No, I’m taking the data as it exists on the API …

We can see a globally slowly downward trend, probably not good but I’m definitely not equipped to analyze that

Then again if it’s some guy in his corner doing stuff on his own, is it really a community ?

Neither nostr nor simplex make “community building” a thing. The most important defining point is the ability to have communal intermediaries. All protocols can do a forwarding bot, starting with the good old mailing-list, but anything more complicated than that is rare. In nostr that would be running a full relay (which is just out of the question if you’re not technical). Simplex isn’t much better. Both are built for individualistic purposes, so it’s not really surprising.

ActivityPub isn’t perfect but it has Groups, with some people working on making them controllable. XMPP has highly configurable pubsub. Those are proper foundations for billions of people building billions of communities

I’ve been thinking about that a lot and plan to build something I’m more interested in:

• powerless instances where all you can do is create accounts and store stuff to be served but every logic and integrity is done by clients
• anonymous account creation so that everyone can participate -> freedom of speech …
• follow-based interaction: if I don’t follow you, you cannot send me anything -> … not freedom of reach
• because instances are powerless they do not define community anymore. Communities are good old accounts, created, managed and animated by users directly
• because clients have all the power, they are the primary storage source
• Communities are the primary dissemination vector. If I don’t follow you but we’re both part of the same community and you post something to that community, I’ll see it
• when I block someone, that block can be propagated to others so they can automatically block that same account. This works for communities as well.

Hopefully a design like this should empower users and communities by letting them focus on the social aspect of building the group, nurturing it, instead of the technical parts that constrain users into artificial uses