Why Nostr? What is Njump?
2024-08-27 12:37:03

Svetski on Nostr: Last week I posted about "Nostr struggling" and while there were many good responses, ...

Last week I posted about "Nostr struggling" and while there were many good responses, it seems to me that a bunch of people misunderstood my premise.

I'm going to clear that up here and expand on the idea a little further.

First of all, I'm a Nostr bull. I'm sold, and I know how necessary this is. I'm still recruiting souls from twitter:

https://x.com/SvetskiWrites/status/1828403019081269661

Secondly, I know that Nostr is SUPERIOR, technically speaking - and while the apps might not be as smooth, and some of the UX might be buggy, the substrate were working with is fundamentally better than the status quo.

did a fantastic job of explaining that at the recent conference (I suggest everyone watch that if they haven't - and I'm still bummed I couldn't make it).

There are so many NIPs, and so much tech shit going on, that nobody else stands a chance really. Elon might have cool AI, but we have that can produce more prototypes than all the AIs in the world, combined.

That being said, my reference to "struggling" was not about the technical side of things. It was about messaging & go to market.

I speak to people every day about Nostr. I live in Brazil right now and travel on a regular basis to at least 10 countries each year. When I speak to people, they don't really care so much about censorship resistance, or Bitcoin (interestingly enough, two things Rabble also mentioned in his talk).

What they want is a place to connect, that's COOL.
And that's a VERY HARD thing to do.

and the guys did it with Twitter early on, and so did the Instagram founders - but for every one "hit" - there are another 1000 well built flops which people just didn't find "cool."

Right now, the messaging is more doom, than bloom. More "you need this bc government gonna get you", and less "this is where the cool kids are at".

Now...I understand that this is gonna take time. All good things do. But if we're going to attract more people, the conversation needs to evolve.

I wrote a piece a little while back called "Social as a Service" and framed Nostr more as this substrate for a Universe of new applications. Once again, Rabble echoed this in his talk and leaned into the "Social Protocol" angle.

I personally find this more compelling. More white-pill, and more appealing for the purposes of growing a network. People need to be pulled, not pushed. The latter can work in bursts here and there (as we've seen this week since the Telegram debacle), but it's not sustainable growth.

has been doing really good work with her framing, and I think her 80% bloom / 20% doom approach is a good one.

has some good framing too with the “city” analogy

_______________

Thinking out aloud, maybe we just need more angles. I guess the Bitcoin people are still going to be attracted by "government gonna get you" - and we're FAR from saturation in that dimension. So maybe the right approach is the have that conversation with THEM...but a very different conversation with others.

Ultimately, I hope to see more go-to-market initiatives that are user-oriented, and get people excited about Nostr. We saw that at the Nostr booth that kicked off, and that is now working on.

We've got some plans for later this year at a few conferences as we unveil

I know and @fiatjaf are doing some podcast stuff, which is excellent. Also is doing a Nostr book.

I'm starting to repeat some of what I said last week, so I'll stop here.
Ultimately the point is this:

Nostr is not struggling "technically" speaking.
But it's not yet found a compelling enough SPACE in people's minds, outside of the Bitcoin community. And it's not found a narrative yet that's compelling, beyond the "government gonna get you / big tech gonna ban you".

When we find that, I expect things to really begin taking off.

Thankyou for coming to my TED Talk 🤣🤣🤣
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