We have actually had that happen, repeatedly. Whether it was them being too slow to moderate malicious spam on their relay, the website going down, the relay going down...
Always resulted in a mass-exodus of people who couldn't figure out how to adjust by moving to other clients and relays.
The users with the most staying power seems to be my "generation", which arrived after the initial building phase and before Primal, so that we tried out different clients and figured out what relays and NIPs are, and stuff. It was a steep learning curve, but we're much more resilient.
It felt like learning how e-mail or SMS or telephones worked, before everyone used WhatsApp. The Primal onboarders are clueless and helpless, like the WhatsApp onboarders. If Primal goes down, they think Nostr is down. If WhatsApp goes down, they think all mobile communication is dead.
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It was really palpable. Everything would be hopping, for days or weeks, then suddenly the thread counts would drop like a rock and it'd get eerily silent.
Where is everybody?
Primal's down.
Oh.
I think there is this assumption that 'good UX' and 'good onboarding' actually means preventing new users from learning anything, for that only implies confusion and friction.
This notion IS true, but only for the idiot masses. And however much we want it to be the case, those will not get onto Nostr anytime soon. There are many many many many maaaaaany millions of non idiots that are more than capable and willing to do the basic learning. Those people are far more likely to get onto Nostr. I like to look at the population numbers of the Roman republic to conclude you don't need that many people to be meaningfull.
Subsequently, once all of those people are on Nostr, and the idiots come, those idiots can ask their nephew for help when things go wrong.
I.e. get the nephews first. "Mass addoption" is putting the cart before the horse.
