NOSTR INVASION!

NOSTR floodstorm

I probably should have participated in this as I do have an NPUB floating around and I know how to use NOSTR (it's not particularly easy which is a huge problem for their UX). But alas I'm a bit of a Hive MAXI when it comes to decentralized social media. I mean sure if anyone anywhere on the planet made something that Hive doesn't do (or upgrades our mechanics) I would totally use it... but every single time I check out the "competition" it just falls flat on its face and I'm left wondering how we still have so little adoption.

It's baffling sometimes if I'm being honest... and that's not a delusional moonboy assessment... it's more like looking at all the facts and the utility and realizing that nobody in crypto is doing their homework anymore: instead opting to just throw their money at brand new shit and hoping it will x1000 so they can dump on the laggards. GREED!

So why did this happen?

It would be a very logical assumption to conclude that this push toward NOSTR is a direct result of the Telegram CEO getting arrested for simply providing a platform that allows encryption without a backdoor. All these Bitcoiners understand that their time on Twitter is very much borrowed time, and that their usage of WEB2 social media is blatantly hypocritical and unsustainable. The counterbalance of all this is that deep down they all know that NOSTR is a complete pile of hammered dogshit.

https://x.com/mononautical/status/1828433683465871540

https://x.com/HodlMagoo/status/1828431775841837401

It's essentially gotten to the point that some of them aren't trying to hide it anymore. They understand that the NOSTR UX is complete garbage, and some of them even realize (and ask valid questions) as to the ability for NOSTR to actually scale and get better. The short answer is that it can't because NOSTR has zero WEB3 incentives. That's what happens when you refuse to print currency to create the necessary inflation and positive feedback loops.

Starting with the answer first and working backwards.

This is how both the Lightning Network and NOSTR were born. They start off with the assumption that inflation is the literal devil and can never be justified under any circumstances (even though Bitcoin does indeed issue inflation). They think they can build cheap layer two protocols without creating a centralized WEB2 model that tracks data and issues ads. Clearly, they are delusional, but that is a whole other can of worms.

https://x.com/edict3d/status/1828478490326233545

Virtue Signaling hard

This puts Bitcoiners in an impossible paradoxical position. On the one hand they acknowledge that decentralized social media needs to exist, but on the other hand they refuse to use it because they know their version of it doesn't work. So what do they do? They pretend to use it, signaling to all the other Bitcoiners their intentions with no actual plan to back up their empty words. Sometimes it's hard to evaluate whether this is funny or sad. Maybe a bit of both.

The plot thickens?

Rumor has it that the Telegram CEO was arrested under what we might call absurd pretenses. It's now being reported that the literal president of France personally invited the dude to lunch... but arrested him instead. I seriously can not imagine being the leader of a country and doing something like this... under any circumstances. Does your reputation mean so little to you that you're willing to be a conniving little snake right out in the open for everyone to see? That's peak Clown World right there. Politicians don't even have to hide their corruption anymore. It's wild. Cue Nancy Pelosi continuing to insider trade the stock market publicly while no-one does anyone about it but make jokes. Insanity.

What would it take to get them to use Hive?

Well personally I believe that at least 50% of Bitcoin maximalists are so entrenched in their own delusion that even if we set up the perfect onboarding solution for them they would still automatically outright reject it due to generic basic-bitch "shitcoinery" narratives. Then again a lot of Bitcoiners are closeted alt-coiners, and it shows. These people pretend to own no alts and then get mad when their secret holdings lose value. It's honestly pretty comical to watch play out.

So what would it take?

Zero requirement to buy Hive.
A frontend that completely or partially eliminates Hive from being displayed.
The ability to easily and automatically transfer all rewards onto the LN.
A solid Bitcoin-only echo chamber for them to playpen.
The ability to easily setup encrypted messaging and public/private chatrooms.
The ability to post memes and shorts.
A good plan to bootstrap: small-scale to large-scale.
Consensus from the Hive community that this is actually something we want.

https://x.com/edict3d/status/1828411224628802042

As you can see... we already have most of these things.

The biggest variable being no requirement to buy Hive in order to use Hive. This is very easy to do on a small scale but very difficult to do on a larger scale. We all know how cheap and easy resource credits are to get at the moment. The real challenge is setting up an automated system that stops bad actors from creating a bot army with free resources. Then again Hive has so few users that onboarding thousands would be quite significant and that's not a number that actually requires full automation. WEB3 seems to be a game of quality over quantity. Users are worth more than WEB2; a lot more.

Remove Hive from the Frontend.

Or more specifically: show the rewards in terms of SATS. Bitcoiners love that shit. If we show that people are earning 10x the SATS on Hive vs NOSTR even in this crippling market that's a pretty impressive feat. Again, this is something we already have... as most rewards are usually displayed in HBD/USD. A transition to sats is trivial, and the rewards on Hive are way higher than literally every other option by exponential margins... which is pretty sad when you think about it.

V4V / LEO / VSC

The ability to easily and automatically transfer all rewards onto the LN.

Ideally this would be a one click solution. There are several ways to exit from Hive to BTC, including the LEO backdoor into MAYA L1 and HiveEngine pegged SWAP-BTC. Of course HE and LEO are not viable options for small amounts because of wrapping fees and on-chain BTC fees. In fact even the wrapping fee would be enough to deter a maximalist from using it simply out of principal. In addition, VSC is currently still vapor and doesn't even exist yet... so that's out for the time being as well.

However this still leaves @brianoflondon and the @v4vapp connection to the Lightning Network, which is clearly the best solution for a clean exit in this particular case for the small amounts being considered. All that would be left to streamline something like this is a one click solution that automatically sends rewards to @v4vapp to be transferred to a LN wallet. This one-click solution should also start a powerdown if one is not already going.

In this same vein these people aren't going to want to buy Hive or anything else to power up and cast upvotes. There would obviously need to be a way to link LN wallets to Hive accounts and have a one-click solution that allows direct tipping on the LN. Again, this would probably be very easy to accomplish with current infrastructure in place.

A solid Bitcoin-only echo-chamber.

This would be best accomplished with a brand new frontend or, with a lot less work involved, getting @khaleelkazi on board to create these structures on https://inleo.io. You can't just plop this type of person in a sea of shitcoinery. There needs to be some kind of shield up that limits that exposure (possibly in both directions but maybe only unidirectional). That's not what they're here for. They're here to be delusional incels: let them. The customer is always right.

SCALING

Getting a network effect going is singlehandedly the biggest challenge of any social media platform. A platform isn't good until it has a lot of people... but a platform can't get a lot of people until it's good. This creates a chicken and egg scenario that is exceedingly difficult to navigate. It's like needing 10 years experience right out of college to get a job. Fake it till you make it, amirite?

The three biggest factors that I imagine would make Bitcoiners take us seriously are the zero initial investments tied in with a nice echo-chamber playground and encrypted direct-messaging/groupchat. A direct message only requires two people which limits the need for a network effect. As long as those two people have this type of access they can continue communicating via encrypted channels.

Taking this one step further... we could easily set up these lines of communication using either the MEMO key of the Hive account... or, even better, the Lightning Network wallet public key that's connected to the Hive account. A maximalist would love to be able to send encrypted DMs to other users on LN, and the ability for Hive to link up a readable username with a LN wallet is a feature completely within our wheelhouse.

Tricking Maximalists into using this system.

Let's be honest. Maximalists are stupid. They aren't hard to trick. It would not be hard to prototype something like this... snipe usernames on Hive that are similar or exactly the same as their Twitter handles, and then make them think they're using a Bitcoin-only platform. Think about it... how would they even know? The frontend wouldn't be showing them any of the stuff happening on the backend. In fact the messaging system could be running on a completely centralized node or even truly peer-to-peer (more work but still doable).

Unfortunately at the end of the day what I really think everyone wants on a social media is a truly good algorithm and curation system that finds the content that specific users want to see and curates it for them automatically. This is the end game that is difficult to achieve, as algorithms such as these require a lot of work and tinkering to get right. Hive still doesn't have a good way of doing this. Elon Musk said he was going to open-source his and he didn't. Why is that? Because then bots could easily game it by knowing all the rules. It's a difficult dance between fairness and privacy that is not easily achieved.

Do we actually want something like this?

Also a very valid question. Why would we go through all that trouble targeting a group that we know has a very high chance of cashing out everything to BTC the second they get the opportunity? It brings into question just how much value this content has in the first place. Are we overpaying our users for their content in the hopes that we make up for those losses elsewhere? Loss-leading is a dangerous proposition that must be considered carefully. Or perhaps in the long run the content we create does match the value it's being paid. These things are very hard to guess and even harder to measure with any certainty. It's all speculation.

Conclusion

Decentralized social media has fully invaded the zeitgeist of crypto... but no one has quite figured it out yet. Everyone knows we need it but nobody can agree on how it should be done. This lack of consensus results in absolute garbage pump/dumb shitcoinery, and on the other side of the coin NOSTR which is completely centralized, slow, and non-scalable.

The solutions to these issues is painfully non-trivial. Otherwise Hive would have made it to the Big Leagues already. Simple and elegant solutions are hard, but I think that's what we need to shoot for. The best frontends will be the ones where new users have no idea what's going on in the background. It is known.