Is Nostr just for building Twitter clones?

nope

We’ve seen an explosion of Twitter-clones built on Nostr including great ones like damus, snort.social, astral.ninja, iris.to, hamstr.to. This may lead a casual observer to conclude that Nostr is somehow a protocol for building Twitter clones. And while it is really useful for that, it can be a lot more.

Nostr is a simple way for anyone to publish messages and to allow anyone who wants to read those messages to do so without relying on any specific person or corporate entity to ensure that the message is available to be read. Yet there’s still a mechanism to help you verify that the message you’re reading was sent by the person you think it was and wasn’t modified along the way.

A Twitter-like public messaging service is a natural first thing to build to explore how this works, because it is the highest engagement use-case of publishing (basically public chat). It’s easy to drop in, say hello, meet people and get your first welcome “🤙” or “🫂” to get your experience started. Think of it as a global water cooler. Just because it’s a great starting point, doesn’t mean that exhausts all the possibilities of what can be done with this new protocol.

There are a few other demo use-cases people have built which show how you can use this Nostr publishing primitive to build other types of services like Chess, a Telegram-like messenger, or a Reddit-like community forum.

The starting point for this kind of innovation might be a bit skeuomorphic. But the really interesting things happen when you start building in a way that explores the possibilities of what’s natively possible only here.

Open Commenting System for the Web

One of the types of experiences I’m excited about are around having a common open commenting system that works on every blog with no additional account creation and which can syndicate back to a global feed. This has been tried and failed many times before, and I’d attribute it to the activation energy required to participate being too high. With an open feed system and portable identities which can be used on any website this kind of thing may flourish now. Wallet Scrutiny is a project which has started experimenting with this idea of incorporating Nostr to run an open commenting system.

Amazon Product Reviews prioritized by people I trust

I’d like to see Amazon product reviews about a given product prioritized by people who I trust/interact with elsewhere on the web. In fact, if I knew people who follow me would have access to my reviews when considering a purchase I would write more of them. I’d also love to be able to see a great review and see what else that person is saying across the web (other products they like within a similar taste profile, articles that may be relevant, etc.). I don’t think Amazon would build this in the near term, but maybe someone else would build a place to visit to get this view of information (maybe a browser extension to begin?) - again, the lower activation energy may actually enable it to work.

Nostr Search

As information gets published in this new way we end up with a bunch of important new signals to consider for search quality: 1) an open follower graph and the implied trust graph, 2) scarce value attachment from anyone to anyone (lightning/zaps) with a transference of some topic-specific trust signal. These two new signals could profoundly impact how search works on the web. It’s a topic I’m passionate about and have been beginning a series of discussions on the topic with smart builders I find.

Universal Messaging

Each of the big private messengers offer roughly the same features, but each network is disconnected from the others to serve the needs of their corporate owners: 1) sell more devices, 2) serve more ads. But the ideal user experience would be to allow me to message my contacts regardless of the messaging experience they’ve chosen. We can finally have a global interoperable messaging network on the Internet — so many messaging UXes could be unified and users could opt for UXes they prefer regardless of the preferences of their messaging counterparties. I dream of a day where I don’t need to switch between iMessage, Twitter DMs, Gmail Chat, WhatsApp, Signal, etc. In fact, I could imagine a view where I have more control over UXes that prioritize notifications in new ways I want, in which case I might also opt for Slack and Discord DMs to roll into the same experience.

Fix Email Spam

If we build universal messaging we’re really only one step away from reinventing what we consider for our email-like experience. Of course, email was invented long before we had invented digital scarcity so it grew up (and re-centralized) before we could add payments as a signal into those interfaces.

What else?

I fell in love with the Internet as a kid and I’ve carried that love my whole life. I’m excited about the opportunity to reinvent many of the basic services of the Internet which were built for a different era and to invent totally new experience we couldn’t imagine before. If we rethink the web with webpage and data decoupled (and digital scarcity/free-payments as a new primitive we can build with) we open up an entirely new design space. The Twitter-clones are great and I use them daily, but I can’t wait to see what we build next. Reach out if you’re building something new or just want to brainstorm on what might be doable. I’d love to help!