[treyd]

> Isn’t this just an implementation/UX issue?

Yes, but it's a fundamentally unsolvable one due to how the ecosystem has chosen to settle on it. Even blockchain wallets are experimenting with social recovery and hijacking SSO systems because traditional key management is too hard for the average user to do correctly. Users barely want to do key management for that! Much less to look at cat pictures.

> I agree that it’s not perfect, the tradeoffs make it harder to reconstruct a full history for a given identity if you’re trying to reach way back in time.

This is just not how users expect systems like this to operate. If it was purely a low-level async messaging protocol (where retention matters less) that'd be more okay, but it's trying to be used as a general purpose social platform.

And this is why I've concluded that the Nostr ecosystem is just deeply unserious about its philosophy of design and it's fundamental architectural flaws. It's super common to see responses that have the form of "here's why it's actually good that this sucks". I thought it was clever when I first discovered it, but it seems like they're very happy to be stuck with half-broken functionality because it feels fun and janky like IRC and they're all used to the bitcoin ecosystem where they can just blame the user for messing up.

[iamnothere]

It may be that Nostr just isn’t for you. The tradeoffs involved come with costs and benefits, and that mix tends to appeal to two primary groups right now, crypto people and free speech maximalists. (And also quite a few Japanese people, for some reason.) Similarly, the Fediverse has its own limitations and tradeoffs, which appeal to a different set of groups. Both have a healthy number of users and seem to be developing well.

I think that this kind of fragmentation is becoming more common. Not everyone wants to be on a platform with the rest of humanity anymore. And not everyone shares the same design goals for protocols to replace those platforms.