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The Q3 2023 Twitter Migration report is out: https://www.deweysquare.com/digital/twitter-migration-report/ It shows Nostr is holding steady after Threads tsunami. We’ve got users, interest, and development but we’re stuck in a bitcoin / crypto echo chamber. The problem isn’t the tech directly so much as culture. How can we cultivate millions of communities with their own values and norms. Sure they can use lightning for payments, but mostly people won’t be here because they believe in nostr or bitcoin. In fact for both to succeed we need folks who don’t care about the underlying tech at all.

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β€œThe Nostr platform, which our scans found holding a steady but small following as an X alternative, may be unknown to those who are not engaged in the cryptocurrency development communities. It is challenging to measure Nostr using web traffic because it's a decentralized social media platform. It's also debatable even inside the Nostr communities as to how to track Nostr from within the network in order to identify unique human accounts rather than spam or bots. We will keep watching the Nostr space, especially looking to see if it breaks out of its β€œcrypto niche” in which it now lives.β€œ The Developer Migration: β€œAs Musk and Yaccarino continue to express the ambition that X will become a single β€œEverything App” β€” and moved in that direction by making it more difficult for outside developers to work with the platform β€” third-party application developers have moved to greener pastures. In addition to this more developer-unfriendly environment, there is an increasing trend and interest by developers in the emerging β€œopen social web” and developing β€œopen social protocols” such as ActivtyPub (which powers Mastodon), the AT Protocol (that powers Bluesky), and to a lesser extent the Nostr protocols.” View quoted note β†’
I agree here. We need diversity and also methods for people to create content streams that align with specific interests. Nostr = btc is fine for a starting place but it needs to be broader than that to go mainstream. Conversely we need nostr apps that are more than Twitter like timelines. Apps with private relays were cohorts of people can work on things with specific intent. We are building a nostr slack for that use case. Devs who want to help on this project are free to DM me anytime. We are also looking at a Reddit alternative with a beautiful UI where topics and communities of focus are easier to find and cultivate.
From a design point of view, a solution must be 10x its predecessor, or existing users won't migrate. Nostr is 10x for privacy lovers and those with something to lose; for others who care about comfort and ease of use, the duper mine effect of algorithmic social media, or the size of the audience, Nostr cannot appeal to them just yet.
thanks for sharing this @rabble - I love how this topic has been close to your heart, and you have triggered many great inputs and ideas in this thread and over time as well. But more so, its really nice to see so many agreements and disagreements and people just debating about this openly without attacking anyone.
To be clear. There’s nothing wrong with an enthusiastic bitcoiner community on nostr. In fact it’s really important to sustaining nostr. What I’m saying is we need to make it easy for other kinds of communities to and find their space. Some people care about knitting or Brazilian Jitsu, coffee, or drag, or tons of other things. Think of all the subreddits. Right now you join and see mostly people talking about bitcoin. We don’t make it easy to find the other people and content. The communities features help. Getting more kinds of content helps. Working on discovery helps. Making tools for enabling folks to enforce community boundaries helps like ability to opt in to shared mute / follow / content warnings. And some kind of algorithms for finding and recommending content and people. We can solve this.