People outside the Nostr bubble are generally content with the existing social media model. Don’t get me wrong. There are some aspects of social media that people are dissatisfied with, such as its negative impact on mental health and the occasional toxic interactions with strangers. However, these problems do not concern the foundational infrastructure of social media and are not problems that Nostr can inherently solve.
It would be a mistake to believe that Nostr’s unique features would be sufficient to eventually win the market. For instance, censorship resistance alone is not a winning feature because people generally don’t care about censorship. Only a small fraction of users ever face censorship due to political discourse. Hence from the perspective of most users, censorship resistance is just not a big deal, even though it is a powerful feature of Nostr.
The same applies to privacy and encrypted messaging as well. Let’s be honest. Only the most odd personalities are concerned that Meta can read their DMs on Messenger. As long as people don’t have an image in their mind of somebody actually tapping into their personal information, they comfortably assume that it would not happen. And for the most part, they might be correct. They are only one among billions of users who have their data exposed on these platforms. Why should they be afraid if everyone else isn’t? What do they have to hide that is worthy of being singled out for?
Does this mean that we should ignore the majority and just let Nostr be a tool for the few who value it? Absolutely not. One of the biggest promises of Nostr is that it would remove the barrier to entry for new ideas for social media and beyond. And these ideas would not be impactful if they are only available to a sliver of the population, nor will there be enough incentives to create them in the first place. Simply put, the internet would become a much more innovative and vibrant place if we bring the world into the Nostr ecosystem. We should therefore strive to “nostrify” social media because it is a worthwhile endeavor.
So what would it take to make Nostr the primary foundation for social media? As an example, consider how the internet became popular in Ethiopia. Around 2008, most Ethiopians had never even used the internet. I was a school boy in Addis Ababa at the time. From what I remember, only people involved in education used tools such as search engines, and very few folks were familiar with email.
Then Facebook came along. The platform became so popular in the country that millions of folks learned how to open a browser, type in facebook.com, and log into their profiles. These are people who would have otherwise never used computers. Cyber cafes started popping up in every neighborhood and over a period of about four years, the majority of the nation’s urban adults became internet users. This shift happened all because people flocked to a product called Facebook.
Just as how people in Ethiopia learned how to use the internet for the sake of Facebook, the world today needs great products that can attract people to the point of having them learn to use cryptographic keys. There needs to be a set of Nostr-based products that can create sufficient disruption in order for the protocol to be widely adopted. And this will require more than having Nostr-based replicas of mainstream apps.