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@₿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.
â‚żen Wehrman's avatar â‚żen Wehrman
This is the third or fourth time we've seen a MASSIVE wave of attention hitting the social media censorship problem worldwide—enough to catalyze MILLIONS to delete a major legacy app and download a new one—yet Nostr has received practically zero new users from the exodus. I've been posting all over X trying to pull people to the freedom protocol, but it's become a waste of time when there's literally less than ten of us who are consistently sacrificing our time/energy trying to generate Nostr buzz on the legacy apps. At what point do we direct serious resources away from building a million new Nostr apps everyday that nobody uses, and focus 1000% on marketing, so we can show the world the awesome shit we've been building here? I don't have a strong handle on the inner workings taking place behind the scenes (especially when it comes to grant money and other funding mechanisms), so I'm asking honestly: What are the main blockers we have right now that are preventing us from making a significant, organized marketing push aimed at bringing new users to Nostr? (Paying big creators to make videos about Nostr, reaching out to big podcasts to platform our best Nostr educators to a bigger audience, clients hiring commission-based outreach reps that pay based on bringing new users that sign up for Premium, etc.) Is the problem 100% a lack of money within the ecosystem? I know there have been rumblings in the past about an OpenSats-type funding mechanism to help boost Educators and Content Creators, is that still in the works? Is it a lack of strong business models among clients that would make new user acquisition a strong enough benefit to allocate resources toward hiring people to go out and hunt down new users to bring over? Lack of purely marketing-focused entities that could act as a centralized hubs for organizing such campaigns? If it is one of the above things, what steps do we need to make as a community to clear out the obstacles? Or am I completely off base on all of this, being too impatient, or focusing on the wrong things when there are more important upstream problems that need to be fixed first? I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts, because this recent UpScrolled saga has been a disappointing signal that we are failing at positioning ourself as the perfect solution (WHICH WE ARE) to the problem millions are facing worldwide. #AskNostr View quoted note → View quoted note →
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