I agree. NOSTR right now is too boring for me to bother remaining active on any of the platforms built atop it. I do think that there are absolutely potential use cases which will potentially have a lot of adoption and actually see widespread use for something worth my time -- particularly when you can more easily onboard newbies and nocoiners into using something that's technically built using NOSTR but which they'd have no knowledge of it because it's flawlessly operating in the background and doesn't make them have to understand anything technical, doesn't make them set up an NIP-05 identity, doesn't make them set up a lightning wallet, etc.

All they should have to do is sign up using a username and password, tie it to their e-mail address (optional) and let them download a recovery file they can save locally or e-mail to themselves, etc. Then they should be able to load up their "account balance" with sats that could be purchased using a credit/debit card, apple pay, android pay, with a gift card, etc. As close to the experience of using a traditional web2 product as possible...make people comfortable with using something new and then once they are using it because they like the content that they are able to access on the platform, because there are cool people using it and the stuff that's being posted isn't just some dumb derivative bullshit of the things you can see elsewhere on social media (with less hassle, natch) then, that's when you should start to drip feed them information on what is actually happening behind the scenes and why it's important we have a decentralized alternative to the existing walled gardens of social media platforms operating at the behest of major multinational corporations.

I don't have much faith in the abilities or intelligence of the average person, sadly. If the average person I encounter here in the United States is supposedly someone with an IQ of roughly 95-98 (which, while not a perfect 1:1 comparison, is generally equivalent with being around 1 standard deviation below the level of intellect of most of my friends), that's already starting at quite a disadvantage. Then you have to factor in that is the average, with there being a sizable plurality of people who exist BELOW that level of intelligence.

So, that's just kind of an overly complicated way of saying that trying to bang on about the merits of decentralization or the brilliance of certain technologies we're using, is essentially an exercise in futility that will never really go anywhere. These people simply have no idea what the hell we're talking about, even if they wanted to care, which they don't. In fact, I'm oftentimes left wondering if in fact the kind of future that many of us pine for and hoped would come, is nothing but a pipe dream, and that the people who are already able to "get it" (i.e. those who actively engage in self-custodying their assets, using all of the stuff we use, etc.) are more or less doing so by now.

It's not like any of this is "new" anymore...if we want to push forward from here I think we are going to genuinely need some kind of groundbreaking platform that doesn't/can't exist in the form of the current corporate internet. I don't know what it is, but there's a reason why most of these "decentralized" alternatives to existing social media platforms fail, and never become anything more than a novelty. Because they suck, their UI tends to be fugly as hell, the user experience leaves much to be desired, and the only adoption they actually see is driven by people farming speculative shitcoin airdrops (in "web3") or are people who are already within our bubble similar to those of us here at SN.

Anyway, sorry for ranting, I'm just putting some thoughts out there, forgive me for this being a bit scatterbrained...long day.