Does Nostr need a marketing team?

Open-source projects are hard to instigate. They suffer from a form of the “tragedy of the commons” problem. Instead of destroying a limited, shared resource from over-use, open source projects create abundance. But no one is really on the hook to build, support, and promote these projects to support and expand that abundance. As long as someone does the work everyone gets to benefit from it. This goes for the development work, obviously, but also every other kind of work to contribute to an open source project’s success (marketing, user support, etc.).

Nostr reminds me of Linux in the 1990s. It’s foundational, ideological, and open. It’s a push back against that corporate overload everyone knows so well that you don’t even have to name it. But for Nostr we might not know its best use-cases yet. At the time I installed Linux on my computer in my dorm room, most people, including me, saw it as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows desktop client operating system. But the turbo-charger was when people started using Linux as a server technology. Similarly, today a lot of people think of Nostr as a social media protocol. And it’s good at that, but the magic that could really turbo-charge utility for a wide variety of people may still be out there yet to be invented (for example, look at how people are exploring Nostr as a way to coordinate ecash mints or connect ideas across long-form writing). And when that gets invented it wouldn’t surprise me if the social media use-case gets lifted in the updraft. This is why I find Nostr exciting. It’s brimming with unknown possibilities.

[FWIW, Linux did finally become a major client-side operating system years later in the form of Android on mobile devices, but the path looks very little like a direct replacement for Windows.]

But for now Nostr’s primary use-case and build-out has mostly been around censorship resistant social media. And it’s a good use-case to keep pushing so that Nostr can survive and thrive long enough that even more turbo-charged use-cases have a chance to arrive. So I do think we would benefit from more marketing.

I see 3 main ways to contribute to marketing in Nostr:

1. Create and support homegrown creators

2. Simplify consumption with discovery algorithms

3. Build bridges to the outside

More detail on each:

1. Create and support homegrown creators

   There’s a common refrain among nostriches today that goes something like this: “once the creators show up, then everything will be great…”. I don’t believe existing mainstream creators will just show up until they believe that Nostr provides at least similar opportunity for them as traditional platforms do. If you’ve heard of a given creator they’re usually already successful as creators in the old world. Traditionally creators care about 2 things: 1) growth of audience and 2) monetization. We may need to support a new kind of creator who is initially more interested in the ideology of censorship resistant publishing, has views that are not supported by the mainstream, or someone who just wants the adventure of being a homesteader in a frontier land. They may be more open to trying a new approach — publishing in a place that is uncrowded and niche even if it doesn’t provide amazing growth and monetization opportunities yet. It’s an investment in the future. Being early before the masses arrive will prove to be a gift to your future self.

   Rabble has done a great job instigating this kind of thing with the Nos Social Journalism Accelerator, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are existing writers who care about freedom and alternatives to mainstream journalism, but they might not have clarity on why Nostr could be a good option — most of them are finding a “good-enough” home on Substack today. Meeting them and sharing the Nostr story may help. In fact, if you’re this type of person, reach out to me (on Nostr, Twitter, etc.) and I’d be happy to help you learn more about how it might help you.

   All of this home-grown niche content becomes marketing for the protocol. Want to hear about topic A? When it happens first on Nostr, come join the conversation about it.

2. Simplify consumption with discovery algorithms

   Algorithms get a bad rap. We’ve only ever seen corporate controlled algorithms so it’s hard to know how transparent, open, switchable algorithms may feel. But if you help consumers have a better experience finding the good stuff on Nostr easily then you help neo-creators get more excited about creating more on Nostr. It’s a virtuous cycle. And these consumers will talk about and share what they’re finding here.

   An algorithm is not some sort of magical mind control wizardry. It’s just a process that a computer uses to optimize toward a goal. We’ve seen what algorithms look like where the goal is to serve a centralized corporation which needs more ad impressions to sell. We haven’t seen what algorithms in media look like when they optimize for an end-user’s goals. How different might that be? I want a Nostr that can help me direct my attention toward the notes I might find most interesting. But if it’s behaving badly (in my judgment alone!) I should be able to read and modify the code running the algorithm or simply plug in another algorithm that I think may serve my needs better.

   Some nostriches say “oh, you’ve gotta do the work to find the good stuff — come, on — proof-of-work!”. Well, that’s fine when it’s small, but it does exclude a more casual consumer who might be good audience members for the new creators we want to nurture. Imagine there are 1 billion notes published on nostr some day. Do you still think there’s a way a person can sift through 1 billion notes to find the good stuff? No way. There’s not enough time in a day. We need algorithms to help serve our individual goals — not some centralized corporate goals.

   And algorithms can help surface creators who are doing their own proof-of-work. i.e. investing their time and energy in creating, scripting, writing, recording, editing, and publishing new ideas. Time-ordered delivery of notes to a consumer means that when a creator invests hours in creating something great it has just as good a chance of being seen by someone as a note I dashed off in 10 seconds. It seems like an obvious imbalance and a problem to solve.

   It’s a two sided marketplace of creation and consumption. Let’s harness the power of computers to serve the success of the protocol while ensuring no single actor gets to dominate the algorithm game. The best marketing here is to make the protocol easy to use and easy to find all the good stuff. It makes people talk about it.

   Primal pokes the tip of this iceberg with “Trending 24h” and “Most-zapped 24h” algorithmic feed options, but there’s a vast depth under-explored here. Amethystdemonstrates how DVMs can be used to surface notes algorithmically. Also, ideally this can all remain open and standardized so such algorithms can easily be used across all clients. Noogle.lol shows a promising direction for how this might work.

3. Build bridges to the outside

   Creating in a nostr-only way can be great. It helps nostr by being the only place for audiences to go to get certain good information. But we would benefit from more bridges to the outside, too. This could include technical bridges like what Alex Gleason did to connect ActivityPub and Nostr. But it could also be content bridges.

   For my part I’ve invited non-Nostr-pilled people to be guests on my Nostr-themed podcast. I could do more here and am considering a sort of reboot to focus more on helping in this way. Instead of telling successful creators to come to Nostr we should “be the change we want to see” and invite creators as our guests to create with us. Psst: there’s a cross-pollination of audiences when they show up. Some may find they like it and stick around!

If we push on creating along these three lines the marketing sort of happens as a side-effect. It’s a lot more work than just “build it and they will come”. But it’s not “traditional online marketing” activities. We need to tell great stories and make it easy to find and share while connecting nostr to the world. The best marketing is really just focusing on the process of creating and sharing.