I dipped my toes into a new digital stream: Nostr

Among all the chaos and disturbing regulation around social media platforms, Nostr’s simple design feels fitting for our global context. Allow me to share some thoughts with you.

Just as TikTok is about to be banned and Twitter is becoming unusable, a lot of us are exhausted and confused about social media. Needless to say, we’re experiencing a vibe shift and the drawbacks of centralisation and algorithmically dominated feeds are becoming clear.

Personally, I have low mental bandwidth and didn’t see why I should spend time learning about alternatives like Mastodon or Nostr. It took multiple nudges for me to open up and realise that this future is in our hands.

I want to own my data. I want a simple, intuitive new stream for social interactions. I want a fundamentally free cyberspace. One solution won’t fix everything or be perfect, but I’d rather try. Each click is an energetic vote on how we choose to collectively coordinate.

So I went clicking around Nostr and here’s what I want to share with you:

Your data is yours

You’re equipped with a public and private key pair, it follows you everywhere so you don’t have to lose followers or content between platforms
Doesn’t matter which platform your friends are using, if you share your public keys then you can still follow each other (no need to get everyone onto your specific bandwagon - yeehaw)
You don’t sign up for a new account each time you use a new app (it’s the same public key), goodbye to aaall the email and password logins you’ve collected over the years

Censorship resistant

Instead of relying on one server to hold your data (like what we have with Twitter for example), you choose a number of “relays” run by people around the world to store your data and share messages
Each relay gets to choose how to store and share data, and you choose the relays you connect to. We’re not limited by a host’s rules and ideologies, and avoid ending up with a collection of silos
Relays interact with clients (which provides the interface you see), and that checks whether your data was actually produced from the public key you hold. Clients display your posts and can’t control the data or your identity
Remember, you can sign into any Nostr client with a single pair of keys; no registration required

It’s simple to build on

Nostr itself is a protocol, not an app or service that you sign up for. It’s an open standard which anyone can build on, much like how we build our sites to go on HTTP or TCP-IP
It’s a message standard, based on simple and flexible “event” objects which are passed around as plain JSON. It uses standard public-key cryptography for keys and signing
This makes it easy to run relays and build clients, ensuring the ability for the protocol to extend and adapt/evolve over time
It also works as a peer to peer network where you don’t need to know the IP address of your peers or be online at the same time

Belongs to the community

Anyone can build and anyone can transact (already has effortless Bitcoin micropayments for content, without ads or subscriptions)
Potential for emergent properties to arise, since people running relays can experiment with different mechanisms to store data and send messages
The people getting involved feel like a community reminiscent of older internet days, and there’s a sense of commonality and lessons learned from the past decades
Individual sensemaking around this could be really exciting for developments beyond just a “social platform”
The community is already responding to major gaps in privacy (check out this first run through of Nostr through the Nym mixnet — for some network privacy lovin’)

Tidbits for getting started

Sharing some gems I found helpful (this by no means is a solid how-to guide):

How To Use NOSTR - A Decentralized Censorship Resistant Social Layer
- Don’t issue your key pairs within the browser or app directly, because it can potentially be leaked. I wasn’t aware of this but luckily followed the video’s tip on using the Alby plugin and have been pretty happy with it. For best practice there is a particular command you can run while generating key pairs (I’m not your person for this).
- Also, the video suggests astral.ninja, I’ve jumped to iris.to since it’s less glitchy. This is the fun part because things will be changing and you can switch as much as you like; so be open to different clients and know that people are doing their best to build right now
Nostr w/ Gsovereignty | FIAT LUX Podcast #4 (shoutout to Yves Edwards)
- I really enjoyed this interview actually, it’s genuine and gives you some sense of the ideas behind and around Nostr

If you made it all the way here then congrats!

Say hi if you choose to follow me: (tech.energy.love@pnproxy.org) or nostr pub key: npub1shpjzwzudkj0hfcn0eeypn9haqr4mzwp4vlycn5wkp6audrh3u7sd9dm2g

Let’s play: I’ll gift you a special Nostr badge if you quote a line from my poem ;) <3

It’s up to us to shape a healthier internet

We’re stepping into a new era and it’s time to learn and make do with new patterns. You and I are emergently figuring this out, let’s embrace collective intelligence and explore what a better future could look like (who knows, it might even be surprisingly simple).

Special shoutout to the No Trust Verify crew and Pineapple Proxy for the help <3

Ok I want to share one more last thing: this recent talk between privacy practitioners on the front lines, I really enjoyed this and may write about it in a future post. It’s not related to Nostr but I’m putting it in anyway.

Lots of love

xxx