• Dead again
• What the relays actually see
• The exoduses that actually happened
• Where the quiet growth is
• What is honestly not working
• Small is not the same as dying

§Dead again

Aleksandar Svetski, one of #nostr’s loudest advocates, posted something in 2025 that made the true believers uncomfortable. The network effect, he said, is going to take way longer than anticipated. Unlike Bitcoin, winning is not inevitable.

That post got signal-boosted by people who had been saying the same thing for two years. Nostr is dead. Everyone left for Bluesky. The protocol is a ghost town. You hear some version of this every few months, usually right after a wave of users leaves X for somewhere shinier.

I’ve been posting on Nostr long enough to have seen this cycle three or four times. The obituaries follow a pattern: someone checks the daily active user count, compares it to Bluesky’s latest sign-up number, and writes the eulogy. The numbers they cite are real. The conclusion they draw from them is wrong.

§What the relays actually see

Here is what the data looks like if you bother to check it.

Daily active users on #nostr have hovered around 17,000 for over a year. That number is flat. It is not growing in a way that would impress anyone who measures success by Instagram metrics. There are roughly a million pubkeys with profiles and contact lists, but most of those are dormant.

That is the bad news, and I am not going to spin it. Seventeen thousand daily users is small.

But the activity numbers tell a different story. Text note events went from about 18 million in 2023 to over 304 million by mid-2024. That is a 1,600% increase in a year. Long-form content, the kind published as NIP-23 articles like this one, is up 800%. Zap transactions passed 5 million in May 2025, with an 82% increase in profiles carrying Lightning addresses.

The user count is flat. The usage per user is exploding. Those are two different things, and most people writing Nostr obituaries only look at the first one.

Relay counts have drifted downward, from around 900 online in 2023 to roughly 660 by mid-2024 and about 470 public relays now. That sounds alarming until you realize the relays that shut down were mostly hobbyist boxes running on enthusiasm. The ones that survived are better provisioned and more specialized. Fewer relays, but the network is more stable than it was two years ago.

§The exoduses that actually happened

Every time there is a crisis on X, millions of people sign up for something else. Let me tell you how those exoduses went.

Bluesky grew from 3 million users to over 40 million between late 2024 and late 2025, mostly on the back of the US election and general X fatigue. Forty million accounts is a real number. But by October 2025, daily active users had dropped 40% year over year. The platform had 3.5 million daily actives out of 40 million registered accounts. That is an 11% engagement rate. Most of those sign-ups were people who created an account, looked around, and left.

Mastodon’s story is worse. Monthly active users peaked at 2.6 million in November 2022, right after the Twitter acquisition. By 2025, that number was under 700,000. Still higher than before the migration, but a 73% decline from peak. The surge created accounts, not a community.

This is what mass exoduses actually produce. Sign-ups. Not sustained activity. Not engagement. Not the slow, boring kind of growth that turns a protocol into infrastructure.

#nostr never had the sign-up spike. It also never had the abandonment cliff. The people who are here tend to stay, and they tend to do more over time. Whether that is better depends entirely on what you think success looks like.

§Where the quiet growth is

If you only look at user counts, you miss where Nostr is actually changing.

Zaps turned #bitcoin micropayments from a theoretical concept into something people do without thinking. Cashu ecash mints are live on the network, with NIP-61 nutzaps letting people send private payments that settle instantly. npub.cash gives you a privacy-preserving Lightning address without signing up for anything.

Data Vending Machines, the NIP-90 spec, turned Nostr into a marketplace for compute. You can pay sats to get AI transcriptions, content recommendations, or image generation from service providers you discover through the protocol itself. Routstr runs an entire AI API marketplace on Nostr relays with Cashu tokens as the payment layer. No accounts, no API keys, no sign-up forms.

Zapstore distributes apps through Nostr identities. Shopstr and Plebeian Market run peer-to-peer commerce. These are not theoretical. They are running on mainnet, processing real transactions.

None of this shows up in a daily active user count. All of it shows up in what the protocol can do that it could not do two years ago.

§What is honestly not working

I said this is not a cheerleading post, so here is the other side.

DMs are still a mess. NIP-04 was deprecated because it leaked metadata, but NIP-17 adoption has been slow. Some clients support it, some do not, and the transition period means your messages might just not arrive depending on what app the other person uses. The HRF is running bounties for encrypted group chat because that problem is not close to solved.

Relay economics do not work. Ninety-five percent of relays cannot cover their costs. Sixty-four percent receive zero zaps. The free relay model is not sustainable, paid relays create friction, and nobody has found the middle ground yet.

Spam is unsolved. Without a central authority to moderate, the protocol relies on web-of-trust filtering and client-side blocking. It works for now because the network is small. It will not scale gracefully.

And the cold start problem is real. Creators go where audiences are. Audiences go where creators are. Nostr’s pitch of censorship resistance appeals to a specific audience, and that audience has a ceiling.

Svetski was right about the network effect. It is not inevitable.

§Small is not the same as dying

So is Nostr dead? No. Is it winning? Also no.

What it is doing is getting deeper. The user count is flat and might stay flat for a while. But the protocol is accumulating capabilities that did not exist two years ago: native payments, private ecash, decentralized compute markets, app distribution outside the App Store.

If you think Nostr is supposed to replace Twitter, it is failing. Forty million people signed up for Bluesky and most of them left, but at least they signed up. Nostr never even got the sign-up wave.

If you think Nostr is supposed to be infrastructure for how value and identity work on the internet, the trend lines look different. The people building on it are not trying to win a popularity contest. They are wiring up payments, identity, and coordination that work without asking anyone for permission.

The mass exodus from X keeps happening. It just keeps not landing on Nostr. And the people who are already here keep building anyway. That might be the most honest thing you can say about where this protocol stands.

#nostr #decentralization #bitcoin