Nostr

The nostr docs

Nostr is a very intriguing protocol for communication that lends itself to a decentrlized social media experience through the use of relays. I would love to understand it more fully someday, but I am inclined to be in line with almost anything decentrlized, and although the primary content in the nostr-verse right now is bitcoin, I am sure that as time goes on, the need for a truly free way to communicate will be necessary - and nostr won't solve every problem, but I think it'll be a tool in the set of solutions we come up with. It's secure, decentralized, actively worked on, and very flexible.

Decentralization

Why does decentralization matter? Put simply - censorship. A founding principal of America is free speech and in recent years our right to speak freely has been put under severe fire.

I've crossed paths with people who very regularly talked about freedom of speech but it wasn't until the last several years, mostly with covid that I started to pay a little closer attention. I'm not turning this post into any long rant about anything specific, but I do know that many voices were silenced on Facebook, Twitter/X, Insta, etc. Big Tech really threw the hammer down on people - a simple example was the Ivermectin stuff... which in the last 2 years has turned out to be a pretty effective treatment for many thousands of people!

But why does that matter? It's because the platforms that existed which made it possible for anyone to "have an audience" made harsh judgements about what could and couldn't be on their platforms... There's pros and cons to this, but a primary con I see is that the power to limit the spread of information was pretty solely concentrated in the departments of these Big Tech firms that allowed or disallowed certain things to be said and expressed on their platforms.

Nostr is different here in that there's no central command, no single data center or hub.... Nostr is a protocol, like HTTP is a protocol... anyone can send "Notes and Other Stuff over Relays" so developers can build any kind of UI for it, and you as the user can subscribe to relays that tend to have information you care about... in a sense it's kind of like subreddits but not quite as organized (yet).... but unlike reddit, there's no central authority. The closest it gets is that a relay may go down or someone may choose to close one - no big, you just subscribe to other relays, or don't subscribe to relays you don't want to see

Another friend of mine likened this to RSS - and it's also not UNlike that, but there's more to it - the notes are on the relays, there's encryption throughout the protocol, and several other standards called NIPS that make nostr unique, and I think bulletproof as we go into a future clouded by big government and big tech collaboration.

Brief Usage

As for a usage pattern with nostr I think you have to combine the ideas of reddit, rss, and twitter...

Some apps like coracle.social have nice support for building "feeds" and "lists"... lists are combinations of tags (hashtags) and feeds are combinations of lists - at least in the coracle world. This means you can use lists of tags to discover content and users, create feeds of things you want to see regularly (like your RSS feed subscriptions), follow other users (using their pub keys see [## Follow Me]), and curate your social media experience in whatever way you want.

There's nostr apps specific to mobile (primal, snort) and desktop (coracle.social). They help you set yourself up in different ways and to learn more about how I got started then checkout getting-started-with-nostr. There's also content-driven nostr apps, for example fountain is great for music and podcasts that are distributed on the nostrverse, which feels like a totally different world than when I use coracle to browse my tech or bible related feeds.

End

Nostr is a pretty cool thing taking shape... here's some related info

Thank God for nostr podcast

nostr website

Note these posts aren't available yet but they will show up on my RSS feed when they're published

My post on getting-started-with-nostr

My project on thoughts-to-nostr

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