A Vision for Nostr. Coracle blog.

I love open protocols. Just the fact that anyone can build on them has a ✨magical✨ feel to it.

 

What would the world look like if the World Wide Web and the internet, with all its open protocols, did not exist? We would be far more dependent on big corporations, and their willingness to let us into their walled data storage. It would be much pricier to communicate with other people, and our communications would not and could not be private.

 

Many blogs, early forms of "social media," were built on open protocols. Anyone could use an RSS reader to subscribe to the blog, and read it on a platform, device, or app of their own choosing.

 

Then, Big Money marched in: Myspace, The Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram are all still built on open protocols like HTTP, HTML and CSS, but now, you have to sign up first, and then log in, to be allowed to view other people's text, photo's and video clips.

 

Ugly walls rose in our beautiful garden, the open internet.

 

The monetization of our eyeballs, the scheme where they make money by showing us targeted advertising, became a multi-billion dollar business.

 

Don't get me wrong: If you feel happy making the Meta (that is Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) shareholders happy and in so doing, helping the open internet die, then certainly, please continue to use their apps. I do as well. Not because I want to, but because that's where all my friends are. After all, where else, could they go?

 

Even if you wanted to switch from Instagram or Twitter to an open alternative, where would you go? Any new app that comes along feels as scary as a large empty playground. 

 

The beauty of building new platforms on existing open protocols is that from day 1 of your new app, you immediately have millions of users. If I launched a new email client today, how many people could I potentially reach with that client? I guess about 4 billion, right? Now if I launched a new closed social media platform, let's say a new Twitter that you had to sign up for to be allowed to use it, then how many users would I have from day one? Exactly, zero. Zero! That is the true difference between open and closed platforms.

 

NOSTR = Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.

 

I am currently very positive about Nostr, an open protocol that allows anyone to build a number of different social media "platforms" on top of it.

• Sharing photos and video's Instagram-style? NostrGram has got your back: https://nostrgram.co/?build=626#global:allEvents

• Twitter clone, but without the blue-check madness? Damus.io to the rescue: http://damus.io

 

I ran into this interesting blog post by "Coracle", another platform that's build on the open Nostr protocol:

Source: https://blog.coracle.social/a-vision-for-nostr.html

If I had to sum up what the core principle of Nostr is, I would say "individual sovereignty". Nostr is a social experiment that asks people to take responsibility for what they say (and sell, host, publish, promote). This topic has been explored ad nauseum by better writers than I using Bitcoin as a vehicle, so I'll avoid re-treading the same ground if I can, except to point out that the two key design decisions of the Nostr protocol, self-custody of keys and hosting spread across multiple relays, simultaneously entrust control to users and revoke certain entitlements users are accustomed to.

…

Many users including myself have experienced a 10x or more increase in engagement, despite a much smaller number of people on the platform. This is of course likely due not only to the lack of an algorithm, but also to the lack of celebrities, which tend to absorb attention, leaving little for the rest of us. But for now, Nostr is for the plebs.

…

Most people I know don't have Twitter accounts, or use them. For them, Twitter is about as relevant to their lives as CNN. Instead, they use private Facebook groups to arrange babysitters for their kids, or Cragislist to buy and sell local goods. They use Google maps to find reviews for nearby businesses, and the church email list to keep up with prayer requests. They subscribe to newsletters their friends publish, and spend their days at work sending memes over Slack. The common theme here is that all these platforms connect "us" with "mine", not with "them". And yes, journalism and topical interest ala Reddit is a part of this, but for normal people, a vanishingly small part. But let's stop squawking about "echo chambers".

Keep dreaming kids, and keep building.