You’ve seen the word nostr appear a lot online ever since Jack dropped some cash on it and Elon subsequently advertised it by… banning people from sharing links to it.
You probably think it’s some kind of new social network thingy that will never catch on because these things never catch on. Remember App.Net? Or Peach?
You’re wrong. This Time Is Different.™️ It’s different because this protocol actually enables something that, in the sum of its parts, will be a step-change improvement to the social media experience for normal, everyday people.
Censorship
Let’s start with censorship. Whether you think stuff should be censored or stuff shouldn’t be censored, or maybe those things should be, but those other things shouldn’t… look, everyone’s in the same boat on censorship.
Most can agree that one rich dude or group of rich dudes or board of people appointed by a group of rich dudes shouldn’t be the World Wide Web’s truth arbiter.
To explain how nostr fixes censorship, all you need to do is understand the basics of these things called relays and clients.
Nostr is an open protocol; anyone can run a relay and anyone can build a client.
A relay is a server that hosts notes (posts).
A client is an app that lets you view them and post them.
You post notes to and read notes from whichever relays you wish. You use any client you wish to do this. There are already hundreds of relays and dozens of clients.
Everyone uses the relays they want to use, and naturally, you’ll read and write from the ones that host content made by people you want to follow. Your feed populates accordingly.
If a relay tries to censor you, you simply choose to use a different relay. If a client tries to censor you, you simply use a different client.
Again: Nostr is a protocol, not an app or a company. Anything built on it is an open market competition, and that includes the flow of information. You can do whatever you want, but so can anyone else: Everyone else might not want to read your garbage, and they don’t have to!
Again: Again: This thing is just a free, open source, public domain, dumb protocol. Its name stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.
This means that nostr is a honey badger. It doesn’t care whether or not you use it.
Nostr doesn’t live or die by whether it manages to capture sufficient users from incumbent social media networks within an arbitrary timeframe. It doesn’t have investors or pitch decks or runway.
It’s going to be here 50 years from now even if no one uses it.
Why twitter (etc.) bad
Speaking of incumbent social media networks, let’s talk a little about what’s wrong with the incumbent social media networks—besides censorship.
The walled garden social media networks you use every day are predatory, bloodsucking leeches whose ultimate obligation is to shareholders. That sets up a very specific set of incentives that have made Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok the treacherous experience that they are. (And most people don’t even know how bad they are, because they’ve never considered it could be different than it is.)
If you didn’t know, all of these apps have to find ways to make money. The way they make money is by collecting data about you and selling ads against it. Then, they use various signals, like time spent viewing content, or likes or retweets, to maximize spread of the most engaging content. Doing this maximizes the amount of time you spend in the app, and the number of ads you click. This is a profitable business.
And if the business is the end goal and the platform is the business, well, it’s really, really hard to make decisions for the platform that might be good for users’ mental health or good for increasing the quality of discourse, but might be bad for business.
Does nostr somehow do away with profit and business in social media entirely? No, as I’ll explain below. But hopefully this helps set the stage to begin to contrast the existing model with what nostr will make possible.
Why nostr good
Nostr dispenses of all that and allows for something completely different.
How?
Because it’s a dumb open source protocol controlled by no one, as explained above.
Because #bitcoin.
Let’s talk a little about #2. Nostr has nothing to do with bitcoin. Nothing.
It’s a really dumb protocol that could have existed a long time ago. This might not mean anything to you, but here’s Damus (an iOS client for nostr) creator Will Casarin explaining nostr in 6 words:
Translation: It’s really, really simple. It’s text shared on the internet. Bitcoin is not a technical dependency for the system.
But see, running relays and building clients isn’t free. Neither is, say, running a nostr-native image host. Or a nostr verification service. Nostr needs an internet-native money if all of these non-free things are going to be able to find a way to stay as decentralized as they are and break even at scale!
(No, it doesn’t need its own blockchain or its own crypto-token; it needs an internet-native money, and there just so happens to be exactly one that is neutral and decentralized enough to be considered money. And if anyone disagrees, they’re free to build a nostr client integrating their coin and make their case. Good luck.)
So why is it catching on now? I believe it’s because bitcoin, and more recently the Lightning Network, has:
Spawned a contingent of people who understand its significance.
Enabled a native economy of nostr to exist technically.
Combining the simplicity and open source nature of nostr’s protocol with instant, near-free Lightning payments allows the “economy of nostr” to exist—and that economy couldn’t work before bitcoin and Lightning. Again, let’s talk a little about #2—what the heck do I mean by the “economy of nostr”?
Use your imagination
I concede we’re in the early days of this. Right now nostr clients just support things like manual Lightning tips between users and making it easy to share and fill Lightning invoices.
It’s just the beginning, but even in its current state, it’s remarkable. You almost have to experience it yourself to know what I mean, but a place like Damus built from the ground up on nostr, removing corporations, replacing them with a group of nerds who care about this stuff, and the assumption of a future a micropayments economy, and actually working, is a magical thing.
Much more functionality is already in development, and even more than that is inevitable—many of the things I will describe next are technically possible today; they just haven’t been implemented yet.
Micropayments for the whole stack
Every part of the nostr stack has a cost, and as nostr scales, sats (a small share of bitcoin) are going to have to start flowing. Clients, relays, image hosting servers, etc. they all do work for you. With Lightning on nostr, you could make micro-payments with every action you perform to each part of the stack, programmaticaly.
Suppose you want to post an image, using a client, to a relay. Those might be three parties who require an sats micropayment to do so because, well, they’re running a business and they need to make some money. You send 3 sats (a small fraction of 1 penny) to the image host, 3 sats to the relay, and 3 sats to the client. It’s instant and free to do so, and it’s a ruthless free market competition for who will earn those sats.
It’s not a far-fetched idea that it could be entirely frictionless for every user of the network to be making micropayments with almost every action they perform. Instead of giving Elon $8 for the privilege of a blue check, you’ll be spreading some small amount of money across all the parts of the network in accordance with your actual usage. What you get in return is a social network without perverse incentives.
Micropayments for content
But it’s not just about automatically sending money to everyone who provides value to you in the platform infrastructure. It’s also sending money to other humans that create awesome stuff. Frictionless sats tips that function like tapping the button are already happening and in the works.
You can send sats to people that make great stuff and post it on nostr, and you yourself can make stuff—or just post the stuff you’re already posting elsewhere—and start getting paid for it. But if you want tips, well, it better offer some genuine value!
What if Twitter took its $5 billion/year and, after expenses, distributed the rest to the best content creators? At scale, a twitter-like social media ecosystem of apps built on nostr could have an economy that big, but instead of paying shareholders, everyone would just pay everyone all the time—but only those who provide value to the network!
Again, you have to experience it yourself, but money is a way better social signal than likes or retweets. Every sat sent or received is a meaningful and scarce share of the 2.1 quadrillion sats that will ever exist; it always has a human on both ends (ultimately), and it can’t be gamed. This makes one interaction with a person who sent you a 100 sat tip for a post feel 100x more meaningful than 100 people who give you one retweet.
A new kind of algo
I said nostr is Different™️ because it’s a step-change improvement on the existing social media networks. If you don’t get the significance of bitcoin, the above section might not be that exciting to you. Good news: You’ll have a hard time resisting nostr not because nostr clients have bitcoin integration, but because of what that integration will do to make nostr the best place on the internet.
You know how everyone hates the algorithmic feeds on Twitter and Facebook? They hijack your brain chemistry and keep you in the app by showing you the stuff that’s the most mind-numbingly addictive or keep you caught in anger and political controversy feedback loops. These algorithms were created by profit-driven corporations using engagement signals to do what corporations do best.
Well, suddenly, on clients built on nostr and bitcoin’s Lightning Network, where everyone is tipping everyone according to who provides the most actual value, we’ll have a new kind of signal to create an entirely new kind of feed: one based on value.
Instead of a feed that surfaces the things that received the most thoughtless retweets and cheap likes, we’ll finally have a feed that surfaces the things that got the most tips in the form of bitcoin—again, the only neutral, censorship-resistant, workable internet money with a credibly-enforced fixed supply.
You’d like and retweet a stupid, thoughtless chuckle-worthy meme all day, but are you going to send someone who copy/pasted a grainy image from somewhere 1,000 sats? I’m not. I’m sending 1,000 sats to people who make something good that I like a lot, and I’m sending it in hopes of receiving more.
An “algorithmic feed” featuring primarily that kind of high-value content, the kind worth paying money for, and none of the garbage, might be the killer app of the nostr stack for normal people. Nostr clients promoting that content via this new kind of feed might make sharing content on nostr (and only on nostr) intriguingly profitable for just about anyone that makes anything worth anything.
Hopefully you can see how this might catch on.
Helping people get bitcoin
I’ll mostly leave this for another article, but I can’t wrap this up without it: bitcoin is really hard to understand, and this platform is going to help people understand it.
Bitcoin is an elephant and we’re all the blind men, and, according to your predisposition, certain pieces of it will help you get it sooner than others.
When normal people and businesses realize that global money transfers can be borderless, instant, free, and only take like two clicks, I think things are going to get very interesting.
Snowden nails it here. The nostr clients that are integrating bitcoin are showing in hyper-tangible form just how powerful this new monetary system can be.
The sooner people realize they have access to a tool that both protects them from monetary policy and political insanity and makes the flow of money between business and people free and effortless, the better.
Some people will need the latter to come first. Weirdly enough, those people who end up getting bitcoin because they were enticed by nostr… will ultimately come to understand nostr in full because they came to understand bitcoin.