@₿en Wehrman
Thoughtful post and highlights things we should be discussing. Let me push back a little.
So I think the frustration comes from treating Nostr as if it’s supposed to behave like a better TikTok or a less evil X. But that is not the case.
Nostr doesn’t exist to absorb mass outrage cycles every time legacy social media (LSM) humiliates itself, and it certainly isn’t designed to sustain the attention seeking economy that influencers depend on to survive. The people who thrive on LSM are optimized for constant algorithmic validation and a steady drip of dopamine for themselves and their followers. But Nostr offers none of that on purpose. There’s no opaque feed or audience to game, no centralized amplification, etc. Expecting large influencers to migrate en masse is like expecting casino owners to promote sobriety!
And I'm sure you already know that the hype around the latest censorship panic will burn out like it always does, and I think it's because the underlying incentive structure never changes. Nostr don't need to play that game!
So I believe that’s why user growth here is necessarily slower. It's more selective and it will be more painful. Nostr needs people who are explicitly not "influencers", people that are ready to trade that reach for agency. Marketing (in the traditional sense) won’t fix this because the bottleneck is disposition. We don’t “acquire” users who don’t want to be unhooked from the slop machine. We wait for the small minority who already feel the problem deeply enough to accept the costs of sovereignty. Now that doesn’t mean building tools is pointless or that education doesn’t matter (you've done very well on the education front!), but I do firmly believe that the success metric is wrong.
Nostr is not a mass market product competing for attention. Think of it as THE exit ramp. And exit ramps are mostly quiet and ugly, and mostly ignored until someone is genuinely ready to leave.
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