GM. PV. We're going Nostring.
Just a few months ago, Nostr was just a promising alpha protocol not ready for the mainstream. The clients all looked like this...
And to log into any of them, you had to paste your private key into the a random webpage. The smartphone apps were far from stable enough for daily use.
Just a few short months later and look at where we are already! Clients like Damus for iOS and Amethyst for Android make mobile use just as convenient as Twitter, we have web clients like Snort.social that look beautiful, and we have extensions like nos2x that allow you to sign in without sharing your private key.
But most vitally, Bitcoin Lightning support is virtually ubiquitous across not only Nostr clients but paid relays as well. It's created a real usecase for online Lightning microtransactions around the world.
In doing so, it's also done what Brave couldn't: create an organic ecosystem of value for value microtransactions throughout every layer of the internet. Yeah, Brave Browser has become reasonably popular, but how many times have you tipped or been tipped BAT? Even if by some miracle you have, did you bother to go through the mandatory KYC process to earn BAT tokens or withdraw them from your Brave wallet?
I'm guessing not. But without even trying, Nostr has done what a VC backed corporation couldn't. Through an organic community and hard working open source devs, they've created the social layer of crypto, based on the OG: Bitcoin. Or to flip it around, they've created the decentralised microtransaction layer for social media and the broader internet, fulfilling one of Satoshi's first stated visions for Bitcoin.
After all, Nostr is not just another Twitter clone. Aside from the power of its decentralised network of nodes, it is also a neutral platform, meaning much like the internet itself it can be used to post anything. Projects from marketplaces to the self-hosted blogging platform you're reading this on right now are all based on Nostr.
It should go without saying, but every single piece of Nostr infrastructure I have mentioned in this post is open source.
And the benefits don't stop at integrated Bitcoin payment either. The Onion-style network of censorship resistant nodes means creeping Orwellian government regulations to control speech online are unenforceable here. The same cannot be said for many other so-called decentralised models such as Mastodon, which has a CEO and is designed so that server admins can (and frequently do) get to choose what you are allowed to see.
Nostr may pride itself on not using a P2P protocol, but much like P2P networks such as Bitcoin and BitTorrent, it is designed to be resilient against censorship and there is no central authority to target. No CEO, no server admins - just a network of nodes passing messages to each other.
On top of this, it Nostr is a unique privacy win. There are no accounts, no emails or passwords, no KYC to get a tick as was recently announced by Meta. Instead you simply generate a cryptographic keypair. You can add as much or as little information to your profile as you like thereafter. Most people choose to go by pseudonyms. It feels like a return to the internet I grew up with, before it became a corporate surveillance pit.
Will this mark the future of the internet? Only time will tell, but the most difficult part any new platform's success is retaining DAUs (daily active users) - this is why social media companies like Instagram and Twitter are worth billions. The technology may be easy for a multibillion dollar tech company to replicate, but the community isn't. Nostr is doing a very good job at retaining an active userbase, and unlike its competition, it can never be for sale.
One thing is for sure: we really can code faster than you can regulate.
If you read this post all the way to the end, enjoy this sick track.