Silberengel on Nostr: ...

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Yesterday was also a day

I’m still quite bullish about using Nostr to publish, and generally for OtherStuff, but I was feeling a bit pessimistic about the microblogging (kind 01) feeds on Nostr, yesterday. And, rightly so. Mine has been grinding slowly to a halt, and not for lack of effort, on my part. I regularly hear reports, from other npubs, that they sense the same phenomenon.

Most of the people I have whitelisted on the wss://theforest.nostr1.com relay (currently 302, in number) are beginning to give up on Kind 01 clients, except for occasionally making an announcement, and are increasingly moving their chatting off-Nostr. (I’m still privy to those conversations, but most of you no longer are.)

So, my feed has been getting quieter and quieter. Even adding new people doesn’t help much, as they don’t tend to stick around, for long, so it’s a Sisyphean task.

Some others are still bothering to show up, regularly, but they increasingly see it as a chore, or something they do to “keep up appearances”. Add me to this group of wearied, diligent noters, holding down the microblogging feeds, with our exhausting attempt at #KeepingNostrWeird, while the influencers surround the gates and the Kind 01 feeds dissolve into nothing but warmed-over Bitcoin memes, GM notes, notifications from the OtherStuff, and Things Copied from X.

The problem of barren, intellectually-emptying Kind 01 feeds is further exacerbated by the fact that new entrants to the Nostrverse find it increasingly easy to “find good follows”, but they’re all only finding the same follows: whoever is on the trending list.

The See-Nothings

I keep complaining about this, but the responses I get are generally unhelpful. They are:

• mockery – Oh, Miss Hoity-Toity wants more attention!
• insults – Nobody is talking to you because you are boring and stupid, and nobody likes you.
• clueless – You should try replying to other people, then they might reply to you.
• or they tell me to just stop looking at the list, if it upsets me.

What people are missing, by telling me to just not look at the trending lists, is that the lists are a statistic of what real humans are looking at, on Nostr. The bizarrely-high concentration of npubs, on the list, so that their entries show up multiple times, suggests that what people are primarily looking at… is the trending list.

Either directly, because they use a client that has that built in, or indirectly, as they have been onboarded with the lists or told to “just follow the people I follow”, which leads to a steadily-rising concentration of follows. This concentrating effect is accelerating.

The newly-popular WoT (web of trust) relays further exacerbate this effect, as they put a premium on the npubs that have the highest WoT score, which – surprise, surprise! – are the same people as on the trending list.

And this is why everyone on the trending list insists Nostr is a fun, happening place, full of human interaction. A place where replying reverently to Jack and posting GM religiously will make you a sought-after conversant. It is that place. For them.

In fact, they’ve reached that glorious state of #PeakSocialMedia, where they have become famous for being famous, and no longer have to even pretend to be trying to appeal to anyone with their content. They can post literal garbage, and their fans groupies sycophants commentariat will cheer them on, and flood their replies with ardent encouragement. Less because those other npubs actually cared about what they posted, than because they are hoping to pick up new followers in those threads, since they know that everyone is looking at those threads, because those threads are trending.

It’s a pyramid scheme of following.

For the rest of us… the vast majority of us… that blue line at the bottom is mostly how it feels.

The trend is to trending.

What we no longer have, is people looking directly at relay feeds, to find new people, or even their own follow list feeds, to see npubs they’ve already subscribed to. Even when people follow me, they usually don’t respond until I’m trending, which suggests that they’re also seeing me on the trending list because that is what they’re primarily looking at. This is why, as soon as you get on the trending list, your replies explode. And your replies will be concentrated in a hardcore few, otherwise.

Those few are the reason I keep coming back, but as they’re also often chatting with me off-Nostr, I am facing the question of: Why bother with Nostr microblogging?

This is the question I am struggling with. If kind 01 isn’t for plebs chatting, anymore, (and it increasingly isn’t) then it’s mostly a sort of bulletin board, where we post notifications of items we’ve added in OtherStuff clients, or make announcements of meetups, software releases, or conferences. This, however, is compounding the dullness of the feeds and turning it into a sort of “info flyer”, except for a lucky few. But, perhaps, I am simply a #NostrBoomer, who is failing to move with the times and get with the program.

I’m slowly reaching the conclusion that Kind 01 in an open, centralized market of notes, will always coalesce around a small subset of #NostrElite and turn into a largely passive form of entertainment, or a frustratingly lonely place, for everyone else. There can only be so many people talking, at once, in a public square.

The only movement I currently see, that might end the slow slide of Kind 01 into irrelevance and tedium, is to create lots of smaller, public squares, through single-relay communities. This has been such a long time, in coming, and has been resisted by client devs so ferociously, that I worry that it’s merely an attempt to close the barn door after the npubs have escaped.

I sincerely hope to be proven wrong, though. Perhaps the relay devs, who have valiantly taken up the fight, will #SaveKind01. We shall see.