Did a little Nostr talk at a small bitcoin meetup with mostly non-technical users last night, as they asked for people to talk about stuff they're building with it.
The idea was for builders to talk about their projects. But instead, I had to give a general Nostr 101 talk, because only about a quarter of people had even heard about Nostr before, virtually nobody used it regularly, and there was also no other speaker present.
Observations:
* People who were aware of Nostr were also much more interested than the others. They mostly had the usual questions:
** What about spam?
** It feels like Nostr has lost all traction (following users who aren't posting anymore)
** Is it possible to get an endless stream of interesting posts? ("I'm used to doom-scrolling")
** How many relays are there?
** How difficult is it to run your own relay?
** What if one company (e.g., Primal) gets to "control Nostr" through market share?
* And a couple of new ones for me:
** Can I spam people's inboxes for profit (i.e. mine relays for user interests, then target users with DMs)?
** Has someone built a DEX order book on Nostr yet?
Generally speaking, Nostr was still perceived as social media only. Which makes sense, because the least experimental clients are focused on micro-blogging, of course. I did explain the Other Stuff, and also demo'd my blogging software, but the questions and interest were almost all about the social media use case.
Most of the evening felt a bit like talking about the fediverse in 2018 or so. Now you just point to Meta having a Fediverse timeline in Threads, and there's simply no question that the protocol is useful to enough people that a company of that size would add it to their product. It also went through the same waves of adoption, where people brought a lot of followers to the protocol, only to then stop posting and make the place feel empty for those followers. And with every wave of adoption, more people stay and make it more interesting for the next wave.
