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 spiderweb 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.
Nostr's Rise and Potential
Nostr had only a small handful of users until Dorsey joined and started promoting it at the end of 2022. Since then, the protocol has been on a slow but upward trajectory in terms of activity. Alongside Dorsey, Naval Ravikant and Edward Snowden have been some of the protocol's biggest boosters. A lot of infrastructure is still raw, and there are weak points in the areas of privacy and security, but the pace of progress is dizzying. Social clients like Primal already look and feel nearly as good as X, but have completely different features.
"Bitcoin and Nostr combined together work like an international decentralized open-source Venmo," Alden writes. Thanks to a "Nostr improvement protocol" (NIP-57) that developer Will Casarin helped invent, Nostr integrates seamlessly with bitcoin. Users can follow content creators and send them payments called "zaps." They tend to be a few cents or dollars at most but have been as much as $10,000.
Unlike X, users of Nostr clients don't have to live in a particular country, fill out paperwork, or have a particular type of ID to send and receive money. They could be in Iran, Cuba, or the U.S.—the system doesn't discriminate. Zaps might be tips for authors or podcasters, support for development projects, funds for campaigns, or just a sign of admiration or respect. These "tips" never really took off on X, but on Nostr, they are a way of life.
There are, of course, many other decentralized social network models besides Nostr, primarily coming in "federated" or "Web3" blockchain-based flavors. Mastodon is the most popular platform of the federated variety—the crown jewel of what people are now calling "The Fediverse"—but it is deeply flawed, according to developers like Gigi. "Switching to Mastodon or another federated service doesn't remove King Elon," he explains. "It just creates thousands of King Elons. You need their permission, and you can be deplatformed at any time."
The largest Web3 platform is Ethereum, and its community created an app called Farcaster, which is the most popular "decentralized social network" by a long shot. It's built on cryptocurrency and funded by tens of millions of dollars of Silicon Valley venture capital. But the protocol only has one popular app, and it might not survive if the creators quit or their business model fails. Farcaster has a very different feel than Nostr; its users are heavily focused on getting wealthy by chasing the next crypto token.
Although it interacts with bitcoin, Nostr isn't built on bitcoin or any other blockchain. Unlike Farcaster or other Web3 social projects, its users never have to use or support a digital currency, though many do. "Bitcoiners are very good at identifying technology that is complementary to bitcoin," according to the programmer Rockstar Developer. "Nostr is synergistic with bitcoin, but Farcaster is a silo that traps you into a dependency on crypto tokens. And we have a saying in Nostr: all your silos will be destroyed."
Decentralized computing networks depend on multiple parties being able to trust each other without the oversight of a central authority, which makes them notoriously difficult to scale. In its early years, bitcoin lacked the capacity to process more than a handful of transactions a second, and it has taken years of engineering work to add a decentralized payment network to bitcoin that could begin to scale the network to serve the entire world.
Nostr's developers had these challenges in mind, and came up with a simple and elegant design that will make scaling easier. As a monetary network, bitcoin needs to maintain a decentralized central ledger that everyone in the network agrees is correct so users don't try and spend the same money twice; but Nostr doesn't need system-wide agreement about what its users are doing all the time everywhere on its network. Users just need to be up to date on the people and accounts they follow.
Today, some Nostr users in China use VPNs to reach international posts; others, Casarin speculates, use Nostr networks that are entirely enclosed within the Great Firewall, which is China's internet censorship system. In Japan, he points out, there are similar self-enclosed Nostr networks, intentionally isolated for cultural and language reasons. A fully synchronized global state is not possible, or even perhaps desirable, to achieve in Nostr. Its communities can sprout up anywhere and don't rely on each other.
Nostr, like the web, will rely on caching and indexing services to make it searchable and faster to access, which in theory brings some centralization risk. But Braticevic, the founder of Primal, has pointed out that Nostr is likely to end up with dozens or even hundreds of them, which will make the protocol sufficiently decentralized.
A Free Will Revolution
Earlier this year, I attended a small meeting with Dorsey and a dozen of the world's top human rights activists on the sidelines of the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum. Participants ranged from Hotel Rwanda hero Paul Rusesabagina to the Iranian women's rights advocate Masih Alinejad to Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy. There were dissidents and humanitarians from Tibet, Gaza, Lebanon, Bolivia, Uzbekistan, India, Uganda, Azerbaijan, and Iraq. Added up, the social media followers of all the people in the room exceeded 20 million.
After brief intros, Dorsey started to tell his story and explained the opportunity at hand. He began by talking about the original promise of Twitter, and how at the beginning, activists helped the platform go from a niche Silicon Valley audience to something truly global. "You're going to do the same thing for Nostr," he told them.
He talked about how X had failed and introduced the concept of Nostr. The activists were intrigued.
Dorsey cautioned patience: Create a profile on a Nostr client like Primal, and then go to your big traditional account on X or Facebook or Instagram. Make a post there, saying you'll continue to post there, but that you're also going to be over here on this new network. Maybe, he said, you can tell them you'll put out some special content there. "Only a small percentage of your following will come," he said, "but those are the most important. They will be committed. And the more you post, the more will come."
I see this as a revolution. In Oslo, Dorsey said that the "free speech debate is a complete distraction. I think the debate should be about free will. We feel it right now because we are being programmed." The algorithms used by platforms like X "know us better than we know ourselves," Dorsey said.
In June, Dorsey gave a talk in Italy, where he distinguished today's social networks as those "diminishing" us vs. those "enabling" us, such as Nostr. Nostr, he suggests, allows you to better control what you see. You decide what to consume. And you can connect directly with your following, both in terms of engagement and payments.
'It is coming.'
Gigi, the bitcoin developer, reminds us that the currency of the modern internet is attention. Today's big apps are harvesting our attention, so the outcome is all the platforms produce car crashes that we can't look away from. But Nostr is integrated with a different currency—bitcoin—so we can build in a different way. "I don't post very much on Nostr," Gigi says. "I keep it simple, usually just posting a good morning and good night message. But people send me bitcoin, and it pays for my breakfast every day."
This may seem far-fetched—connecting to and earning material sums from your followers without dealing with any corporations or banks whatsoever—but Dorsey has said that the visceral experience that Gigi and thousands of others are beginning to have is more or less inevitable.
"It is coming. It's just a matter of time and when we all decide to do it. When we all decide to remove these dependencies. Because," Dorsey told the crowd in Italy, "we believe more in humanity than these companies and corrupt governments."
Social media is how we speak, transact, and shape our identities. We can't entrust our primary communication protocol to a handful of corruptible humans. And now we don't have to.
The post Can Nostr Make Twitter's Dreams Come True? appeared first on Reason.com.
