At least, not for those content creators who rely on the monetization infrastructure that platforms provide. We are at a point now where all of this constitutes a decent economy with many people and their families depending on these streams of income. Sure, all the capital they have build in terms of following and alike is at the mercy of those platforms; but that is not all too relevant if those same platforms are the reason creating that capital was economically viable in the first place.
Sure, there are those that did the hard grind, building up an email list, getting their followers to go to their own website etc. to a point that they can sustain themselves. Thats nice, but that route is undoubtedly longer and harder. Often the reason they go this way, is because they know they will get kicked off those platforms eventually anyway due to the nature of their content. i.e., leveraging the big platforms simply was never a viable option for them to begin with. I am sure most would, if they could.
The web did not start out this way, the first videos on the internet were not NPC streamers saying ‘icecream so good’, it took decades to build itself up to this point. This means two things; one we are fighting an absolute behemoth, and two, there are plenty of domains Nostr can facilitate that don’t require monetization.
Sure sure, we got them zaps, whatever. Hooray for marginal pennies and for the marginal few who make marginally more. As long as there is no critical mass, it still does not constitute an alternative for the many ‘professional content creators’. At this stage, we don’t have a story for those people, so simply don’t bother telling it to them. There are more compelling stories involving Nostr, there is a whole web of them, tell those.
In the meantime, the flood of AI slop is putting pressure on the monetization models of these platforms. In principle, they don’t care what you watch, as long as you watch. But that appears to only go so far; the musicians, photographers etc. are having to ‘share’ the cake with an ever growing slice going to endless garbage of which the novelty will wear off. Those content creators will give up at some point, whilst audiences will grow tired of the next AI-cat-drama-video.
For that, Nostr does have a compelling story in terms of being able to filter out noise, in theory at least. But even there, it will take some time, so the bottom line of that story currently is ‘if you are starving, might as well come and starve here’.
With a vision as big as Nostr, with its whole paradigm shift constructing a different web entirely, the only compelling story I have is that of war. Want to fight young man? You can: join our ranks, we will defeat the enemy and at the end you will have your own plot of land you can farm in peace. It was waging war that motivated me as Bitcoiner, it is war that motivates me as a Nostrisch. In that light, the question is not whether Nostr is a viable alternative now, its whether it is an alternative future worth fighting for.