Yeah, it takes people to get good content worth paying attention to but if everyone says "it's dead" then it will remain dead. But if people voted with attention and said "yeah, it's kind of dead, but if I hang out here and my friends join, then it will be less dead and people will notice and also join..." You basically create the future you want.
That just describes any social network cold-start problem. If you want to solve that it needs to be really easy for regular users to join and contribute.
Example: Click "Join Nostr" on the nostr.com landing page and the first thing you see is "private" and "public" keys. Click next, you land on 4 example nostr clients. One is broken, the other one is filled with japanese content, the other one is a GitHub repository etc.
It's a cool project from a technical pov as the system is quite simple but you can not expect regular content to start popping up if the experience is only tailored towards motivated tech nerds.
I tried to improve that by making it easy to syndicate the content of Kirby (A blogging framework) to Nostr (https://github.com/dewey/kirby-posse/pull/9) but ran into many issues with how the various clients support and show images and lost interest along the way.
Nostr actually has web of trust (WoT) implementations. I think Coracle has this and some others. Nostur even lets you specify how far you want your web of trust to reach. Pretty cool stuff!
Network effects are difficult to replicate. You need lots of users to get a few solid consistent "content" creators. You need even more users to get the content that YOU like. So, it just amounts to having more users. Some might say it's impossible to replicate some existing social platform like X, and that may be true - but at the end of the day, you can vote with your attention and can contribute in ways you would like your space to be, so if you like say... log cabin content, then you can create it yourself and start amassing a log cabin enthusiast audience who will then start sharing their passion for log cabins.
Only if you're on a Bluesky-operated PDS. That's straightforward to fix, at which point the most Bluesky can do to “ban” you is stick a label on your account that non-Bluesky applications/clients are free to ignore.
> to my knowledge their promises of being decentralized are comparable to Telegram being E2E encrypted.
AFAICT your knowledge is about a year out of date.
* relays can just go away - you don't have your data then
* there is both user-friendly and secure way of managing your private keys; additionally, once your keys are gone, your identity is gone - there is no "I forgot my password" procedure
Looks super interesting. I am waiting for the App Store release since TestFlight is full. I like the idea of not requiring a phone number - the only thing makes Signal lose some points in my eyes... well, I guess if the company goes down that might be another reason for open protocols over apps.
