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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

I like the intent of these types of projects but a serious question I have is: How do you get the majority of people to switch to something like this?

There are many examples but the most recent ones that come to mind are people trying to get their friends to use Murmur/Mumble instead of Discord with basically near-zero success. I've seen this in a few gaming forums. Anyone attempting this is basically laughed off the platform with the responses like "All my friends are on Discord" and "Discord can do x,y,z can your app do that?"

So in practical terms how would one make such a platform widely adopted?

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> How do you get the majority of people to switch to something like this?

This is really the wrong focus.

Everyone should be focused on how to "mainstream" this in the minds of content creators, organizations, institutions, and media. The audience will find these subjects because they have a certain gravity to attract followers.

This is why, in my mind, if the federated open web wants to "succeed" (spoilers, it hasn't failed at all and it's a spectacularly organic ecosystem. Everyone's just using the wrong definition of success), it needs to start demanding for these mainstream content creators to publish to the open web by way of standardized protocols. Especially any groups that take public money or hold special permission to use public airwaves (licensing).

Focus on small communities, not lots of large communities.

I mean, that's valid as well. Each "influencer" or "big account" on existing services is in a way its own community.

chicken or the egg?

Why would a content creator, org, institution, and media use a new app with no users? All of the above publish to twitter because Twitter's "bizarre techniques to keep you addicted" and "doesn't show an actual historical feed from people you follow"

you know, there are a lot of interesting parallels with the early adoption of the internet.

I remember back in the 90s there was a time when no one had their own web site, but you couldn't listen to 15 minutes of news without someone telling you their AOL "keyword".

Things are very similar today, in a way.

Be the unreasonable minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

I don’t think the majority of people would be interested in a project like this.

> How do you get the majority of people to switch to something like this?

One way is to port over interesting content from existing platforms. They already have an RSS relayer here: https://github.com/fiatjaf/rsslay

Not saying that this is like a genius new idea, but I think they're aware of what people may want.

Being decentralized can't be the only reason (unless you're a part of a group actively being wiped from a centralized platform).

You need to do something better that makes people go "oh, this is neat". I had never heard of Murmur/mumble before, so I spent about 5 seconds checking it out. Nothing about the home page appealed to me... so I closed it.

Well, I feel like your example goes the other way. Discord does feel like it’s always been the default, but many of us old timers remember the days of 2015, when everyone was using Mumble and Teamspeak except a few people trying to push this Discord app that had just launched.

Takes time, a lot of marketing money, more time, more money. Look at what is happening with Telegram globally. It is used as a serious alternative to WhatsApp in some countries, but far from being a real global competitor still.

UI/UX also needs to be buttery smooth and non-technical, especially where setup/onboarding is concerned. The more you stray from that the more difficult it's going to be to bring in a significant population of users.

> So in practical terms how would one make such a platform widely adopted?

I’m not sure if can be…

- Developers working for free generally build things that they themselves want to use. If you look at HN’s opinions on eg Discord vs IRC (or Dropbox vs rsync+cronjob), you can see how the venn diagram of “nerd goals” (e2ee, distributed, federated) and “everybody else goals” (I want to communicate with my friends) is almost two separate circles.

- If you get paid by the users, nobody will use it (Remember app.net? Me neither)

- If you get paid by advertisers, you have the same economic incentives that created Facebook

Well, Twitter has been going into a series of serious banning recently. They even banned the president of the United States. All these banned people had to find homes in suboptimal platforms from which they can be banned again and so on. If that trend increases and Nostr can position itself as a viable alternative it might catch some chunks of mainstream.

But yeah, it's kinda hard. We must keep building though.

You don't get the majority to switch. You get small interesting niches.

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