What is Nostr?
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2024-08-14 13:00:03

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What's trending on Nostr over the last 24 hours?
Here's my profile for Reason on Nostr and why it could very well change the world

Pasting a few paragraphs here, you can find the rest at the link

Feel free to spread far and wide 😉

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Can Nostr Make Twitter's Dreams Come True?

Twitter's founder says Nostr is “100 percent what we wanted”—an open, ownerless network

Alex Gladstein | 8.13.2024

Virtually everyone agrees that social media is broken. On Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, people fear out-of-control algorithms, fake news, state actor censorship, and propaganda. Google and Meta collect vast troves of personal information on their users and receive hundreds of thousands of requests every year from governments around the world to access that data. YouTube has become arguably "the most powerful media platform in the history of humanity," yet its algorithm is an ever-changing black box to the creators that populate the platform with videos. During the pandemic, federal officials were in contact with every major social media platform, coercing them to remove content.

The problem is centralized control. We can't trust companies to run our primary communications infrastructure. Government regulation only makes matters worse because it creates new legal barriers to entering the industry, which protects incumbent players and stifles innovation.

What if there were an alternative, not owned by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Chinese Communist Party? What if there were a way to control your own data to prevent companies from harvesting and monetizing it? What if you had granular control over what you see in your feed, with the freedom to choose your own algorithms? What if you owned your identity, which could be accessed seamlessly across different clients? That way, if you disapprove of the changes that Elon Musk brought to X, instead of closing your account you could take your handle and followers elsewhere.

That alternative exists. It's called "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays"—or Nostr.

The Decentralized Solution

Invented by a pseudonymous programmer and overwhelmingly funded by grants from non-profit foundations, this decentralized, free, and open-source protocol has been quietly evolving for the past three years. Like bitcoin, Nostr is a community-run digital network highly resistant to censorship and corruption. It has 40,000 weekly active users and a growing ecosystem of clients and applications ranging from social media to long-form publishing to payments.

Nostr is only necessary because our existing internet is so broken.

Fifteen years ago, social media seemed destined to decentralize the world and give power back to the people. In 2009, we watched as Arab Spring activists used Twitter and Facebook to organize, coordinate, and help topple several long-standing dictatorships. The promise was that these new social platforms, designed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could help liberate the masses.

It was intoxicating—but turned out to be a mirage. The Arab revolutions stalled out when brutal military regimes cracked down. These platforms became tools for spying and censoring their users. X and Facebook have helped journalists and human rights activists reach bigger audiences, but they haven't fulfilled their revolutionary promise.

Jack Dorsey's Shift from Bluesky to Nostr

This was a major theme at the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum, which is put on annually by the Human Rights Foundation, where I serve as chief strategy officer. At this conference for democracy and human rights, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey told the audience that the problem was, actually, guys like him: The very fact that Twitter, now X, has a CEO makes it a single point of failure. Governments routinely pressured Dorsey to censor content; once the company's offices in India were raided. Dorsey says that under the new Musk regime X complies with whatever governments want.

The X network is proprietary. Known as a "silo," this construct traps a user's identity, followers, and data. X also has the power to evict anyone from the platform and delete what they've written. Several years ago, when he was still running the company, Dorsey became convinced that Twitter should become an application instead, where users could post content to an open, ownerless network. This would make it similar to how bitcoin works, where you use an application called a wallet to interact with the network, but the network itself is neutral and open.

Building a non-proprietary architecture was Dorsey's original vision for Twitter, but over time the need to maximize revenue to build a business and serve shareholders undermined that goal.

Nevertheless, in 2021, Dorsey encouraged the creation of Bluesky—an initiative bootstrapped in-house to create that open neutral base layer. But after Musk bought the company, the managers of Bluesky were afraid they would run out of money and started raising funds from venture capitalists, which undermined the vision of building an open platform. Dorsey grew disenchanted and left the Bluesky board.

At the conference in Oslo, Dorsey explained what happened next:

I asked a question: What open source initiatives should I be funding that would be helpful to the public internet? And people kept tweeting at me that I should be looking at Nostr. I found the GitHub that described it and it was 100 percent what we wanted from Bluesky, but it wasn't developed from a company. It was completely independent. Its paper diagnosed every single problem we saw and had. But did it in a grassroots and dead simple way, that felt like the early Twitter where any developer could get on and really feel it.

Escaping the 'Golden Prisons'

Nostr was created in 2020 by the pseudonymous Brazilian programmer fiatjaf, who describes it as "the simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global 'social' network once and for all."

Though nobody is in charge, Nostr works as promised and is thriving. "It is the solution we've all been looking for," says Miljan Braticevic, founder of Primal, one of the two dozen plus clients now available for the Nostr protocol. "Nostr is not a Twitter competitor or a Mastodon competitor. This is the biggest misconception at the moment. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Nostr is nothing less than the foundation for the new internet. Meaning almost every conceivable app we have today will be built on Nostr."

Braticevic's prediction is echoed by at least a dozen other prominent developers. Martti Malmi, the first coder to work on bitcoin alongside Satoshi Nakamoto, is now a Nostr developer. In a recent talk, he said he had started to work on similar ideas around decentralized identity in 2019, only to come close to giving up. But then he found fiatjaf's invention, which he called a "godsend."

"Bitcoin is freedom of money, and Nostr is freedom of everything else," Malmi said. "I was there" in the earliest days of bitcoin, "and Nostr is even more intense."

For something that could be world-changing, Nostr is quite simple. To join, you sign up with a mobile or desktop client, which helps you to create a public and private key pair. The public key (or "npub") is used as your identifier, and you share it with clients and other users so that people can find your posts or pay you for your content. The private key ("nsec") is hidden by the user, stored safely (just like a bitcoin seed phrase), and is your way to log in to different services. Unlike platforms like X or Facebook, no other information is required to set up and use Nostr.

This gives users a powerful range of sovereignty. You can use a client, for example, that has strong hate speech controls. Or you can choose one that doesn't have any at all. You can use a client with aggressive algorithms, just like the ones X uses today. Or you can use one without any algorithm at all. Today, when you log in to an app like Primal, you can sort your feed by what's the latest, by what's most popular, by what's most zapped, or by customized keywords. It's up to you.

Last month, the macroeconomist Lyn Alden, author of one of the best books on bitcoin, published a long essay about Nostr's potential:

[Nostr] is a simple set of foundational building blocks that, if widely adopted, could gradually reshape "the Web" as we know it. Instead of a separate set of siloed social ecosystems, we could gravitate toward a more interoperable set of ecosystems, with more of the power dispersed to the content creators and to the audience, and away from the middlemen corporations.

The Nostr network is constructed like a spider web that can morph and regenerate, making it almost impossible to censor. When you set up a client on Nostr (perhaps, Primal or Damus on iOS; Amethyst on Android; or Coracle on the web), you choose from a variety of relays to connect to. This architecture ensures no single point of failure: If you are connected to seven or eight relays, and half of them choose to censor posts, your feed remains censorship-free, as your app will display the net sum of everything broadcast from each relay. If the Chinese government decides to attack your relays—as it did in 2023 when Damus launched on the Hong Kong and mainland app store—then more can be spun up. "The enemy," said Damus creator Will Casarin, "is too numerous."

Prominent bitcoin developer and educator Gigi—who switched to Nostr and deleted his X account—says that what helped it become so resilient is that it has zero exit cost. If the Chinese Communist Party bans YouTube, its domestic users lose everything. There's no way to get back their profiles and followers. The same is true if a user voluntarily closes an account.

Gigi calls these corporate silos "golden prisons" with no escape. Nostr's spider-like architecture makes escaping easy. If one client goes down, or you fail to connect to one relay, you just find another client or connect to another relay. You keep your posts, photos, preferences, contacts, and even algorithms of choice. If you use X, you are an X creator. But if you use Primal, you aren't a Primal creator, you are a Nostr creator.

https://reason.com/2024/08/13/can-nostr-make-twitters-dreams-come-true/

TENNESSEE ATTORNEY GENERAL JONATHAN SKRMETTI JOINED US AT THE PARK A FEW WEEKS AGO TO DISCUSS THE LEGAL ENVIRONMENT FOR OPEN SOURCE DEVS IN AMERICA.

HE WILL BE ON CITADEL DISPATCH TOMORROW AT 2100 UTC. JOIN US IN THE INTERACTIVE LIVE CHAT. 🫡

https://citadeldispatch.com

Moment of vulnerability here, wondering if anyone has had a similar experience before.

I completely LOST it on another person's kid today when I thought they had intentionally hurt my daughter, but I was wrong and now I feel horrible.

Context: on a road trip with another family. The other child has behavioral issues and has been known to get physical in the past with others at school and daycare. Over the course of the trip he's been pretty poorly behaved and aggressive but not downright violent... but I had it in the back of my mind that it could happen.

My daughter was playing with him in the other room, then suddenly runs out screaming, bleeding from the mouth and saying that he had hit her. I've never experienced anyone intentionally hurt my little girl and I instantly flew into protective dad mode before properly assessing the situation. In my mind he had punched her in the mouth.

I stormed into the room and flew into a rage, screaming at the absolute top of my lungs, pointing my finger in the kid's face saying to NEVER touch her EVER again. His mom was right behind me. He was likely terrified and I was honestly way beyond any level of anger I've ever felt.

In the next minute or two my daughter then clarified that it was an accident and they had been playing rough but had unintentionally slammed into each other.

The boy cried, his mom was in shock, and she also had tears in her eyes. I feel absolutely awful about the whole situation, I should have had more self control, and I'm a little in shock how quickly I became an absolute monster to a young kid.

I apologized in the moment to both of them and sent a message after saying I should have handled the situation better.

Just really upset about the whole thing, unsure how to proceed now. Any girl dads out there ever have this happen to them?
Bro when am I gonna get to open this fucking bottle.

It’s been in my fridge for 3 years now lol 😂
https://reason.com/2024/08/13/can-nostr-make-twitters-dreams-come-true/
What are some of the best movies of the past five years?
Back in 2018 my wife used to work in the hospital.

There was this male nurse who would try and hit on her.

One of the other nurses had told him I was a Bitcoiner I guess and when the price collapsed down to 3k, he told my wife “if I was your husband I would have sold”.

I always found it funny.

Not only did this guy want to be me, but in his mind he was a better version of me than me lol 😂

Meanwhile in real life I have the girl and the coins.

I retired my wife later that year.

He still works in the hospital.
RE: UK/EU CENSORSHIP, SURVEILLANCE, AND ARRESTS

ELON WILL ACT TOUGH IN PUBLIC AND BEND THE KNEE IN PRIVATE.
I was going to therapy for awhile.

Then I orange pilled my therapist at 68k.

Haven’t been back since 😂
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