Dawn on Nostr: A system like this would not replace closed communities or an open ecosystem. It ...

A system like this would not replace closed communities or an open ecosystem. It would be more of a middle-ground between the two. It would offer a fix for most of the issues that real users have with other social networks, like getting suspended for stupid stuff and being overwhelmed with content they don't want to see. The latter problem is one Nostr clients in general also struggle with, but worse than closed platforms, because everything is so wide open. A user's ability to manage their experience has to be learned over time.

Retention partially fails because there is no authority to say "this is the UX we want you to have and we will control everything to make sure you have it." The result has been users that want to like using Nostr but end up leaving because the friction of finding their perfect UX is of a defensive nature. The alternative is having clients who dictate the whole UX, silo'ing people not much differently than FB & X, which are easy to use, but hard to change.

Semi-closed, user-lead, environments could provide places to learn, content that matches users' tastes, and real-world utility. Users could be proactive in growing their personal UX rather than being defensive about it, while also not being trapped in any single environment. They could still leave the community completely and use the same client, or they can use different clients to access the community. Conscientious community leaders will know what their users want and need more than any app developer ever could, so if they want their thing to work, they will put in the effort to make sure other clients that cater to specific needs are available or at least known.

Some mirco-networks would be really strict about what they include, sure, but they should be free to create that if they want. Like a church would want to do. Others such as hobby clubs, friend groups, small towns, or whatever could be relatively lax, and all those things can start overlapping at their edges. Nothing would diminish the user's ability to expand and contract their own environment and home feeds.

It decentralizes the burden of onboarding and lands users into places they might actually want to be in, too. Many hands make light work, as the saying goes.

I'm not saying this is the only way forward, but it's almost completely unexplored thus far, and trying the same things over and over with slightly different twists hasn't exactly worked out real well for retention.

quoting
nevent1q…dh0n

Maybe the way Nostr can get more people is by making it a good choice for semi-closed hyperlocal mini-social-networks, like a low-effort impromptu social network for a neighborhood, a church, a school, a company, I don't know.

People could join this just because they have to if they want to get news about their community and stuff like that. They won't regard it as a global social network, they will keep using X, Instagram etc, this will just be an annoying app they're forced to use.

How to make it work:

Some conscientious member of such community would set things up, spin up a #pyramid relay or something like that that would provide an exclusive space for this community. Then he would use a client that supported such mode of operation to send invites to other members.

Upon receiving the invite (the invite can just be specific for that client, no need for a standard here) new users would have an account created for them and be thrown into a prepared environment in which the only feed would be that relay's feed, search would be scoped to that relay, replies and mentions would only be sourced from that relay. There will be no spam, no Bitcoin, no bots.

Luckily it's easy to turn an existing kind 1 client into a client that supports this mode of operation (some are already almost there), so if you're a developer reading this here are some ideas to consider implementing:

- making relay usage highly configurable (allow users to be set up to only read mentions from their "read" relays ever, only publish to "write", only search for specially designated "search" relays etc -- this could be optional);
- supporting relay feeds alongside the classic "following" feed;
- hiding the "following" feed entirely if the user doesn't follow anyone (or having an option to hide that regardless);
- maybe allowing other customizations, like changing the UI colors and whatnot;
- supporting an invite flow that allows some community leader to prepare the invites and then sets up all of this stuff automatically for people who get the invite.