Yeah, it takes people to get good content worth paying attention to but if everyone says "it's dead" then it will remain dead. But if people voted with attention and said "yeah, it's kind of dead, but if I hang out here and my friends join, then it will be less dead and people will notice and also join..." You basically create the future you want.
Nostr actually has web of trust (WoT) implementations. I think Coracle has this and some others. Nostur even lets you specify how far you want your web of trust to reach. Pretty cool stuff!
Network effects are difficult to replicate. You need lots of users to get a few solid consistent "content" creators. You need even more users to get the content that YOU like. So, it just amounts to having more users. Some might say it's impossible to replicate some existing social platform like X, and that may be true - but at the end of the day, you can vote with your attention and can contribute in ways you would like your space to be, so if you like say... log cabin content, then you can create it yourself and start amassing a log cabin enthusiast audience who will then start sharing their passion for log cabins.
Looks super interesting. I am waiting for the App Store release since TestFlight is full. I like the idea of not requiring a phone number - the only thing makes Signal lose some points in my eyes... well, I guess if the company goes down that might be another reason for open protocols over apps.
There are a few ways to find my content.
1. Follow me
2. Find my note in a hashtag / interest-based relay or in global chat (global will probably not remain for long as the network grows and it gets too noisy / spammy). You'll have interest based relays / tags, however that gets structured. Right now there are no interest-based relays that I know of (yet).
3. Via a boost (equiv. to retweet).
4. Via some sort of ranker. Some clients rank posts by activity.
In general, you have to follow people to discover content you want to see, but it's not a requirement (as outlined above). I definitely think the Nostr experience for people improves dramatically as they follow a few folks.