Maybe Nostr needs to work on its social layer first.

I'm still here after several years 😎 I've never been one of those women who need to use the bathroom with all of her friends but rather hung with the guys anyway, so that might be why 🤔

The next level to that is Concord, theres literally only like 3 or so women on there vs hundreds of guys. Nostr social is actually fairly close

That is based

Bitches

Why do they do that? Is there like a hidden ping pong table in the women’s bathroom or something?

You make it sound as though women’s willingness to be on a social network depends on how much validation or attention they receive. If that were true, women would flock to male-dominated Nostr. If women don’t stick around, I suspect it’s because many prefer a certain degree of transparency and accountability. Here, I can’t even tell whether I’m talking to a man, a kid, or a bot. There’s something rather unsettling about walking into a room full of masked strangers who all seem to know one another while you’re the only one wondering what’s going on. Just yesterday, after nearly a month on Nostr, I decided I’d start sharing more of my life (pictures, little videos, personal thoughts). Then today, @The Beave , someone whose judgment I respect, posts a selfie looking like a knight in full armor and announces that’s the only kind of selfie anyone will ever get from him. And now I’m wondering whether he knows something I don’t. Maybe women are leaving because they can’t figure out why everyone seems to be hiding. And rather than spend a month figuring out the rules of the masquerade, they just go back to Instagram.

the irony is that "opsec" is deeply embedded in the "cypherpunk" culture of nostr and selfies and showing your real life are done at a cost you make a lot of noise about when you do it. people don't realise that modern norms about social media amount to a kind of public confession ritual and if you want to look into why that's a problem a whole world will open up before your eyes. nostr is not shaped by an algorithm in the same way as most single private company social media are. it's not funded by advertising driven by the gathering of all that self-confession information and nobody, almost nobody, at least, is getting paid to put anything on nostr. confusing nostr for siloed, monetised social media data gathering and public opinion shaping is the problem here. this isn't "social media" this is a bunch of people who want to talk to real people instead of a machine-sculpted sugar coated version of reality. i don't know if there is any gender differentiators involved in this but the same gender imbalance exists in engineering, manual labor, military and security. it is probably true that it's more dangerous to be a woman on nostr because you aren't being chaperoned by The Algorithm.

The discussion was about why women don’t stay on Nostr, not whether Nostr should resemble conventional social media. That’s a straw man argument. What makes Nostr more dangerous for women, or how an algorithm would ordinarily protect them? Nostr doesn’t have to abandon its cypherpunk principles, but it cannot expect mainstream users to adopt those social habits as a condition of belonging. Whatever happened to freedom of choice? As a normie woman who’s been here for almost a month, I can tell you that the culture of secrecy makes the environment difficult to understand and, at times, uncomfortable. And that’s precisely what can make a social network feel not so social.

> Nostr doesn’t have to abandon its cypherpunk principles, but it cannot expect mainstream users to adopt those social habits as a condition of belonging. Whatever happened to freedom of choice? you can make your own nostr, with blow and hookers if you want to. you can't expect to be the visitor and get house-owner decisionmaking power. i'm not aware of what this "culture of secrecy" means, that sounds like your misinterpretation of the fact that nostr events are signed and once someone has them, they can be used against you forever. that's probably why you don't get it. this is not just a "social media" where there is no protection against your mistakes being held as evidence against you forever by anyone at all. at the silos, the enemy is the one whose economic interests align with retention. here, there is no alignment between who keeps the records, the verifiability of the records, and your desire to not have those records be kept. if you don't like the fact that everything you post on nostr is both provably yours and impossible to stop from being kept as part of court-grade evidence against you, then you know what to do.

“Get house-owner decision-making power”? Who owns the house? lol Anything published online can be preserved and used against someone. Nostr isn’t that special. I highly doubt ordinary women who don’t stay on Nostr were planning to post anything likely to become incriminating court evidence in the first place. What makes Nostr more dangerous for women, and how exactly would The Algorithm protect them?

@AnnSofiNovelist probably is a good person for you to look at to understand better how nostr works. she's a kind of a public figure, she writes books, and she journals extensively on nostr. @Laeserin is more of a polemicist and rhetorician and, frankly, politician, but her personal work is also around databases and she has done quite a bit of development of clients and possibly her work might fit you better than whatever client you are using. Nostr is just an entirely different thing to regular social media. you can't change how it works, those things define what it is. the algorithm doesn't really protect anyone. it protects the advertiser income stream for the company running the thing, and as far as that aligns with the user, it has advantages over this free-for-all of nostr. but it fails in other ways because its whole purpose is to induce confession and make everyone essentially open themselves up to being covertly attacked. on nostr, that is already a given, the difference is nobody has privilege about how to access that data. as for gender differences, i'm not going to enter into that subject area any further. i'm not busy thinking about the interior decoration of nurseries or the business of gynacologists or the details of discussing one's husband or children's behaviour or being offended about gender issues. those are things that are interesting to women because they involve women. there is no "common room" in a protocol like nostr. if you don't like what you are reading, stop following the disscussion. or mute the person whose words bother you. everything is up to you here, nobody is going to hide things automatically or guide you, you are on your own until you establish friendships with other users. it's different, and the ways it is different are more about the incentives of who runs the servers and builds the clients than anything else, and those originate in the architecture, and the principle of free speech and anyone can run their own nostr, with blackjack and hookers if they want.

I don't know. I'm not that kind of girl, either. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Sometimes they take me along because I am there and they want to pretend I'm welcome, and it's like... Why are we all standing around the sink watching Stacy fix her lipstick while Tina talks trash about her ex?

You have to remember that a lot of the guys on here are nomads, or living in self-imposed exile on a mountaintop or in the backwoods, or think the NSA is gonna take notes on what they had for dinner last night so that it can reverse-engineer their private keys. I arrived here, years ago, and it was actually way more anon and paranoid. We do groups and meetups and conference calls and stuff, now, but before it was like 🫣

For the record, I am a certified freight-forwarding agent and logistician. 😂 > but it fails in other ways because its whole purpose is to induce confession and make everyone essentially open themselves up to being covertly attacked. Yeah, see, what you call "confession", other people call "making and keeping friends by exchanging personal information". 🤷🏻‍♀️ You can have intimacy and anonymity, but not both. I don't come onto social media to shout into the void. I do it to socialize. I agree that the data retention problem is an issue, but we're solving that with stuff like communities and groups. But new arrivals will still often have to "out" themselves in kind 1 to get invites to those smaller spaces.

I think we girls are gravitating more toward #cordn. That's also where our meetup group will be headed.

> You make it sound as though women’s willingness to be on a social network depends on how much validation or attention they receive. If that were true, women would flock to male-dominated Nostr. I am very grateful that Nostr has de-bachelorified enough that you don't realize I meant that women were being aggressively hounded out and now we're tolerated and treated like we're almost human. 😂 There used to be a very loud-n-proud "girls are stupid, throw rocks at them" crowd, but they're less active, now.

I only know 2 girls on Cordn

My closest frens are all women, tho. I'm not that girl, but I am also not _that_ girl.

What do you mean - I throw rocks at you all the time! Need to work on my aim, it seems. Grumble grumble

everything we put out there is a handle. the difference here is that it's primarily our peers who are grasping them, not some big anonymous system that pretends to be protecting us or entertaining us but is actually selling us. i use the expression "confession" because the mainstream social media are essentially normalizing something that has a very dark history, and someone needs to be pointing that out. i also have opinions similar about teh data retention problem. that's why i've been banging on about paid relays and low friction subscription models for so long.

Grindr analogy is crude but valid, and points at something real. Nostr's cypherpunk culture treats visibility as an OPSEC failure. Probably the same reason adult content, which is seemingly a natural fit with zaps and being uncensorable, hasn't taken off on Nostr. Sense of safety?? FWIW all the profiles purporting to be women on Nostr have been funny in my experience.

Nusa, BitKarrot, and I. That's three.

Pfft. I'm not a good example. I'm a paranoid idiot. I actively prevent my likeness from being disseminated as much as I can. I know that everything sent via the nostr protocol is logged at some point. Given the power of immutable digital identity and attestation, I understand that there is no delete button in any appreciable manner. And, I think my words are usually enough to convey my thoughts and what pictures I take that I post are generally pleasant things that I wouldn't mind sharing with pretty much anyone. My memes are occasionally spicy and nearly always stolen, because memes are about the only proper commie property there is. You share what you want and don't share what you don't want. I'm not choosing to live this way out of fear. I'm not afraid of what might happen if someone sees my face. I am just selectively, intentionally reducing my digital fingerprint and eventually I may only be reached by analog means and then only by showing up in person, if you're privileged enough to know my probable location. For me, it works. If that doesn't work for you, that's totally ok, too. The issue of women on nostr is another matter entirely. There's a large subset of whores (I don't mince words since I find it to be very correct by definition and implication and conation) who ply their trade, but many of them find it hard to earn a living on a protocol that doesn't artificially boost them in rankings and doesn't even offer an executive way to pay for views, and since they are mostly vapid, shallow people, the current vast majority of regulars on nostr find them at most passingly titillating and at worst blockable for being boring, neither of which helps them make money for pictures of their feet or butthole or whatever is the "sexy part du jour." I just hope they all meet Jesus and make the world a better place. (But I'm not buying what they are selling. 😤) Then you're left with the rest of the women who stick around. Many are married/attaxhed to other nostriches. The rest are here on their own and we are generally better for them since they (and I'd include you in this group, El) are interesting, intelligent, curious, and intriguing humans in their own right. I'm up super late after a really long week with a lot of rollercoasters culminating with two heavy and very long conversations with two people who have had very different crisis hit them and I am the one who is the designated listener and discusser at this time. I don't have a point at this point. I just urge a bit of caution, but you know because I've told you that things are forever into they are not on nostr. You're still in the process of finding your weird. That's ok, too. You've already got a variety of responses from some of the most interesting people on nostr (IMO). I'm going to shut up now and attempt to sleep when though my brain is buzzing from so much information and processing. Goodnight, I hope.

Hey, I've done all that, too, but I'll still work to never have my face on TNP. 😎

Ew. No. It's already good enough and terrible.

But Nostr is a void, you cant expect any reaponses..

Not my fault!

your lack of faith in privacy is disturbing (tm)

You earned a follow. 🕊️💪

That’s genuinely surprising to hear, because my experience so far has been almost the exact opposite. From my very first day, people have been welcoming and have gone out of their way to help. The warmth and engagement I’ve received have been far beyond what I expected. In fact, last night’s exchange was my first encounter with misogynistic attitudes here. How many years have you been here? And is there a girls’ club around here I can join? :)

Thank you for the compliments. They’re kind, and I genuinely appreciate them, along with all the help you’ve given me. But I have to admit, receiving a compliment at the expense of other women feels rather strange. Now, as always, it boils down to discoverability. How on earth were you finding all these women selling pictures of their body parts when I can’t even find people interested in sailing or bread baking?! As for privacy, I understand now that it’s a personal choice, and I respect yours. I’ve made similarly unconventional choices that other people find odd and then question. For example, I’ve never drunk alcohol or tried any drugs (although I was given drugs between the ages of 3 and 5). What bothers me is that the caution of longtime Nostr locals has become contagious. I was perfectly comfortable with the idea of sharing more of my life until I started noticing how carefully people who’ve been here longer protect even the most ordinary details about themselves. And now I feel almost forced to choose between protecting myself and expressing myself. Protecting myself from whom, exactly? And how am I supposed to find my people if I never reveal enough of myself for them to recognize that I’m their kind of weird? So I’m trying to figure out how to participate in a place that celebrates individual freedom without allowing everyone else’s caution to make me second-guess my own choices. And I do hope you managed to get some sleep after that difficult week. When are you coming back?

I think it's been three or four years. Since Elon took over Twitter. It's much quieter, now. The Bitcoin Bros have all calmed down or shut up, and the Neonazis and pedophiles and etc. have been muted into obscurity. You can still see their remnants, sometimes, if you read directly from the Primal relay stream (don't 🫣😂). I'm admin for a good relay to view directly, that contains lots of posts from women. You have to subscribe to write to it, but anyone can read from it. wss://theforest.nostr1.com One thing that Nostr really suffered under is that Jack and Odell got tons of people to jump over here, way too early, before there was anyway to control the feeds. Everyone got hit with waves of spam, porn, trolls, etc. and ran away screaming. 😂 It's quite nice, now. Arguably the most pleasant place on the open Internet.

Mleku isn't misogynistic. He talks like that to everyone.

For the record: I am morally opposed to anyone, male or female, of any age, selling sexual services or sharing sexually-explicit imagery of themself in a public forum. People peddling sexual services are whores or pimps, by very definition. They harm themselves and the people who consume their garbage, so they sin twice. I consider that the worst form of self-exploitation, with persons under the age of 18 selling services being the worst of the worst. I am not going to enable that sort of thing. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it should be accepted or even tolerated. I do not tolerate that on my relay or in my feed, and I am very grateful that the majority of Nostriches feel the same way. Which is why it doesn't randomly wander into most people's feeds (unlike on "controlled platforms" like Instagram or X). That said, there are over-18 relays full of the smut you are looking for, as you seem to be missing it. They're probably run by the government, but you do you.

Can confirm :D My grandfather would have liked him, but if Mleku ever returns to modern Australia he'll be quickly jailed for crimes against feelings.

there are some heartwarming girls, I can give you their npubs if you wanna to join them 💃 🍯

Ma'am, I haven't seen much sailing content, but I see sourdough bread and baking content fairly often. #cooking might be a good hashtag to click and follow.

i already disregarded their rules about publishing instructions how to produce dangerous drugs in 2003. elfspice.tripod.com :) it's been 14 years or something now but i also probably owe the ATO a bunch of money still as well. and i just fucking hate that country, seriously. there's problems here in eastern europe and west asia but ninnying busybody taxes over 70% effective rates are not among them.

It looks to me like you’re labeling sailing and bread baking as smut. Just to clarify, is that a commonly held opinion on Nostr, or merely your personal misinterpretation? lol

Why should you not receive a complement at the expense of others? Is that not what a compliment is, at its core? Everything from "you're pretty" to "you're exceptionally talented at belly button scrying" is, in fact, a setting apart from others. So... Your confusion mildly confuses me and amuses me. 😁 The same thing applies: time. Trial. Interaction with those already in your feed. You are, in fact, already doing exactly what you need to do. The rest takes time and serendipity. I would urge patience. (And yes, that's oxymoronic, but hopefully in the fun sense.) I've been this way for a long time once I realized the purpose of big tech. I am not a product to be sold by convention and the barest whiff of manufactured but uninformed consent. Oooo! That's cool! I've never some any recreational chemical enhancement beyond occasionally drinking alcohol. That certainly puts me in an or of the way category, and I compliment your ability to have decided to not imbide at all! I think this is why you're so dang cool! It is honestly a good thing you are (were?) comfortable enough to want to share. That means TNP has matured enough for people who aren't... Well, too weird in some ways, can enjoy interacting on a social layer that is just the least cool part of TNP. (IMO.) The question you put into the open: from what or whom should I protect myself from? Is, in fact, a good question to ask, and is one that more people should ask. The short answer is "everyone and everything." The more nuanced answer is that there are some very disgustingly demonic people around. They tend to have been beaten back beyond the gates of generally acceptable polite company "in the clear" but they can still see everything. Facts: you can't do anything about it, and, I generally think that you shouldn't let this bother you. They are going to be gross no matter what and as long as you just flatly ignore them, you'll be fine. Allowing that tiny percentage of evil to control you out of fear is exactly the type of behavior I wish to avoid because it leads to a dark place to dwell in and it ruins everything eventually and I just can't live life like that. Also, you are going to make mistakes. Be human. Be you. Being toon cautious is worse than being too bold, if, as in your case, one is not a degenerate. I mean bold in the sense that you are unabashedly yourself. This is why I like mleku. He's brilliant, abrasive, abstruse, and extremely interesting! He rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but that doesn't bother me much at all. You are already in the process of finding your people. You're doing exactly what I did that brought me to the best people (IMO) who socially use TNP. Just keep doing what you're doing and sprinkle in some patience. What is pushing you to worry about this? This should be examined. You've certainly figured out the crux of the issue. I, personally, am just myself. Those who like that find me a goofy companion with good ideas on occasion. Those that don't think I'm a half-retarded tea-totaller. (Jokes on them, I'm just the village idiot and don't care about their opinion much.) I did! I'm feeling much better now even with a ton more work to do this week. Probably early November. The adventure continues!

Loooool! Noooooo! I can guarantee she's not saying that. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Reducing women’s interests to nursery decorations, gynecological matters, and gender-related grievances sounds pretty misogynistic to me. And the phrase “being offended about gender issues” adds another layer of condescension, implying that women’s concerns about sexism are merely emotional grievances rather than legitimate subjects for discussion. And talking like that to everyone doesn’t make it any less misogynistic.

Yeah, let me check them out!

He's frustrated with latest gen (5th wave? 6th?) Feminism and not exactly taking it out in you, specifically. Not that I have to justify everything he says... I am just sympathetic to his point of view at times.

IMO, some people derive enormous satisfaction from having their intelligence recognized. There’s nothing inherently wrong with seeking intellectual validation. But when someone feels the need to demonstrate intellectual superiority at the expense of others, hijacking a conversation to put their own intellect on display, complete with straw man arguments and condescension, I recognize that as intellectual performance rather than a genuine attempt at constructive dialogue. There’s no value in it, and I have no interest in participating.

Yeah, okay, have fun with your feminism. Life's too short. Goodbye.

That's probably the best way to handle it. 🎉

it's 2026 we are all transformers

Lmao, true.

> think the NSA is gonna take notes on what they had for dinner last night so that it can reverse-engineer their private keys. You say that... but...

Also @ me next time XD

see, this kind of attitude is why my recommendation was to mute me. because you sure as fuck aren't going to get me to care about your opinion.

so what is this little screed if it's not muh women's on the internet issues? isn't that where this started from? isn't that what the op is about? and you don't want to engage with it? and you are going to follow this up, as you did, with claims that this was about someone else being a smart arse while you are twisting words pretending it's not about something specific to being a woman. you know, out here on the internet, 99% of "women" are african dudes looking to get money out of you, and here, on the other side, we got no money. lack of empathy is not a gender specific problem. but it seems to be popular on a lot of the internet for women to make out like it is.

@Анкап-тян (she is gifted writer and philosophist, also she speaks Russian), @Delilah FJ @ivy lumi (inspirational singer and poetessa) @Dreiberge @talia ✨ @Joy , maybe @Loraine and @Another 13 Moon Woman (these two I know less)

Melaleuca essential oil cleaned the fuck out of blackheads and acne in general out of my skin. And you have to use droplets at a time, mixed with soap or some generic cream because that shit is strong as fuck.

The problem with nostr is that it obliterates plausible deniability. A bad post from another social network can be screenshotted but you can always claim said screenshot was photoshopped or “AI did it”. Your notes in nostr get signed with your unique identity so anyone who preserves the note payload (or the raw json event as some clients put it) can prove any time in the future that you said what you did and there was no tampering with the evidence. That is a bigger guarantee than “oh here is the archive.org snapshot” because even those require that you trust an entity to be honest, meanwhile a nostr archive only requires that you trust… maths.

I think you misread what she said. She doesn’t seem to be looking for degeneracy, it looks like it was a critique about the lack of discovery mechanisms in nostr.

She attacked two of my frens over imagined misogynistic microaggressions, in defense of literal prostitutes. That's 3 strikes, she's out.

Was it elsewhere on the thread? I swear I can’t see the advocacy for the oldest profession on that note. But as for the other two, I have seen worse but yeah, that can be annoying. I personally find value keeping some Don Quixotes around me, even if they like to pick fights with windmills from time to time. Guess I just enjoy recreative argumentation 🤣

I asked @The Beave 1 question about discoverability: how is it that I struggle to find people interested in something as ordinary as sailing or bread baking, while others encounter a very specific category of sexually explicit content that isn't algorithmically promoted and is routinely muted or blocked. You responded by directing me to “18 relays full of smut you're looking for.” Since I was looking for sailing and baking, I asked whether labeling those as smut was a common Nostr practice or your personal misinterpretation. I might've understood why my question triggered you so much if the pictures of the “sexy parts du jour” happened to be predominantly taken aboard sailboats by women holding freshly baked focaccia. You've now publicly characterized my question about discoverability as an attempt to find smut and subsequently accused me of defending “literal prostitutes.” That's a pretty severe mischaracterization of what I actually said. You're entitled to disagree with the definition of misogyny, but you're not entitled to invent my intentions and present them as facts. And here's another possibility worth considering in a discussion about why women don't stay on Nostr: perhaps some leave because an ordinary question can become an exhausting exercise in defending themselves against accusations they never invited. And I’m out of what, exactly? lol

My general online experience is that women who are easily offended and who use feminist vocabulary are two cups short of a full set and it's best to put up a safety perimeter around them and send up some flares. I kept thinking, well, maybe this time it's different. Nope, it's never been different.

please, make love, not debates, nostr is such a cute and warm place (both of you)

An honour to be in this list amongst incredible humans! 🙏🏼

I see that you are using primal. So will answer directly. Nostr search takes a little to get used to and it's a bumpy ride. For primal you may like to input hashtags #sailing and #breadbaking in the advanced search and limit the global scope to your follows or network interactions to find some results. What is displayed there is not the entire network as it goes throught their cache server. So maybe try other nostr clients for ios like nostur or damus. There is content everywhere but the search is not very efficient. For sailing for example @hanon and @SailorsLog like to publish about that. @Corneelvm is a diver that posts about his experience and many more. For bread baking and any recipes you can use zap.cooking on web as the ios app is to come, searching for bread baking there brings you results as posts and recipes etc and if you login and follow an author there that stays followed in any other nostr app including primal and you can take on from there.