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If Nostr is truly easier and more flexible, why don’t people use it or talk about it? I’ve listened to every one of your podcasts and loved every episode, but it’s frustrating to hear nearly every guest praise ActivityPub or AT Protocol. When you bring up Nostr, perfectly, in context, it gets no real discussion. To me, that signals they either don’t care about it or don’t really believe in its potential. I agree we could improve in this area. I thought we were moving forward after the discussions at Nostriga, where clients started experimenting with managing keys and bunkers for users who wanted that option. It worked like the familiar email/password login flow, but since then, those clients have either shut down or moved on, and no further progress has been made. Someone has to lead the way. Right now, most of the content is “yay Bitcoin” or “yay Nostr” because those are the core communities. We branch out into topics like art, music, cats, homesteading, carnivore, and health—but it often circles back to Bitcoin in some form. What we really need are genuine content creators producing original content beyond Bitcoin adjacent topics. I don’t think it’s entirely true that all content is Bitcoin related. While much of it is, I’ve seen people share music, artwork, surfing videos, and more that resonate with our smaller user base. So there is variety, it’s just not the dominant flow yet. Bitcoin remains king and will remain king until someone else consistent posts content that resonates well within the community or brings their own community here. Algorithms themselves aren’t the problem, it’s closed, forced algorithms that are. I think we agree here. What we need is better discovery through feed marketplaces and DVMs. Primal is currently the best at this, hands down. Still, DVMs aren’t perfect. They can be slow, offline, or unreachable at times. I also like Damus’ local first approach as a viable alternative.

Replies (2)

Damn you Notedeck. This was a reply to @rabble 🤣
rabble's avatar rabble
I've had a LOT of conversations with people about Nostr, really people who are aware of Nostr but don't use it. There are a few things that come up. * General admiration for Nostr and how it does tons of interesting things in terms of tech. It's way more flexible than ATprotocol or ActivityPub. * Frustration with the way user accounts / logins / keys work. It's very confusing if you're not somebody who already understands crypto. Mostly it's confusing because of how we talk about it. If we tell people, here's your magic user text, paste this in places and you'll be magically logged in, they love it. If we try and explain custody and wallets and keys and browser extensions and all the ways you can login with Nostr, their eyes glaze over. * Not feeling like it's a place for them. Everybody is talking about Bitcoin and Nostr. Most folks don't care very much about the underlying tools or how payments work. They want to talk about their interests, surfing, food, travel, their friends. or ten million other things. They see Nostr as a bitcoin place. Most people have either no opinion or a negative opinion of bitcoin because somebody tried to evangelize it too hard. * Zaps, folks love zaps. I've heard from board members and the executives of Bluesky that they want zaps. Folks don't like bitcoin and bitcoin content but they do want the functionality. The problem is when creators come to Nostr, they only get zaps for content that is about nostr or bitcoin. There's no good way to build and sustain themselves with other content. * Algorithms - we all have a love hate relationship with algorithms. We say we don't want them, but we choose to use systems with algorithms. We have them in nostr with DVM's and it works. But it's not well integrated in to the apps and most feed services via DVM's are way too slow. The algorithm helps people be seen, grow an audience, find their people, keep being engaged. We built the proof of concept but didn't make it in to a good product. These things that keep people from Nostr are fixable. What i'm going at with my podcast is to build a larger movement, Nostr is a solution, but people on Nostr aren't my intended audience. ;-D
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