to prove everything that’s being done on web2 today, but web3.
very much agree, the space lacks clear information aimed at muggles so everyone can understand what nostr really is and how it all plays out VS web2 habits
right! it's a mess seen from the outside
nostr ecosystem has still a long way to go for people to get onbard, tldr ux is bad.
1/ learning about is painful. there’s plenty of doc, but it’s very dev oriented, so boring for the pleb.
2/ “create an account” is stressful, first you need to understand the concepts of pub/priv keys because now to signin on your social all you need is a key, no more email+pw. counter-intuitively this sounds more like some sketchy stuff rather than the security & privacy shield it’s supposed to provide.
3/ find a client, and boy it’s hard. there’s plenty of them out there, if you wanna stick to one it’s tough to find the right client that works for you. after some experimentation i came to the conclusion that primal is the least worse.
4/ relays are really bad from a user perspective. it means having to do your homework on what relays do, how they talks to what clients and when do they sync with each other in order to maximize your chances of getting ALL of the nostr network, in real time. this is for me the biggest hurdle in nostr.
4/ I’ve been on nostr for 24h and I still have a hard time understanding how this all works. you can’t refresh your feed like you would on web2, which doesn’t give this sense of “fresh news delivered” that web2 provides. search is clunky, i can’t like posts on web and i can’t follow people on android so it’s pretty much buggy, and so on.
no way my muggle siblings are doing all that. we’re far from mass adoption, but as long as we keep building on top we’ll eventually be able to offer the comfort of use people or used to, and therefore expecting from a social network.
haha thanks for answering, i was making sure my data was correctly syncing between the app and the web client 🖖
wym! I used alby to checkin primal on web, worked fine until it didn't
yes, X is here to make a profit, not simply offer a service at cost price. wechat is a good counter example as it is state owned (not really but we know how things go in china) so it doesn't play in the same court as occidental "free" businesses. i think?
what do i not have a follow button on people's profiles when using Primal?
what else to expect from capitalism? 😮💨
jee i already have to get used to this relay thing, depending on the client i dont get all the content
does this thing work?
first day on nostr, super excited to join the web3 social space!