Dr. Hax on Nostr: There's a lot of truth here. I've struggled to get people who were curious set up ...

There's a lot of truth here. I've struggled to get people who were curious set up with an on-chain wallet. I lost one person because they didn't want to put a PIN on their phone. Another didn't like all the screens explaining what everything was before they could use the app.

Regardless of what some people think of these are barriers, they are very real, and they DO limit adoption. Lightning is 10x more complicated.

So it does need to be easier, and they only thing that is really easy to use is a custodial solution (but those are vanishing rapidly due to KYC rules).

Even putting micropayments aside for a moment, nostr is absurdly complex as compared to what it was a year ago. It used to be you just opened a client and started posting. If you wanted to change the default list of relays, you could. Now clients want every user to manage half a dozen lists of relays and understand what each list means.

As for bitcoin content being in the way of adoption, I don't agree with that. I'd agree that if it is all memes about bitcoin, not many people will be interested who aren't already here.

I'm not sure what the way forward is. Some things that would help include:
- Easier discovery of content
- Being able to filter out posts in languages you can't read would be a nice start
- Clients being immediately usable. None of this high time preference requirement to learn details about the protocol, or having to configure a bunch of stuff
- Following hashtags is big, as is using them if you want to be seen. Clients could help with this by adding suggestions or reminders
- Relay operators can help fight spam
- Tools to deal with abuse should be better. The web of trust model could help here. There's a delegate balance between blocking spam/crap and being able to discover new content.
- Micropayments are not the only thing that distinguishes nostr from other protocols like Bluesky or ActivityPub, but I think it's an important one. Zeus is reasonably easy to use when using Olympus (their LSP). The integration between nostr clients and wallets is reasonable. I wouldn't call it "good", "great" or "fantastic".

I think the common theme here is easier to pick up and use without reading the manual.

The more difficult question is how do we get there? Traditional tech companies have VC money to pay for development, operations, and lawyers. When that runs out, they have money from selling everyone's information to the highest bidder (data brokers, advertising networks, corporations, etc.).

How do nostr developers pay for food, rent, utility bills, healthcare and the like. Donations from the users? Ha! And the idea that donations matching the salary they could earn by getting a "normal tech job" is even harder to imagine. So far it seems like the answer is to work for free and hope to win the lottery of OpenSats or similar. If they're rich and don't need a job, I guess that's cool as long as they never get bored of nostr.

How do relay operators do the same plus cover costs of operation? There may be some clever solutions here, such as users contributing things like bandwidth in addition to money. Something similar to bittorrent, perhaps.

Maybe clients could set up a default of splitting donations between developers and relay operators. Relay operators could then split income between infrastructure costs, developers, and moderators who fight spam. The incentives need to be there.