The founder of Telegram has just been arrested in France. Charges include lack of cooperation with law enforcement, drug trafficking and fraud.
Aside from Telegram, social media is controlled by two billionaires who decide what you say, are themselves controlled by overbearing governments and make money through advertising and selling your personal data.
There is a different way.
NOSTR stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted on Relays and it is a social media protocol in the same way http is a web protocol.
The protocol is open and anybody can build upon it. It has some fundamental concepts that are very different to existing social media platforms.
Firstly it is decentralised, it runs across relays and anybody can run a relay. They can be open or closed, public or private, free or paid.
Secondly as a user, you don’t have an account, you have a private key which is used to secure your data.
Your profile (account) is yours, you own and control it using your private keys and verified by others with your public key.
Your posts are yours and you can store them on your own relay in your own home or business or you can rely on free public relays or more feature rich paid public relays.
All your public data is signed by your private keys to verify it is you that owns it and all your private data is encrypted so nobody can read it.
Messages (i.e. think NOSTR WhatsApp) are encrypted with your private keys so NOBODY can hack it or listen in, not even the NSA through a companies backdoor. You message other users privately by encrypting messages to them using their public key, which they decrypt using their private key.
Relays store your data in a decentralised network of private and public relays and you discover relays automatically when searching for people or content.
Data is normally sent on the clearnet, but can be relayed across the darknet (Tor) in highly censored regions.
Because it is built using Bitcoin principles and technology, so it has Bitcoin money built in, meaning you actually send / receive money from / to any participant.
As money is built in, the commercial options are different to centralised corporate owned platforms. It would be technically possible to build a platform that supports advertising, however that hasn’t really happened because influencers can be paid directly from their audience in many different ways. Ad hoc tips, subscriptions, pay to view or pay per time models.
The great thing for content creators is that they control, own and keep all the money they make. There is no third party intermediary or merchant deciding whether they are allowed to be paid or not.
NOSTR is censorship resistant, as there is no way to stop anybody publishing anything they want, in the same way nobody can stop or interfere with a Bitcoin payment.
From an end users point of view, if they want to self censor, they can do this in multiple ways. You can mute users individually, or you can choose to use relays that adhere to your views or interests, so if you don’t want to see certain categories of content, you would avoid relays that carry those feeds. You can even run your own relay and curate content that you then charge other like minded users to connect to. You can of course connect to multiple relays for multiple different type of feed.
While NOSTR is a protocol, platforms have to be built to use it, so the first platforms were twitter like clients and they are still very prevalent. However, NOSTR now has clients that emulate most social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Soundcloud, WhatsApp etc. They are even creating their own categories as well as emulating other functions such as Office Suite tools, collaborative calendars, contact lists or e-commerce shops.
If you want to give it a go, the easiest, but not the best, way to get started is download Primal on your phone from here:
It will create a private key for you and setup a Bitcoin wallet.
Once you have done this you can visit me here:
https://primal.net/p/npub1aqakd28d95muqlg6h6nwrvqq5925n354prayckr424k49vzjds4s0c237n
If you want to see a small part of the ecosystem, then visit https://www.nostrapps.com/ where volunteers are listing some of the many apps that exist already.
NOSTR is being backed by Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder, and you can see his account here:
https://primal.net/p/npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m
Or you can see his account like this:
Edward Snowden is also on the platform and you can find him here:
NOSTR has around 2 million users or public keys, although nobody really knows how many, because it is decentralised and not controlled or run by any person or organisation.
Once you’ve setup Primal, you can use those same private keys to access any platform you wish and you can use a browser extension such as Alby to manage your keys: https://getalby.com/
Primal looks great, but there are other better functioning twitter like clients, probably the most reliable for iPhone is Damus: https://www.nostrapps.com/apps/damus
or Amethyst for Android: https://nostrapps.com/amethyst
The content and user base is very Bitcoin and freedom focused right now, but more and more people are starting to use the various platforms and some are transferring exclusively to it.
Some of the more interesting projects right now are:
https://www.0xchat.com/#/ – Private messaging – think WhatsApp
https://zap.stream/ – Video streaming
https://fountain.fm/ – Podcasting
https://wavlake.com/ – Music streaming
https://shopstr.store/ – Online shop
https://npub.pro/ – Website creation tool
https://nostr.build/ – Media and file storage
https://relay.tools/ – Build and curate your own relay
https://creatr.nostr.wine/subscriptions/new-user – Creator tools
Remember, the same keys you created for Primal can be used across the whole ecosystem.