Happy Sunday #Nostr !
Here’s your #NostrTechWeekly newsletter brought to you by written by
The #NostrTechWeekly is a weekly newsletter focused on the more technical happenings in the nostr-verse.
Let’s dive in!
Recent Upgrades to Nostr (AKA NIPs)
1) (Proposed) NIP 96: File Storage Integration
As a reminder NIP 96 proposes a standard way for third party service providers to offer file storage for Nostr users. Standardization allows files to stay off relays but still be relatively cross compatible if users want to have files attached to notes show up in any Nostr client. It was initially implemented a few weeks ago with the Nostur and Coracle clients utilizing the open source Nostrcheck server by
NIP 96 seems to be getting momentum; now the Nostur client has added integrated nostr.build file storage in a NIP 96 compatible way giving users more options! I hope it gets merged soon 💪
2) (Proposed) Update to NIP 72: Community Posts
This proposed update to Moderated Communities would allow clients to support using event kinds other than 1. Right now, posting on moderated communities (akin to subreddits) makes it so that all posts show up without context on most Nostr clients. Kind 1 events are like tweets, but posts in moderated communities are posted in a context that’s missing on clients like Damus or Amethyst.
This proposal would encourage moderated communities to publish using a different set of event kinds so the posts only show up in clients intended for moderated communities. It continues to gain momentum. opened and closed a proposed change similar to this as this newsletter was being written, and instead threw some support onto this proposal.
This change would be reverse compatible with current Moderated Communities but still allow for cleaner feeds on clients based on their intended content focus.
Author: vivganes
Notable Projects
Zapple Pay’s lightning-based subscriptions ♻️
The team at Mutiny Wallet’s work on Zapple Pay has helped keep the flow of zaps unblocked since Apple’s capricious decisions to force Damus to disable Zaps. Now they’ve introduced “auto zapping” which is the ability to set up recurring payments (like subscriptions) in a self-sovereign way.
Zaps are great to show support, lightning-gated content is going to be helpful for content creators too, but unlocking subscriptions can truly help content creators make a living on Nostr denominated in the hardest money on Earth. This could be game changing as we’ll discuss later 😉
Authors: & Paul Miller
Highlighter 2.0 📝
If you’re unfamiliar Highlighter is “A nostr client for your most valuable information. Your reading. Your notes. Your thoughts. A place to discover thoughtful, timeless content.” and continues to improve it rapidly.
This latest release improves many aspects, mostly focused on making it THE best way to read, highlight, label, and save content that’s meaningful to you.
On top of that has been improving the ability to make money as a content creator via an integration to “subscribe” to support Nostr content creators like you would on Patreon, as well as split zaps for content published via Highlighter.
If you’re not at least using Highlighter to discover content, you’re missing out. In my experience It is the highest concentration of content created by deep thinkers on the internet.
Latest conversations: Nostr adoption via content creators
Nostr’s main feature right now is that it is freedom tech. So far that hasn’t been enough of a draw for mass Nostr adoption.
We can keep building existing apps on Nostr but we’ll need something truly differentiated for people to rip and replace their content consumption habits with the ones run on Nostr.
We have some unique offerings (beyond censorship resistance) in emerging tech like Highlighter, DVMs, and Zaps. Based on what we’ve seen this week, I believe the next million monthly active users will be driven by content creators moving to Nostr.
Helping creators make money
Creators tend to flock to where they can make the most money. This is true of content creators and creators of software.
The fact that Apple apps make far more money than Android ones (despite Android dominating the smartphone market) explains why there are so many iPhone only apps.
Video creators and streamers move between Youtube and Twitch based on who is going to offer them the better income (viewership * take home rate).
If we can provide platforms where creators get to keep more of their money, it could be a game changer.
Locked into platforms
Content platforms provide two things: audience aggregation and payment aggregation.
Payments: The revenue per view of a youtube video is calculable and theoretically Youtube could pay creators their cut of the revenue per view. That isn’t practical because of transaction fees, they’d be larger than the actual transaction.
That’s why platforms serve as payment aggregators between the advertisers, themselves and the creators; settling accounts on a regular basis in amounts that make sense given the payments infrastructure available to them (credit cards and ACH).
Audience aggregation: Audiences go where creators are, but creators go where their audience is; the relationship is complicated. Sometimes individual creators have enough power to make or break a platform, but for platforms as big as Youtube that becomes much harder.
Take the example of Spotify and Joe Rogan. That move was worth it in terms of cash for Rogan, and it put Spotify on the map as a podcasting platform. It didn’t really hurt Youtube a whole lot.
The main advantage of using a content platform like Youtube, TikTok, etc is that the audience is there, you “just” need to capture them. The trade off is that you have very little power to set your price.
Audience non-portability: If a creator decides to switch from Youtube to Twitch, their followers don’t automatically port over. Creators with strong followings have an ok time when switching but not everyone has that luxury.
This leads to a power imbalance between creators and platforms. Platforms can strike down any creator they want; even though, without creators, these platforms would be nothing. In the absence of a better solution we’re stuck in this disadvantageous equilibrium.
Freeing creators with Nostr and Bitcoin
If Nostr + Bitcoin could offer creators ready-to-go solutions that would let creators keep significantly more of their revenue. It just has to be a big enough difference that people make the switch even when Bitcoin and Nostr are unfamiliar to them.
The magic combo of capabilities on Nostr would be: Nostr-based versions of all the usual apps for content consumption, as long as they’re high enough quality to not deter users. Content management tools that are familiar and quality enough for content creators. This would need to include robust file storage and streaming for content (text, video, audio, etc) Payment infrastructure in the apps (via Lightning) that have low fees and support the structures that are relevant for the content type (pay per article, pay per view, streaming sats as you listen, subscriptions, etc) Lowest-common-denominator Nostr onboarding. Imagine an end-to-end encrypted Nostr key custodian, so users that are intimidated by keypairs could have a familiar login with email and password.
In this world, new Nostr users that were asked to join by their favorite creator may never interact with the most common clients on Nostr today. They may set up a Nostr user via some “Login with Nostr” solution and then they only interact with the Nostr versions of Twitch, Youtube, Substack, etc.
If the switch is painless for users and creators and the creators make more money, it’s a no-brainer for creators to try out. If it works for them, more will come.
Taylor Swift and Grimes are good people to aim for. Both have enough autonomy to experiment with any platform they want, and both have fought to maximize artists’ take home pay. Can you imagine if we could get every Swiftie on Nostr’s version of Spotify?
Why hasn’t this happened yet?
This sounds like “value for value” right? Many talented builders and creators have attempted to crack the “value for value” nut, but something hasn’t clicked yet for mass adoption. The missing link, in my opinion, is the lack of audience portability and how that affects payments.
Value for value (streaming sats for podcasts, or paying to unlock one article at a time) requires some storage of who bought access to the content. Otherwise if you switch devices the content platform won’t know you already purchased access. Without Nostr that means signing up for that particular content app and it’s a high bar to start paying for content.
With Nostr, you can login using your Nostr keys and purchase access on any Nostr-based app, using any Lightning wallet, and that access can be attached to your Nostr pub key. It lowers the barrier for users to start paying, which means content creators capture more value.
For some kinds of content, I think all the legos are there for a creator-friendly platforms. With the recent Mutiny wallet announcement of lightning-based subscriptions, there’s no reason not to build a Nostr-based Patreon or Substack. I’ve also seen some work on ways to Zap to unlock content, making the dream of “pay per article” possible.
The last piece missing for a truly seamless on-ramp would be one of these end-to-end encrypted Nostr key custodians. That way clients could offer a “login with Nostr” button and lower the barrier for new users even further.
The race to zero take rate
Nostr naturally combats monopolies (at least for clients at this point). The reason that platforms like Youtube and Twitch have a 20-60% take rate is because they’re monopolistic. They sit on their thrones because no one has yet solved the issue of audience aggregation and portability. Nostr breaks that model.
Once creators use Nostr-based platforms, they can switch at nearly no cost. The content is theirs, and the followers are universal, so they can move to a different platform that has a lower take rate without risking their income. They don’t even have to switch platforms at all if their content is stored and unlocked via events on the Nostr Relays themselves, since those are universal across all Nostr clients.
Ideally there would be third parties that host big files (PDFs, Videos, Audio, etc) which creators pay directly. Then these content clients are simply user interfaces for users to upload and consume content. Hell, even logging in is solved by the Nostr protocol itself, and maybe another third-party login provider). The scope of what these platforms need to build and maintain is small; running them will be pretty cheap compared to running Youtube or Patreon.
At first there may be only a few Nostr-based apps because there will be some economies of scale, but over time competition will kick off a race to the bottom. Clients will eventually only be able to demand a take rate that covers operating their business (build the app, maybe offering the file hosting/streaming infrastructure, etc).
What a future
In this future, platforms have less ability to coerce creators and take their income. Platforms will have a hell of time censoring content creators. Users will get more choice on their experience and their algorithms when consuming content. And the adoption of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange would explode.
It feels like we’re on the cusp of something incredible in the Nostr-verse.
Until next time 🫡
If you want to see something highlighted, if we missed anything, or if you’re building something we didn’t post about, let us know. DMs welcome at
Stay Classy, Nostr.