User retention is garbage because the UX is fucking garbage. It doesn’t help that if you’re not into bitcoin you’re not going to have much to talk about with the native userbase.
User discovery is somehow even worse than fedi, too, lmao
Despite all that I’m actually more positive on nostr now than I was 6 months ago, it proved to be more than a flash in the pan, and its positive properties are pretty interesting. Logging into any (nostr) app, with wildly different uses, instantly, with the same identity feels pretty magical.
IMHO this would require a distributed content delivery system. A “video” would be a json manifest contain a list of content ids (sha256(content)) for different chunks of video data, possibly in multiple resolutions, and a list of recommended content delivery servers.
Content delivery servers would have a standard API to query download stats on content, to give people a fighting chance at estimating popularity of their content, and lightning integration to monetize downloading data, as well as upload and retaining it.
As I see it, content delivery servers would have a variety of policies and serve over HTTP/HTTPS (don’t really need https since the client can verify the data by its hash upon download), but typically they would charge something small to upload, and use a LRU system to evict content, except those that have been prepaid to be retained (to a certain number of downloads and/or expiration). Stale data may enter a state where interested users can still download for a fee, and those fees may drive servers to retain them longer.
As much as I’d hate to see ads creep in, content delivery servers could help people with no bitcoin view videos by serving ads before permitting clients to download non-ad chunks (clients could of course download and discard these ads, as adblockers essentially do on youtube today)
I’d also like to integrate webtorrent but that has some severe privacy compromises.
I guess conceptually these would be very much like relays, but for chunks of data identified by their contents. Nostr would point to these chunks of data by content id.
Servers should probably also facilitate discovery of other servers by region, for instance. Admittedly it’s not exactly in their interest to tell you about other servers (unless owned by the same entity), so it couldn’t be the only discovery mechanism.
Other nostr content besides just videos could be served this way of course.