A massive usability hurdle for any hope of mainstream adoption.
People say Mastodon is hard to join because you have to pick a server. It’s on another level if you also have to pick a service to hold your private key, and you can lose your account if you don’t do this.
Compared to managing passwords, screwing around with authorization codes sent by email and/or text message, and all the other folderol associated with that model?
With just a private key, no such protection. Unless you take active steps to store the key safely, you’re a few Backspace key presses away from losing your account forever (or at the other end, having it stolen if you leave the key lying around).
If someone is not capable of doing that, I am not sure I want to read their articles.
Not sure what you are referring to with "pick a service to hold your private key". The whole point of Nostr is that you don't need any service to hold anything for you.
Ordinary people expect to be able to reset forgotten passwords. And because people are bad at managing passwords, reasonable services try to get them to use 2FA so their accounts wouldn’t get stolen. A service that uses plain private keys has both problems.
Compared to, say, someone being able to compromise every account you have because you walked away from your desktop or phone while logged into email?
Everybody has some data they never don't want to lose.
So the Nostr key would be just another piece of such data.
Also, losing it would not that much of a desaster. Use a new key, and let people know about it via other channels.
There's no reason you need to use the same private key for every service, any more than you need to use the same password for every service.
In contrast to Twitter & Co, a compromised account does not mean you cannot post anymore.
Serious question: Didn't the cryptocurrency people say the same thing? Look how that went -- the tech nerds tended to do it "right," and the non-tech-nerds tended to use exchanges-or-similar that were a bit less than stable, to say the least. Am I misunderstanding?
But my post wasn't even about average users. The majority of people never publish anything.