Thread

🛡️
People who say this like its a bad thing don't understand how to bootstrap networks. 100,000 users on a network talking about 100,000 different topics dies in a matter of days, because there's literally nobody to talk to about *your* topic and no cohesion at all in the network. 100,000 users in one community is a solid network. Look at every successful network in history, it *always* starts with an atomic, self sustaining network around a single community or purpose. - Amazon. Only sold books. - Uber, Lyft, and pretty much any rideshare service. All got a critical mass in ONE city before expanding. - Airbnb. Started exclusively and got success in San Francisco. - Napster. Started with almost exclusively music - Facebook. Exclusively Harvard students - Twitch.tv started as just one guy streaming his life and then targeted gamers. - Pinterest, focused entirely on "mom-bloggers" This list goes on and on. What he is describing is literally *the only way alternative networks are ever successful.* So contrary to the idea that this is bad, it's actually the only reason Nostr is still here. Because you can find most of the best bitcoiners, tons of great holistic lifestyle content, and cypherpunks wanting to build awesome shit. That's actually a fantastic start and we should LEAN INTO THIS MORE, not steer away from it. We do so at our own detriment if we just complain about and fail to embrace the community we DO have. - Tinder. Literally grew itself locally one frat and sorority party at a time. View quoted note →

Replies (30)

🛡️
I agree. And my post history proves it. I’ve said lean into it and service it multiple times in the past. Because, while we are somewhat homogeneous… we still have our own “other” interest that we bring here, albeit with not a lot to talk with about. But that’s how additional topics start to emerge.
↩ replying to Laeserin 🇻🇦
Abnb didn't stay _only_ San Francisco. Mommy bloggers was a ginormous market, with constant new entrants. You would think Bitcoin talk would scale like mommy talk, as lots of people become new parents or buy Bitcoin for the first time, but most people prefer talking about their family life, than about their currency's emission rate. We're more like Stack Overflow, in that regard, and SO is being crushed by AI. You don't need to interact with *people*, in order to find out about *things*, anymore. You can just ask ChatGPT, "How is the emission rate for Bitcoin calculated?"
↩ replying to semisol
I think some critics miss that we're actually the new hacker bulletin board, for the AI age. That's the second "large topic" that keeps me interested. Bitcoiners tend to be techy people, so that sort of naturally rolled off into a second subgroup. I don't know how far that can scale up, as AI crawls the space and quickly makes our innovations into commodities, but we've managed to stay a step ahead, so far. And we're increasingly getting concrete business interest as topical experts or consultants, so there's that, to motivate us to stick with the topic. Biggest hurdle, for us, has been in building something so "far away" from the Primal social feed, that we can present and market the underlying protocol.
↩ replying to semisol
Yeah, that's why we're using it for an AI-enfused, fully distributed, Big Data project. Very novel system. It's been a real slog, but we're finally getting somewhere with it and getting a chance to demo it to new audiences. The market interest is definitely there, primarily from large organisations who manage their own data and want to create a sort of Internet/Intranet hybrid. It's a shame that people who visit Nostr don't find out about us, as we have no clout here, but we're pounding the pavement outside of Nostr. That's why I stay bullish.
↩ replying to Laeserin 🇻🇦
Nostr has a unique opportunity because (unlike Stack Overflow, Twitter, Facebook, et al.) we're designing the architecture _after_ ChatGPT came on the scene. That means we can do complex tasks with a very thin tech stack. Everyone else is trying to modernize and smart-ize their technical debt, but we don't have any technical debt. (Other than stringified json in Kind 0 content 😠😜, a pox on all their houses.) AI is part of the core tech stack here, and not some creepy service we sell to spy on our captured herd of users. I think that's an asymmetric play, that might be a image
🛡️
Facebook is the only example you shared that's even remotely comparable to Nostr. And it was not successful when it was only being used by Harvard students. And those students were not talking about a limited number of subjects either. This idea that nostr can only be for a limited number of subjects is stupid and it's holding nostr back. Once the idiots who can only think about a single subject shut the fuck up nostr will be widely adopted.
I joined Nostr to learn the finer points about BTC. I joined Nostr to build a cyber security skill set . I joined Nostr because the community endorses my attitude that I'm on the right track. Knowledge, skills and attitude helps me to be a better Bitcoiner. To be competent. Nostr ticks all these boxes.
I'm out here doing my thing. Sure, I share the bitcoin link, but I'm here because it is decentralized, and I have proven they redacted science and they cannot do that here. This is the better system. We need decentralized systems for almost everything. If they can redact science and hide something as significant as what I've proven, decentralized everything is necessary for survival. The lack of it is literally killing us.
🛡️
look. HODL uses the term ‘heuristic’ a lot. so here’s one. music. fucking music. by some act of god, i had the brains to squeak by on a finance degree at an ‘elite’ institution but it was punk rock i identified with. not the green day you think. or fall out boy. or whatever tf ppl define as punk now. i was in basements running through crowds to scream lyrics while sweating alongside singers that wanted to change how the world ran. and some of these bands eventually caught the eye of industry bigwigs. i became one. you’ve heard of these bands. they now play stadiums. a crowd of purists who liked the first self made EP - or LP, or indie label demo, or whatever - won’t fill a stadium. something changes in the evolution of a band. the frontman for a street punk band says ‘the cure had a record called Pornography and it changed my life.’ and fans like me say ‘oh shit, i thought that was just me.’ so their next record has a twist that reflects an influence from The Cure. it attracts more fans. different fans. and this happens album after album. the ethos of that frontman does not change. nor does that of the band. i assure you. at heart, they are the same band of punk kids that didn’t sit right with the with a bigger audience, an evolved sound, and the moral compass that stood when they were 16 years old and kids like me were screaming ‘fuck authority’ by their side. don’t like the crowd? that’s on you, not the band. and certainly not btc. btc is that band.