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Returning to #nostr after a while, I went digging into the usage stats. While it's hard to get definitive numbers, over the past 6 months there is a slow grind downward in active users. However it's still around 14K users DAU which is pretty decent.
Nostr Stats
 I honestly feel like there's strill a stigma that nostr is something for BTC maxis only. It felt true when I first joined a few years ago (2023), and it still feels true today when I see/hear people commenting about nostr elsewhere, or look around the relay feeds. It makes me wonder if wider adoption is held back by this idea, or whether it's just *too niche* a technology to expect normies to pick up and use. It's not the same, but activitypub/fediverse (aka Mastodon) has faced similar challenges IMHO. The users are highly opinionated on certain topics, and I can't shake the feeling that their uptake is held back not by the tech but by the users' vocal opinion on various things (i.e., crypto is horrible, AI is terrible, certain political views chastised, etc..) You end up with a very similar crowd of shared opinion as a result, and others don't feel welcome and worse, are actively pushed out. Again, I'm not saying nostr is like this, but there's a similar challenge of adoption. Thinking back to my own experience when starting to use nostr, it felt very easy to get signed up and start consuming/posting. There's good ecosystem choice in clients. The issues are things like NIP-05 verification or creating/linking up lightning wallets; it starts getting more complicated and it's not easy for the regular user to do. I guess I'm left with the thought that adoption is a function of ease: both technical and behavioural. Is it easy to get setup? Is it easy to feel welcome no matter who I am? image

Replies (2)

The biggest adoption hurdle imo is usability. There's a million apps, all of them have one rough edge of another, people are constantly saying you need to pick relays but there's no good definitive way to do so, media upload is difficult or impossible, DMs don't work for many users etc.
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↩ replying to 21_21_21
I think all of these are great points, you're right. Thinking more about the technicalities of getting setup... the varying clients mean FIP support is never consistent. The relay choices are basically a guessing game for newcomers, who may not even understand what relays are doing. DMs are still pretty hit-and-miss. It could be that the DM was sent fine, but the receiver hasn't got a DM relay properly configured.