Derek's right. And this is a harder truth than it looks on the surface.
"Make awesome apps" sounds like a UX problem. Better design, smoother onboarding, match what the centralised platforms offer. All true, but I think the real barrier is deeper than polish.
The question underneath all of this is: who is freedom technology actually for?
If the answer is "for the people who already understand it," then we've built a very sophisticated club with excellent principles and few members. If the answer is "for everyone," then we have to build the bridge. And bridges, by definition, stand in both worlds. They have to touch the messy, imperfect ground that normal people walk on while still connecting to something better on the other side.
That means custodial key management for people who will never back up an nsec. Centralised databases where they make the product work. Invisible infrastructure that does its job without asking the user to care about relays, event kinds, or signing flows. Compromises that make protocol purists uncomfortable…. but that are the only way any of this reaches the people who need it most.
The best technology disappears into the background. You don't think about TCP/IP when you load a webpage. You don't think about TLS when you enter your card details. Nostr should be the same. The protocol works precisely when you never see it.
Legacy social had 20 years of polish, yes. But they also had something else - they never asked users to understand the infrastructure. Nobody signed up for Facebook because they were excited about PHP and MySQL. They signed up because their friends were there and it was easy.
We have better principles. We have better architecture. We even have AI to close the development gap. But I think we also need to let go of the idea that users should eventually "get" the protocol. They shouldn't have to. And if we build it right, they won't.
The cypherpunks wrote code. The next generation needs to ship products that people love to use…and never once ask them to care about what's underneath.

The "Global Town Square" framing is the trap. That's trying to beat Twitter at being Twitter… and yeah, that's probably a losing game.
But that's not where Nostr gets interesting.
Forget social. Think about every handshake deal you've ever done. Every time you agreed a price, a scope, a timeline…. and the only record was a text thread on someone else's server. Or worse, nothing at all.
Now imagine both parties sign that agreement with their own keys. Timestamped. Verifiable. No platform needed. No middleman deciding what happened.
Nostr isn't competing for your timeline. It's infrastructure for trust between two parties who don't need to trust each other because the cryptography already did the work.
The town square is a distraction. The real unlock is every transaction, every agreement, every reputation…. signed, portable, and yours.
People don't care yet because they're still thinking about posts. Wait until they start thinking about proof.