Thread

ok i’ll bite. nostr feels absolutely dead. it’s not just me. a lot of accounts i try to keep up with are constantly posting and getting almost no engagement. maybe it's time to be honest and actually think about whats going wrong instead of trying to create fake hype. there i said it.

Replies (77)

I wonder if a lot of it is hierarchy based. My view is that X and other platforms' users gravitate towards large accounts. I mean, Lynn Alden is great but why are so many zapping her? One of the smartest financial people around and all these small accounts zapping Lynn. Nostr is supposed to be a leveller, and yet people come on here and behave just as moronically as those elsewhere. Next, this Bitcoin maxi sentiment. Nothing wrong with picking a tribe and running with it but to many newcomers it is overwhelming. The technical hurdles to operating around the nostr ecosphere. It is a challenge even for technical people like me. I am sure there are guides but nostr needs to publicise places, knowledgebases. Yes. There are some great efforts but it feels too esoteric. My presence on here is as a force of good but does anyone actually care about the work me and my collaborators are doing? This is the reality of it.
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The trending feed on primal is always same few people. And like, half the time less than 10 other people interacted with them to get on the trending feed. That is kinda telling. Also lots of people unfollowing and muting each other at the moment over war mongering and siding with central banks and fiat currency against bitcoin . They may have something to do with everyone having less interaction. Like if you are against war, that's an automatic mute from half the large accounts on here now
What you say is true, but my personal approach changes when the purpose of posting on Nostr isn't engagement. It's not about likes, building a community, or having followers. It's simply about uploading and preserving a record of my own comments and actions over time. For me, it serves its purpose, whether there's interaction or not. 🙏🏻
Lately it feels like we’re at peak information overload. So much noise. So many takes. Always something new demanding attention. At some point it stops being helpful and just becomes exhausting. Maybe we don’t need more information…maybe we need a break. Anyone else feeling that?
I actually prefer little engagement that’s authentic on Nostr. Just feels more chill and that I’m interacting with real people just living their lives, doing what they love, talking about the simple but important things in life.
There is a place for Nostr being censorship resistant. It might be flagging right now post the pandemic censorship era, it likely to again increase as content also improves or if more censorship is applied. There is also strong competition from X, which continues to battle for free speech too and is doing a fine job.
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↩ replying to volition
Twitter made me delete comments where I called the Australian prime treasonous and accused him of putting Israel's interest before Australia. It stopped me making comments and made me go back and delete it myself before I could comment again. Also it's like 75% spambots on every tweet and all the real humans are always hidden at the bottom under the spam label
↩ replying to Kayne
Was that after Elon Musk had bought it and changed it to X? Whether or not, X is doing a good job relatively, far better than when it was Twitter, which lowers the need for Nostr. Was similarly banned from LinkedIn during the pandemic after raising awareness that the MRNA vaccines were experimental and COVID-19 fatality rate low for anyone under 50 years (particularly children).
That's not my opinion. It's developing slowly and being built diligently, which is not the case with other platforms. If you look at the growth, you can see that people are slowly but steadily switching from centralised platforms because they are looking for solutions. There's a saying here that good things take time.
↩ replying to bitcoinlimit
A crucial point is still that anyone can create as many private keys as they want... nevertheless, it is becoming clear that there is small but steady growth! Don't ask me for figures, but what is happening in the background and will sooner or later render all other protocols obsolete is not a problem as long as it grows slowly. I've been hearing your argument a lot lately, but unfortunately I can't confirm it! Let's wait and see what happens when the censorship gets tougher
There is a lot of lurking that doesn’t show as engagement, and the incentives on nostr hit differently than getting fake engagement on legacy. Might only get one or two people replying or zapping your posts and it still feels more valuable than 100 legacy likes, or “impressions” What would be needed for it to “not feel dead”? More people signing in? More people nor passively scrolling but engaging? legacy social media has taught people to be passive eyeballs, trying to wake people to true engagement is where we’re at. Am i wrong?
There are a lot more articles getting posted than 6 months ago. I would say that is true about posting, as well. You have 50+ responses. Zaps are less common because people either don't set up their wallets (easy to do, folks), or they think half a penny is going to turn into a million dollars someday.
I’m new here, and apologies in advance for the somewhat rambly reply, but I hope the context is important for the deeper message. Some background: This morning, I saw a post on X - something like “according to Nostr Iran seems like a pretty big deal. According to MSM it’s a non story. If your concerned about censorship at least follow @White Noise, @npub17slp...w9r8 ” Already downloaded bitchat following an X post re Uganda. Downloaded White Noise iOS test flight app. Created Nostr account using it with the generated name. Just clicked “next, next, finish”. Now I don’t know anyone in “real life” to add so kind of stuck there. However in the tweet comments was another tweet which referenced @Damus and @primal . I had downloaded @primal many months ago but got stuck at the signup page on the app. I can’t remember what, but it asked for some information that I didn’t want to provide, an email maybe. Anyway, I downloaded @Damus to give that a try instead. It asked me for my Name and an, admittedly optional, Bio. My NAME!? This stopped me in my tracks. This is supposed to be anonymous? I’m not giving it my name. No. Nope. Not a chance. However this time was different… Taking a breath, I see the words, “Already on Nostr? Log in”. So I took my brand new Nostr private key from White Noise and used it to log into Damus. I’m now logged in using the Nostr account that White Noise created for me. I follow some people, have a click around. I then open Primal, log in with my Nostr private key. I see the same people I followed on the other account, all synchronised via the Nostr account/network. Nice! Now how to chose between Damus and Primal? Well primal seems to have some extra functionality, and I had seen it referred to by more of the people I follow on X, so probably that one, but a quick flick into the changelog on the App Store seals the deal for me. Primal has completed many updates in the past year, @Damus hasn’t updated anything in 7 months. So here I am, a new user/Nostr community member. I check out the Trending 24H feed and come across this. My first though is, “I hope not, I just got here”. My second is about perspective, and that leads me to where I believe both the challenge and hopefully the magic is with Nostr. I believe every person has a unique perspective, based on their experience up to this present moment. That is based on their interactions with the world, inputs received, outputs shared, resulting feedback, ad infinitum. Some people may think it incredibly silly that the mere fact I had to pick a name stopped me dead in my tracks, but that was my blocker to adoption. The fact that the developers of White Noise added to their UX the random generation of a name, and my prior knowledge of decentralized networks and public/private keys allowed me to then be unblocked for adoption. Now I don’t think I will use White Noise much as I don’t think that is a use case for me, at least right now, but development in one app in the Nostr ecosystem unblocked a barrier to entry for me in another app. If a Nostr community member hadn’t posted on X, I wouldn’t have known. If previous content creators hadn’t produced content to educate me on decentralized networks I wouldn’t have joined the dot. If bitcoin content creators hadn’t made me think about decentralized networks on a wider scale I wouldn’t have gone looking for that education. My point is, adoption is complex, it is many, many, small seemingly insignificant things that combine to a “tipping point” that turn a “interested outsider” into a community member/user. Some external factors (covid, emergencies, law/policy change etc) can change the balance of the barriers to entry for people, ie the “pain” makes historical concerns less significant in a given moment. Depending on the barrier this may lead to a “well it’s done now and that wasn’t so bad was it”, or “now “the pain” has reduced I’m not comfortable anymore” recalculation of the barriers to entry/continued adoption. Its not fixed, it’s fluid, which is especially apparent with decentralized open source ecosystems, there, by design, is no central authority that says “this is your only option”/“you have to do this or else”. So there will be ebbs and flows, peaks and troughs. What will enable success, in my meager opinion anyway, is the belief, but more importantly consistency of every community member, as you never know what contribution you make today, will unlock something for someone else tomorrow. One final thought or perspective, is feeling SAFE: I lost faith in “the system” a few years ago and that has left me in a sort of limbo. I don’t trust what I have been told to date, I don’t know who to trust, I don’t understand the new technologies well enough and they (whilst much better than before) are still different and a bit clunky, but most importantly, I still have a day job, a family, responsibilities, that take up increasing amounts of my time, energy and attention. That resulted in me just stopping participating. No social media posts, closing down old accounts, talking with people less as they don’t like “my conspiracy theories”. I reduced and collapsed my life in the old system, but had no new system to put it into. That just left me a collapsed person. I feel like, from my perspective, the next phase of adoption comes from not making people aware of the problem, not building a new system, not understanding/educating on the new system, these are all important, but it is to help people experience the new system, to feel safe, to feel empowered. Things will continue to happen that push people to seek out alternatives, but in that state people are scared and fear is great at reducing your cognitive abilities. Things “just need to work” and people need to feel safe and supported. And that, as they say, “takes a village”. I wouldn’t in a million years, no I couldn’t, post this on X or any other platform, because the pure, brutal, honest, vulnerable truth of the matter is that I wouldn’t feel safe to do so. And it’s only from writing this now, that I realise, I wouldn’t feel safe sharing this in any aspect of my “normal” life. Now I’m not trying to compare my lack of safety to others, I’m very fortunate compared to other people globally and don’t take that for granted, but there is something powerful to be able to share without the shackles of societal noise wrapped around me. Anonymity gives me that safety. Yes I’m a bitcoiner and that is what led me here, but what would keep me here is that feeling of safety. That feeling of being in an environment, a community, where I can share my perspective with others, without the constraints of societal or personal expectations, where I don’t need to filter myself, or be filtered, where I can speak my truth and for others to do the same. We all are unique and have a unique perspective and experience of and on things that when shared enhance the collective whole. Maybe one day my feeling of safety evolves into feeling empowered, which one day evolves into feeling self-sovereign and maybe that changes my name from this random generated one to my real one or maybe something else entirely, but for now, WHAT I have to say being more important than WHO is saying it, is for me, in this moment, the magic here. I may well be shouting into the wind on a “dead” platform, and even if noone reads this, I know it helped at least one person, and that’s me. Hopefully it can somehow help others too
As someone that have been wandering through several digital realms such as the Fediverse (especially Lemmy where I'm used to spend most of my online time), Geminispace, Dark Web (Onion HSes and I2P eepsites), I'd say this is far from being a Nostr thing only, it has been an Internet thing. The Dead Internet hasn't been a theory for a long time.
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I come here less often than a few months ago. Centralised systems are more efficient and deliver better UX, which is key for users. I’m not sure privacy is actually superior here. Social networks are about socialising and network effects, if your interests aren’t here, your time goes elsewhere. I use Reddit more (to engage with my culture) and Substack more (for STEM and finance). That said, I still love the idea and the network, so I’ll definitely keep roaming around, especially since Fountain is integrated with Nostr.