We’re agreeing on more than it sounds like.

From the perspective of a one-week-old normie, the first friction happens before Nostr itself. The rest of the internet makes nostr sound much more technical than it actually is. Getting Primal and generating keys is absurdly easy.

But once you’re in, that’s where the learning curve starts. I agree that if you want more of what you’re interested in, you have to actively seek it out instead of just doomscrolling whatever an algorithm hands you. I actually like that. But you still have to know how to seek it out. That is friction too. I have you (!) Other newbie normies don’t.

And sweetie you literally disagreed with me that someone might decide a particular learning curve is unnecessarily annoying and leave, then a paragraph later said you refuse to file formal GitHub bug reports because they’re annoying and simply stop using the thing instead. That’s exactly my point. Choosing not to spend your time overcoming a particular annoyance is not the same as being incapable of overcoming difficulty.

At this point I don’t really question whether Nostr can add value to my life. I’m pretty convinced it can. I’m still trying to figure out how to access more of that value without accidentally spending three years learning where all the doors are.

I think you’re implying that complexity somehow protects Nostr’s good qualities, and that’s where I disagree with you.

Why would flattening the learning curve require destroying what makes Nostr unique, flexible or powerful? You’re treating technical power and user-facing complexity as though they’re the same thing. They don’t have to be. You can have an extraordinarily sophisticated system underneath and an interface that exposes almost none of that sophistication unless or until the user wants it. That’s basically the history of consumer computing.

And I’m not convinced that people willing to tolerate a steep learning curve are necessarily more capable. They may simply be unusually motivated to tolerate this particular learning curve. A brilliant novelist, surgeon, architect, entrepreneur, physicist, chef or filmmaker might encounter Nostr, decide it’s unnecessarily annoying, and leave. Their unwillingness to learn relay management tells us approximately nothing about their intelligence or what they might have contributed.

How much of Nostr’s complexity actually needs to be visible to the person using it?

Also, let me make sure I understood the other part correctly. You’re saying getting through the door is easy, but what happens once you’re inside has been debated for years and nobody has really solved it yet.

So you guys built this extraordinary building, opened the front door, and have spent the last few years standing in the hallway arguing about the floor plan?

But isn’t the self-selection you’re describing partly a consequence of the current friction? If you removed some of that friction, wouldn’t you simply find out whether there are more competent and curious people out there who never made it through the door?

Maybe we need a new app built on Nostr with admissions. You can’t just join. A randomly selected jury of existing users reviews your application. You have to demonstrate curiosity, basic competence, and an ability to contribute to the community.

We can be the first to bring bureaucracy to a permissionless protocol.

A social network specifically designed not to achieve mass adoption. lol

Then maybe the problem isn’t Nostr. Maybe the answer is simply a better client.

I write dozens of handwritten cards to my customers every week, and I know the difference between a protocol and a platform 😎 Normies contain multitudes.

If there isn’t enough material aimed specifically at ordinary users, then developer-facing explanations inevitably become the public explanation by default. And to a normie looking in from the outside, they make the barrier to entry look considerably higher than it actually is.

Do you grow them?

You’re thinking of the wrong normies! But I do agree that normies don’t need to know how Nostr works, just as normies don’t know a thing about Instagram’s backend. I’d known about Nostr for about 1.5 years before I finally gave it a try. Every time I heard non-normies explain it on YouTube, I thought I’d need to understand public-key cryptography, relay architecture, NIPs, key custody, and preferably have a PhD from Harvard in applied cryptography. It genuinely took less time and was easier to get started on Nostr than it was to register for Substack, which I did at the same time.

Well you see I’m not the only one taking pictures of the sky!

Being the new kid in town has historically gotten me bullied, not welcomed. Add “censorship-resistant” and I fully expected at least a few people to tell me to go back where I came from. Instead, everyone has been remarkably nice. That’s the part that surprises me the most.

As for how I ended up here, I promised 3 separate people I’d make a deliberate effort to start interacting with the world again. I considered my options and somehow Nostr seemed like the least noisy place to do it. So here I am.