Table of Contents
1. The Current State of Social Platforms & Networks
1.1 A Summary of the Challenges
1.2 The Streisand Effect; Elon Musk’s Nightmare
2.3 Censorship Resistant & Deleting Posts
3. The Multiple Clients Built on Nostr
5. Data on Nostr Users, Relays & Clients on Nostr
The Current State of Social Platforms & Networks
Centralized social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok can ban, shadow ban and basically censor your content as and whenever they wish to.
1.1 A Summary of the Challenges
Most companies are “for-profit” and some even with some government influence on it, therefore there are very clear incentives to censor, and even give extra privileges to some parties by controlling these centralized platforms.
1.2 The Streisand Effect
The more you try to hide it the more attention you will bring to it!
Elon Musk's fears has sparked our interest and curiosity, hence, we have decided to take a look at these platforms.
Twitter co-founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey announced that he had donated 14 bitcoins, about $245,000 to further the development of Nostr. It went to the anonymous founder of Nostr who is known as @fiatjaf.
The response by Musk/Twitter was not ideal, and they have since backtracked, and the tweet below has been deleted.
1.3 “No Better Time”
Considering the multiple problems that Twitter is currently facing, it seems like these decentralized platforms which offer an alternative to Twitter, has the chance to gain some momentum and capture the attention of users from Twitter.
Source: HashBrown Research:
// https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1623440660270383107
// https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1621026986784337922
// https://twitter.com/tier10k/status/1623458693340700672
Nostr
Nostr, which stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”, is known as an open protocol to create a Censorship Resistance Global Social Network, it attempts to solve the problems we are facing in centralized social networks.
It is essentially a protocol which allows many apps to be built on it.
2.1 How Nostr Works
The mechanics of Nostr is actually quite straightforward, we have simplified it in the image below.
2.2 The Key Features of Nostr
In the table below, we attempt to describe the key features of Nostr.
The Bitcoin micropayments also show that they are trying to attract the Crypto Native Users’ attention, as typically these are the users who will care more about decentralization.
2.3 Censorship Resistant & Deleting Posts
Even if certain relays censor your posts, you could run your own relay yourself, since you are identified by your public key, you don’t lose your identity after getting “banned”.
There is no deleting of posts, as all of these are just clients and even when there is a “delete” functionality, they are just hiding the post from their client.
We refer to NIP-09 where it talks about “Event Deletion”.
NIPs stand for Nostr Implementation Possibilities. They exist to document what MUST, what SHOULD and what MAY be implemented by Nostr-compatible relay and client software.
Source: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
Quoting:
Clients MAY choose to fully hide any events that are referenced by valid deletion events.
Relays MAY validate that a deletion event only references events that have the same pubkey as the deletion itself, however this is not required since relays may not have knowledge of all referenced events.
Publishing a deletion event against a deletion has no effect. Clients and relays are not obliged to support "undelete" functionality.
Source: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/09.md#nip-09
2.4 Challenges faced by Nostr
Nothing easy is worth doing, and Nostr certainly has some challenges faced.
It might take awhile to convince the general public to use such a client, because typically the “average” social media user does not see the problem with centralized parties, and generally prefer convenience over decentralization.
They might not see the problem or risks of these centralized entities having control to ban their accounts, until they get banned themselves.
This is kind of “Nothing’s a problem until it’s a problem”.
3. The Multiple Clients Built on Nostr
There are quite a few Nostr Clients, each with different features that they offer.
4. Damus
Damus is a nostr client, and basically like the decentralized form of Twitter.
4.1 Introduction to Damus
It is supported only on:
iPhone
iPad
MacOS
The client chosen is important as you have to input your private key/generate a private key. Losing the private key is as good as losing your nostr account.
Considering that Damus has been widely known to be used by Jack and Snowden, it is considered to be a safer client.
4.2 The Interface of Damus
The interface which is quite similar to the Twitter App, would be easier to onboard the users from Twitter.
a. Adding a Relay
b. The Global Feed & Personal Feed
5. Data on Nostr Users, Relays & Clients on Nostr
We observe some data on Nostr Users, Relays and the different clients on Nostr.
5.1 Nostr Users
When Twitter announced about the API access no longer being free, there was a significant spike in the daily active users and daily new users on Nostr.
Currently as at 2023-02-10 05:54:00, there are 504,743 profiles with bio and 916,581 pubkeys writing events.
Nostr Relays
With this tool below, you can monitor the lowest latency relay to use. You can also check if the person running the relay has registered an administrator public key.
https://nostr.watch/relays/find
We can see that the most popular country of relays came from the United States. It is important to note the countries with the most relays in it to ensure that the “network” has sufficient support from all over the world, in the event where a possible ban on running a relay is made in that country.
Damus has the most users per relay, followed closely by others such as snort.
6. Potential Competition
We note the potential competitors Nostr has in regards to the other decentralized social applications.
Mastodon
It was thought that Nostr was simply trying to be a lightweight solution to the problems of Twitter and Mastodon.
Mastodon is a series of federated servers communicating with each other, however, the server owners hold the power and control.
The core difference between Nostr and Mastodon is that instead of using a username owned by a server operator, each user utilizes a public/private keypair.
7. Food For Thought
Many well known people who have some sort of “influence” or “relations” in regards to social platforms or censorship in general, such as Jack Dorsey, and Snowden have been known to be involved in Nostr.
HashBrown Research Thoughts:
The Potential For Adoption
There are many great social networks and platforms, besides Nostr such as Lens Protocol (Lenster) and Farcaster Network, which all could potentially work.
The chance of each succeeding is high, as each has their strong points.
We think that these social networks will take over centralized platforms such as Twitter, and viewers might be “spread out’ and distributed among these platforms, while possibly an “aggregation tool” which incorporates all these social networks into one place for users to connect to multiple people who choosing these decentralized apps and possibly centralized platforms like Twitter will have the highest chance of succeeding.
What are your thoughts about Nostr’s Concept and the various Decentralized Social Platforms using Blockchain Technology in general?
Feel free to connect with us on our Socials as we would like to hear your thoughts!
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