[sigmoid10]

All these projects don't understand that it's not the principle of free communication or the idea of sharing content that made networks like twitter and facebook so successful. It was an army of engineers and designers working closely together with marketing people and even psychologists to maximise user engagement and retention. Heck, you could just endlessly recycle the same algorithmic content mixed with camouflaged marketing influencers sans any real stuff and people will suck it up like crazy (looking at you, tiktok). One of the key things nostr criticises (addictiveness) is what will keep it from succeeding on any broader scale.

[orbital-decay]

What makes you think their goal is succeeding on the broader scale, though?

[sigmoid10]

From their website:

>Nostr is a protocol, designed for simplicity, that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network.

So they basically want to create twitter without Musk (or anyone in charge for that matter). Nothing wrong with that goal, it's just highly unlikely to succeed given the fundamental shortcomings of this approach.

[int_19h]

"A global network" doesn't mean "the dominant global network", though. Mastodon is global, for example.

[rapnie]

Just for the record: Mastodon is not a network, but a server app. The network is the Fediverse and the dominant protocol (currently) is W3C ActivityPub.

[volkk]

right. was going to ask the same thing. i'm okay with it being a relative niche. that is to say, writers, economists, artists, etc with a lean towards tech. i'm completely fine with Nostr not becoming the worldwide phenom so that it doesn't attract the spam and the types of people that comes along with popularity.

[kipchak]

I think at least some number of people will grow burnt out on addictiveness and want something else. While it may not replace addictive social media there's still potentially substantial value there, which to me seems similar the internet pre Facebook.

[sigmoid10]

To me that seems about as likely as drug addicts suddenly growing tired of shooting up stuff and going into gardening as a hobby instead. Sure, it's not theoretically impossible, but I definitely wouldn't start a gardening platform targeting those people. Pre-facebook basically means a 90s style forum with highly specialised zed communities. You don't need decentralised approaches for that.

[indigochill]

> Pre-facebook basically means a 90s style forum with highly specialised zed communities. You don't need decentralised approaches for that.

For a number of years I was a forum moderator for a game forum called Uru Obsession. Eventually that wound down and the forum closed, meaning all those discussions have also been lost (unless someone backed them up - by the time they closed I had moved on, so I dunno), and that community as far as I know has mostly dissolved since its closure.

A gossip protocol means there is no host - clients communicate directly with each other and also store the conversation locally so someone else deciding to stop paying hosting costs becomes a non-issue.

[Turing_Machine]

> To me that seems about as likely as drug addicts suddenly growing tired of shooting up stuff and going into gardening as a hobby instead.

I've seen a lot of people leave Facebook over the last couple of years. And I mean a lot. Oh, they might still log in every month or two to see what's up with friend and family, but daily use? Nope.

[sigmoid10]

Because they all moved to Reddit or Tiktok or Instagram. These are the new drugs in the hood and they kick much harder than boring old Zuck's stuff.

[rektide]

We'll see, I guess. This feels like an attempt to apply lessons of what happened yesterday to today. It feels like assuming success only has one mold. And it resists acknowledging how much people hate the thing we have, how many people consider it toxic and damaging.

I think people just need to be lead to greener pastures. Right now the alpha geeks aren't cooler & better, don't have great & obvious advantages for being out on the frontier trying cool shit. The Tim O'Reilly "Follow The Alpha Geeks" advice is rarely wrong, in my view, for the alpha geeks mostly want to expand capabilities & power & enable, in ways most consumer efforts are too bounded & limited to go for, but we keep forgetting this wisdom's words anyways.

Once the alpha geeks are unqualifiedly better than the mundane normy-nets, the tables will start to turn. I think the geeks are doing the good work, are putting in the right effort.

Dogfood your way to success. Do what empassions & excites you. Don't worry about l-users. Focus on being really good & powerful. You'll be out competed if you do what sigmoid10 says & compete to be the lowest common denominator of social networking, and your product will suck as bad as everything else we have.

Truly good works market themselves. Places where genuine authentic people (and creative fun bots) mix & share themselves in are what we are searching for, is the authenticity that the engagement-loop corporate networks break & burry. There's different races here. I do think the broader we are searching for better more open pattern en mass to replace the walled garden networks (a challenge many distributeers reject), but the path to victory is assymetric competition, is tapping into different sources of value & raising it up in different ways.

Do you believe in humanity? Or do you think synthetic gloss shit forever & ever will always win?