nostr

Elon Musk's Tweet displayed on a screen and Twitter logo displayed on a phone screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on April 14, 2022. (Photo illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images) By forbidding the placement of alternative services (and at one point banning those that promoted alternatives like Mastodon), Elon has not given strong signs that anything will change for the better — just that Twitter’s ownership team now plays for the other team of a tiresome, monocultural flame war. It’s also no surprise for those that have been following him across social media platforms including “Chinese Twitter” Weibo that Elon’s stance for absolute free speech is correlated to his industrial interests. After all, in the United States, there is room for some furor through speech— in fact, there may be political gain once you decide to latch onto one camp or another. Yet, in authoritarian states that quash even the smallest sign of dissent, Elon is surprisingly docile. His speech follows his money, not his principles. This isn’t about just Elon either. It’s not like the previous caretakers were that much more scrupulous about how they managed their service with similar incentives. One can make their own conclusions, but in reading through previous archives of Twitter emails, there did seem to be thinly disguised bias against patterns of political thought. Fundamentally, this isn’t a problem of the agent in charge of platform X or Y, but rather the system itself which relies on agents (or really the very idea of agency itself) that aren’t reliable to police the system and to profit from it. The first apps being built upon this layer show some promise — even if user engagement is just building at the beginning. The challenge of a social network has never been really that on the technical level. People don’t join a social network because of how many users a server can support, but rather the users and content that shows up there. It’s a social problem above all else — something well-known to anybody who has built their version of Twitter at a hackathon (though sadly populated by nothing but ghosts of the creator). The Nostr protocol is very simple technically: it uses relays to host and communicate public key information, and a series of clients built on the protocol for people to be able to broadcast from a public key. Developers rally around Telegram to build features. The Nostr protocol uses a series of NIPs to define the fundamentals of the network, with the data structure at core a simple “event” JSON. While the technology is quite simple (dubbed “smart client, dumb relay”), the way events are communicated allows for the “possibility” of the first truly decentralized social network — with perhaps one of Nostr’s clients grabbing a critical mass of users and content. Different clients exist on Nostr, from the aptly named Apple Damus client to Nvote , a Hacker News/Reddit clone. There are Twitter-like clients and Telegram-like ones too. The underlying Nostr protocol code is open-source and published on Github . Another Github repository offers resources so that people can understand the protocol and run a relay if they desire — or access different clients. Nostr developers have envisioned adding bitcoin and Lightning Network in order to help relays with denial-of-service attacks — already, sites like NVote require a Lightning payment in order to change your username. You can already tip Nostr users in bitcoin. Apps built on Nostr may become the decentralized social layer of the Internet while collaborating with bitcoin becoming the decentralized payment layer. It’s early days, but Nostr is perhaps one of the highest-potential ways for the Internet to evolve away from government and corporate control — and towards a more decentralized future.

The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all. It's a very simple idea: each person can publish their notes to multiple relays (which are just simple servers), and people who follow them can connect to these relays and fetch the notes. The protocol just defines the messages that can be sent between clients and relays in order to publish and fetch the content they want. These relays can be hosted by anyone and have any rule or internal policy they want. The fact that the protocol is open makes it so that, as long as there is any relay willing to host someone, they can still publish their stuff for their followers, and the followers can find their stuff in that relay. Relays can also lie about data published by others, but to ensure that isn't a problem, public-key cryptography is used and every note is signed. When you follow someone you're actually following their public key and clients will check notes received from relays to ensure they were properly signed. Here is a video that explains the role of relays pretty well: nostr:nevent1qqsqhrasmmw0nnwjfeeka9sy4zl3c6rw5w2mtv4lugutl4luw57x7nqpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0qyfhwumn8ghj7mmxve3ksctfdch8qatz9uq3wamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxarj9e3xzmny9u76jrg5. The hardest part is how to find in which relay you will find notes of each person you follow, since they can be anywhere. There are multiple heuristics currently being used to approach this issue. An animated description of one possible flow can be seen at See the NIPs and especially NIP-01 for a reasonably-detailed explanation of the protocol spec, it's very small. There are many ways to get started using Nostr, but one simple and recommended way is to visit and go from there.