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2024-10-06 01:00:35Nostr, like many freedom technologies, is a gift often born out of need. It shapes solutions to protect and empower the individual. To become an early adopter, it often takes a mixture of a visionary builder to recognize the principles at its core and the nemesis it is trying to avoid. Knowing that, it is simple to embrace it early on, regardless of the bugs and issues. As time passes, the development reaches a point where it seeks to go up a level, especially when it comes to user experience, but the journey to increased adoption becomes unclear. Nostr's adoption is at such a place, with an is-it-the-chicken-or-the-egg problem. Insiders understand and value the principles behind its protocol. They want to welcome others by improving nostr features based on feedback. The outside, however, is not coming in to give it, at least based on real world nostr testing. To an outsider with a large audience in a platform, nostr needs to have their audience in order for them to consider moving here, but their audience is not going to move here before they do. The possibility is large that a good margin of their audience will stay back. They will also need to help their audience through the nostr adoption process. Hence, many don't make the move. We might feel like this loop is never ending. Time and time again, we hear that people do not care about decentralization and censorship resistance, at least until they're censored. It is the censored who are more likely to move here, but they also need education in the matter. If they do not understand why nostr is the stronger solution for what they need, then they may fall for something giving the illusion of being decentralized and censorship resistant, as has often happened. People have tried to escape to Bluesky or Mastodon, yet unknowingly walk into systems built with similar principles to those platforms who have failed to protect their voices. Outside of censorship, it is easy to blame the absence of increased adoption to a lack of features and people running into more bugs or issues compared to platforms. Nostr is not a grouping of copied features, it is a new paradigm, and that is always difficult to grasp. We all have our personal stories of how we got into freedom tech, as unique and varied as the stars in the sky. I am an artist/designer, growing up in a culture of believing you need to protect your work. I used to be concerned about copyright, watermarks, branding, and the possibility of someone "stealing" my work. I placed considerable effort on walling off and protecting something that should have been free. Now, I release my work into the public domain. The journey of arriving at today's mindset has been deeply personal. It did not sprout out of nowhere. It came with an understanding of the why behind freedom tech. If you were speaking to my earlier self, I wish you would be careful with how you took my feedback. We can recognize the needs and wants of possible nostr users, digging deeper into their whys, but we need to avoid recreating the past, as happened with the internet as it moved toward centralization. Right now, the focus may be in what is not working in comparison to platforms, yet we should also consider that the principles behind nostr make it not only resilient but allow us to reimagine how so much of the digital world works in ways that platforms cannot do. The same limitations platforms place on the individual, limit their own flexibility on what and how to build. One way to adoption is through people running into a pain point like censorship, another is to encounter something so interesting that the alternative falls short no matter how you see it. Today, it can feel confusing to learn of a universe of apps you can use, because we are getting to the point of uncharted user experience. Can you imagine a time when discovery of the nostr network is fun and simple to do? A platform does not concern itself on how to connect different apps built by independent development efforts. They are walled gardens and silos. A platform does not have to figure out how to share a myriad of choices and tools to its users, because they control what their users can use and see, making the choices for them. A platform does not build for its people with its people, it builds for its advertisers. Nature, like nostr, is not a silo. From small ecosystems to entire galaxies, everything is connected. Technology has managed to create artificial silos where control gets built in, but not control as individual choice, instead control of everyone who joins. The beauty of nostr is in shaping the opposite. It is a space where network effects, like in nature, reach you regardless of where you are on nostr. There is no single path, yet we all walk together. Nostr is unique in how it can build what is imagined. You cannot go to YouTube or Facebook and have developers consider shaping and reshaping their products for a different feature just from a random conversation with you. If it happens, it is an outlier, and you are unlikely to know the developers, designers, or contributors who made it happen. However, in my time here, nostr is a connected community, forging stronger bonds not only online but IRL. What gets talked about gets built, tested, reshaped. Independent projects can work with one another supporting both the protocol and their products. Everyone can unmarket their products and their nostr. I love the "unmarketing" term, coined by Vanessa, vrod@damus.io nostr:npub1h50pnxqw9jg7dhr906fvy4mze2yzawf895jhnc3p7qmljdugm6gsrurqev, because it encompasses the imagining beyond what we know. The marketing without the "un" may have had us advertising on Google or Facebook. If you find that silly, then you understand how that goes against many principles of nostr, from avoiding making people a product, to avoiding sharing nostr with people as an advertisement to an audience we don't know nor understand on a deeper human level. The pull to go back to what seems to work for platforms may be there, but the path of nostr comes from an organic movement where speed and popularity are not the goals. The goal comes from building something meaningful that cares about empowering and protecting the individual using nostr. The greatest nostr strength has always been its people. From the beginning, nostr has been a testing ground. We are getting deeper into the user experience. We may get impatient, hoping more people will come in, but this is the perfect time to imagine, build, and test. Instead of waiting for people to join and attempting to recreate the old in order to bring them in, we can choose to walk an unmarketing path, becoming both the ostrich and the egg. In a world that seems intent on removing those very qualities where nostr shines, we can walk forward, guided by the principles we value, to imagine and build the nostr we wish to inhabit. As we come to a point where we need to move forward on uncharted paths, perhaps the best remedy is an openness of ideas, issues, and efforts. You are welcome to join the experimental nostr community [freedomweaver.club](https://freedomweaver.club) built with ditto. It is a space to share what's happening in different areas of nostr for a more holistic perspective, hoping to step outside of the bubble of each independent development effort and into mutual collaboration across different spheres.