Decentralized Social Media just had its “Netscape Moment”
what happened while you were throwing back the ol' eggnog
1990s - DNS, IP, TCP and HTTP -> Netscape
2020s - Nostr -> Damus
Modern web protocols
By the 1990s there were enough protocols to operate the modern web, but it wasn’t until the launch of the first useful web browser (Mosaic/Netscape) that the protocol primitives of the web became usable by and useful to a broad audience. This catalyzed enough momentum to make the web go mainstream.
Free speech for me, but not for thee
The idea of having decentralized social media has captured the imagination of technology builders for years. Centralization of power in the hands of big tech has caused major problems from data scandals and election interference to haphazard and chaotic leadership choices on both ends of the political spectrum (e.g., old-Twitter’s removal of Trump to Elon’s ham-fisted execution of his “free speech” ideals). Unfortunately, no human or corporation can be entrusted to carry the burden of making the “right” choices for all of humanity’s communication needs no matter how well-intentioned or smart that person is.
Enter a new shadowy super coder
At the beginning of 2022 I saw @fiatjaf’s tweet announcing Nostr and immediately thought it was important, but i wanted to see a client implementation that could make it useful to more people more quickly before I figured it could really have a chance of succeeding.
A Christmas miracle
As I write this in the last days of 2022 I’ve been using the TestFlight for Damus (an iOS client built by @jb55 on the Nostr protocol) and it gives a “good enough” UX with a real implementation that lets us use the Nostr protocol to communicate with each other. And, boy, does it work!
Ok, so what is this Nostr thing?
Nostr is a very simple protocol for clients to pass messages to relays and to gather messages from relays. It consists of individual actors signing messages and sending them to a bunch of relays they know about. Relays can be operated by anyone. They just store the messages and forward them to anyone who asks. You don’t have to run a relay to use the network which makes it easy to get started. The cryptography is really basic and has been well understood for decades - this simplicity is a feature of the approach, not a bug!
Then what is Damus?
Damus is an iOS/macOS app (currently in TestFlight) that makes it easy for anyone to use the Nostr protocol. But Damus is just one of many apps you can use with Nostr. If the developers of Damus decide they don’t like you, you can always go elsewhere to use Nostr. Ahhhhhh… breathe in that sweet smell of permissionlessness.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a simple system.
John Gall, systems theorist
Learn from history (or you’re doomed to repeat it)
Twitter - a fully centralized app/UX launched in 2006 which helped us all get comfortable with the then-foreign, new form of publishing (and as a side-effect of building Twitter they discovered the protocol upon which it operates).
Mastodon - an app/system UX which can be challenging for new users to understand coupled with limited actual gains in censorship resistance – often devolves into mini-dictatorships/fiefdoms with censorship even worse than Twitter. Meanwhile it’s hard to move followers from one instance to another.
BlueSky (by Twitter) - a protocol project living mostly in the realm of theory and research with no end-user UX. Theory only goes so far. You don’t really learn how social software or protocols should evolve until you get them in the hands of real people using and developing on them.
Farcaster - a great app UX for a new Twitter-like service, which, while still mostly centralized today, has a vision aiming to enable many competitive clients in the future. Given that vision and early execution we can get a glimpse into what a world looks like when other developers can build apps on the data created on a more open, Twitter-like network.
Previous attempts at decentralizing social media have explored a bunch of new potential paths, but none of them have yielded productive results yet - the complexity always gets in the way:
Where should we store the media data to offer sufficient censorship resistance?
Can we build consensus around a unique namespace while not having a centralized decision maker?
Do we require economic incentives to bootstrap usage (what unintended consequences do we create when we introduce such incentives)?
Do we require the guarantees that come with a costly blockchain architecture just to publish/share messages in a censorship resistant way?
To blockchain or not to blockchain?
Nostr demonstrates how a much lower threshold of guarantees than those that a blockchain provides is probably sufficient to decentralize media. We don’t need a single database with global state like we do when transacting economic value without trusted 3rd parties - in other words, in publishing there is no double spending problem to solve. All we need to solve is “where can I find messages that were verifiably sent by this person?”.
Welp, there’s good news and bad news… but also more good news!
The good news is that Nostr actually works (i’ll explain a bit more detail about how in an upcoming post) and the Damus client makes it relatively easy for an average user to play with it today.
The bad news is that, unlike a money-protocol, the very nature of Nostr being a neutral information protocol means you can’t invest in, make money from, or directly profit from your early knowledge of Nostr.
But there’s additional good news: this is a new, simple, and powerful architecture for how information works on the Internet - that means we can reshuffle the deck on all existing publishing, communication, and information services. You can probably build something really important starting with this knowledge right now. Plus it enables a tremendous amount of new human freedom. If this thing catches on the way I think it could, it will probably create adjacent possibilities which could be commercializable, too.
My recommendation: come to Nostr (say, via Damus) to learn about the technology and understand the freedom it enables. Wrap your mind around the simple new protocol and architecture for decentralized publishing. Play around and see what inspires you!
DM me on Twitter if you want to discuss/learn more: @dksf
And, of course, follow me on Nostr (pub key): npub1kuy0wwf0tzzqvgfv8zpw0vaupkds3430jhapwrgfjyn7ecnhpe0qj9kdj8
I'm waiting for there to be an Android app before I join. My only device is my phone at the moment.
Until Damus is released publicly where can I learn more about nostr?