fiatjaf on Nostr: I don't know if I agree with this "solving their problems" mentality. This is not a ...

I don't know if I agree with this "solving their problems" mentality. This is not a SaaS startup, this is a system with network effect. Without having tons of other users we cannot solve anyone's problems.

If we were to apply that approach, though, we could perhaps start with apps that are still useful even if a single user is using them alone, such as a system for writing and publishing personal articles and blogs that people would otherwise use Wordpress or something like that for -- or tools for creating annotations, highlights, web bookmarking, keeping track of things -- but these are all hard to compete because literally anyone else can offer such apps, and if they make these apps do things anything that Nostr is not good at we're screwed. One app that is doing this very well is Zapstore, actually, which is the best app for installing open-source Android apps that exist, apparently because no one else had the idea of trying to to compete against Obtainium and F-Droid or no one was as competent, so we got that.

After that we can go for things that are useful for small groups, which is the entire "communities" talk. I agree with it, but I find it very unspecified. What the hell is a community? Even after listening to hours of TGFN podcast I still have no idea. I know I have been part of things I have considered communities, but when I say some people talking about "community for sports fans" I get the impression that they have no idea of what they're talking about. Anyway, this can also work, but here we're competing against Telegram, Signal, Discord and whatnot, and again we're screwed.

I say we're screwed but I don't really believe we are, because we have one thing that none of the competitors have, which is the promise of a global decentralized social network (and a million other things that come with that). This ideal is sometimes deemphasized because "users don't care about it" and "we have to just make better software", but I don't agree with that. Competing with just software isn't enough. I'm not sure people realize, but for every many well-designed high-quality apps that are launched only very few enjoy actual success, and one way to prevent Nostr apps from being just another failure is to appeal to people who empathize with the Nostr idealistic vision, even if many parts of that vision are not in place yet (we most notably lack the "social" part since there are no users).