For a number of years I was a forum moderator for a game forum called Uru Obsession. Eventually that wound down and the forum closed, meaning all those discussions have also been lost (unless someone backed them up - by the time they closed I had moved on, so I dunno), and that community as far as I know has mostly dissolved since its closure.
A gossip protocol means there is no host - clients communicate directly with each other and also store the conversation locally so someone else deciding to stop paying hosting costs becomes a non-issue.
I've seen a lot of people leave Facebook over the last couple of years. And I mean a lot. Oh, they might still log in every month or two to see what's up with friend and family, but daily use? Nope.
>Nostr is a protocol, designed for simplicity, that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network.
So they basically want to create twitter without Musk (or anyone in charge for that matter). Nothing wrong with that goal, it's just highly unlikely to succeed given the fundamental shortcomings of this approach.
I think people just need to be lead to greener pastures. Right now the alpha geeks aren't cooler & better, don't have great & obvious advantages for being out on the frontier trying cool shit. The Tim O'Reilly "Follow The Alpha Geeks" advice is rarely wrong, in my view, for the alpha geeks mostly want to expand capabilities & power & enable, in ways most consumer efforts are too bounded & limited to go for, but we keep forgetting this wisdom's words anyways.
Once the alpha geeks are unqualifiedly better than the mundane normy-nets, the tables will start to turn. I think the geeks are doing the good work, are putting in the right effort.
Dogfood your way to success. Do what empassions & excites you. Don't worry about l-users. Focus on being really good & powerful. You'll be out competed if you do what sigmoid10 says & compete to be the lowest common denominator of social networking, and your product will suck as bad as everything else we have.
Truly good works market themselves. Places where genuine authentic people (and creative fun bots) mix & share themselves in are what we are searching for, is the authenticity that the engagement-loop corporate networks break & burry. There's different races here. I do think the broader we are searching for better more open pattern en mass to replace the walled garden networks (a challenge many distributeers reject), but the path to victory is assymetric competition, is tapping into different sources of value & raising it up in different ways.
Do you believe in humanity? Or do you think synthetic gloss shit forever & ever will always win?