"Pura Vida". On January 1st, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey typed this set of words on his Twitter, and received numerous likes.
Pura Vida, this Costa Rican phrase symbolizes simplicity and purity, just like the life of the locals. What Jack, who has stepped down from the position of Twitter CEO, wants is also very simple, that is, a simple and pure social network.
There should be no one who is not worried about the current social network applications, which are cumbersome, complicated, severely commercialized, dominated by one company, increasingly heavy experience, and increasingly strict audits. This is what all social app users around the world are dissatisfied with. The founder of the world's largest social platform, Jack's perception is far better than ours, and his vision for the decentralized network is far greater than our imagination.
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How to register and simple experience
First download the Damus client, Apple App Store can directly search for Damus social, Google Play please clickthis link. As a minimalist social app, Nostr registration has achieved minimalism to the extreme. No need for any personal information such as mobile phone number and email account, just fill in a nickname to create an account from scratch.
Below the personal information to be filled, it will provide you with an Account ID, which is the public key. This ID is similar to an encrypted address. Other users can search and follow you through this ID. In other words, in the world of Nostr, this string of characters is your identity. After filling in the personal information, the new page will let you save the public key and private key of the account. The public key is your identity, and the private key is the password that proves your identity. This string of passwords cannot be recovered if lost, which means that the identity corresponding to the password has also disappeared in this world.
The Damus client is similar to Twitter in terms of product use, and the page layout is almost the same, from left to right are the home page, private message, search and notification pages. Enter the Account ID (public key) of the user you want to follow on the search page to go directly to their profile page. Of course, you can also search Username and Display Name to follow users. For example, when we enter Jack's Nostr public key in the search box, we can see Jack's speech in the Nostr network.
In addition, the search page will display the latest posts of all users in real time, and you can reply, forward, like and share. Each post has a unique Note ID, which can also be entered directly on the search page after copying. If there is a problem with the content of the post, you can long press the post to report to the connected repeater that the post involves fraud, nudity and illegal content, and at the same time block the author of the post (you can find and undo it in the Blocked function). As a product of the Bitcoin community, a peer-to-peer payment system is essential. Damus also has built-in Jack's favorite Bitcoin Lightning Network function, which can directly call third-party Lightning Network wallets for payment.
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Nostr's design logic
Nostr is a "minimalist" social protocol that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network "once and for all": it does not rely on any trusted central server, does not rely on P2P technology, and does not issue Tokens.
Nostr's technical architecture is very simple: users run a local client, such as damus. When something needs to be published, it is signed with a key and sent to multiple relayers (escrow servers set up by protocol participants). When it's time to see something, you can ask nearby repeaters for information. Anyone can run a relayer, and a relayer only stores and forwards content. Users do not need to trust the repeater, the signature is only verified on the client side.
A repeater does not communicate with another repeater, only directly with users. When wanting to "follow" someone, a user simply instructs their client to query the relayers it knows for posts from that public key. A repeater can prevent users from posting anything on it, but this has no effect on the user since they can post content to other repeaters. Anyone can also set up a repeater by themselves, it is not complicated. If no other repeater can be found to publish content, their own repeater can still publish.
In solving the problems of decentralization and common social media, the Nostr protocol leaves a gap for operators to expand and develop. Each user can publish their content updates to any number of repeaters, and repeaters can charge users fees and erect thresholds, which ensures censorship resistance; repeaters can require payment or other forms for publishing authentication (like email address or phone) and associates these internally with public keys to combat spam. If a relayer is used as a spam carrier, it can easily be discarded by users, and clients can continue to get updates from other relayers.
What is the motivation for people to run repeaters? The protocol developer's answer to this is quite interesting.
The developer believes that, first of all, it should not be assumed that the operator of the repeater will serve for free, and then points out that even without the so-called "incentive", DHT nodes in historically successful P2P networks continue to operate.
This looks a lot like a blockchain, but without the most important consensus and economic incentives of blockchain. This is the purpose of the developers, the minimalist protocol, even the incentives and consensus are very complicated, and it is easy to cause the concentration of computing power and unintended problems. What Nostr wants to do is the simplest social interaction. Every word that everyone wants to say can be seen by the people he wants to see. It's as simple as that.
Because of this, Jack, the founder of Twitter, loves Nostr very much. In December last year, he donated about 14.17 BTC (about 245,000 US dollars) to Nostr to further fund the development of Nostr. And he has been active on Nostr. If you look at his public key, Jack is much more active on Nostr than on Twitter.
Of course, in addition to Damus supported by Jack, the Nostr ecosystem also has many interesting social applications, such as Branle, which is also similar to Twitter, Anigma, which is similar to Telegram, and Nvote, which is similar to Reddit.
Branle, Branle is an experimental Web3 Twitter made using Quasar, which, like Damus, is a Nostr client. Currently Branle can be deployed through the Netlify API. If users want to deploy it to their own machines, they must use other methods to simulate the custom title and avatar proxy functions. However, the application interaction is relatively cumbersome. Operations such as changing the user name and Bio need to generate signatures one by one through the private key, which is very inefficient.
Anigma, Anigma is a Nostr client similar to Telegram. Users can manage their own chat groups and content just like Telegram. Anigma has also set up a wallet management function to enable in-app tipping. In addition, the "Global" function is used to find public chat content worldwide.
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Eco-competitive products are strong, can they succeed by relying on orders?
Of course, Nostr is not the first decentralized social network. Whether it is the Lens Protocol developed by the founder of Aave before, or Nostr and Damus, which are now called by Jack, the emergence of popular Web3 social applications seems to be inseparable from the social influence halo of "encrypted OG" or "Twitter leader". However, in order to have sustainable user growth and retention, it is absolutely unfeasible to rely solely on big names to call orders. This is especially applicable to the field of Web3 content social networking.
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Mastodon
Mastodon, free and open source software for running self-hosted social networking services, was announced on the social news site Hacker News in October 2016 and gained a lot of attention after Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk. Currently, the project is maintained by the German non-profit organization Mastodon gGmbH.
Mastodon functions similarly to Twitter and Weibo, these functions are provided by a large number of nodes (or instances) running independently, each node has its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options and content moderation policy. Each user is a member of a specific node, which can interoperate as a federated social network, enabling interactions between users on different nodes. Under this technical structure, users can flexibly choose the specifications and terms of service of their favorite nodes while maintaining and accessing the complete social network.
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Data source: Similarweb
Tusky, Tusky is based on the GPL 3.0 protocol and is a lightweight client for Mastodon. It supports all Mastodon features, such as photos, videos, etc., and its custom emoticons are designed according to its own material management guidelines. Users can choose between dark and Tusky theme colors, there are notifications and drafts features.
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Farcaster
Farcaster is also a decentralized social network, and its technical structure is the closest to Nostr. Users can build client applications on Farcaster to broadcast messages on the Farcaster network, as well as read messages from any user. Like most social infrastructures, Farcaster users are free to move their social identities and graphs between apps, and developers are free to build apps with new features on the web.
The technical composition of Farcaster is divided into two parts: On-Chain Registry and Off-Chain Hosts. Among them, users can apply for a unique username in the on-chain registry, which is used to store the user's host URL and used as the DNS domain name system of the Farcaster network. The off-chain host is used to store the user's social data. Users can host their own content on any web server through private key signatures. There are two forms of hosting: self-hosting and hosting. Self-hosted users need to configure more infrastructure, and choosing a managed host can simplify the process of receiving messages. Overall, Farcaster still has a high user threshold.
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Chart source: "Web3.0 Creator Economic Report: CreatorFi's Development Status and Imagination Space"
At present, there are nearly 30 applications in the Farcaster ecosystem, all of which are active, among which the most mainstream applications are Discover and Launchcaster.
Discove, Discover is one of the mainstream applications of the Farcaster ecosystem, which allows users and applications to create and discover feeds created by the community, and is the main source of information flow on the Farcaster network. Discover emphasizes composability, and information streams published from this application will automatically appear in other Farcaster ecological applications. As the Farcaster network grows, more application data sources and tools will become available to create feeds on Discover.
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Lens Protocol
Lens Protocol, developed by Aave founder Stani Kulechov, is a Polygon-based social networking protocol. Lens takes NFT as the core element. Users hold their own profile NFT (Profile NFT) through their wallets to publish content and realize rights confirmation. The content published by users will be stored on decentralized storage infrastructure such as Arweave and IPFS, and the content will be stored The link is updated in the user's graph NFT. At the same time, all social behaviors and relationships of users are stored on the Polygon chain in the form of NFT, and different graph NFTs interact and connect through a series of fixed modules.
Compared with independent content applications, Lens Protocol and its ecological protocol have stronger social attributes and composability. Applications based on the Lens protocol can customize the development of these three to achieve interactive behaviors such as rewards, subscriptions, and community governance. Users can independently transfer and sell graph NFTs.
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Chart source: "Web3.0 Creator Economic Report: CreatorFi's Development Status and Imagination Space"
At present, there are hundreds of projects in the Lens ecosystem that build various applications based on the underlying technology, involving social networking, curation, and audio and video content. Most of the applications that have been launched are social applications, and there are relatively few audio and video content applications. The mainstream applications include Lenster, Lenstube, Lensport, and Iris.
Lenster, Lenster is currently the most important application in the Lens ecosystem, and most of the interactions between users and the Lens protocol are completed in this application. Lenster's user interface is similar to Twitter. It is a decentralized and permissionless social media application. Users can connect to other users' graph NFTs on Lenster, or join various communities for comments, co-creation, governance and other interactions. Ordinary users can browse content dynamics on Lenster at will, but to interact with it, they need to hold a graph NFT.
Iris, Iris is a social platform for creators. Users can share original and reproduced content on Iris and develop their own communities, and users follow creators by paying subscription fees. In addition, creators can set the visibility range of content when posting dynamics, and set restrictive logic such as "only followers can see" for it.
LensTube, LensTube is a decentralized video sharing platform aiming to be the Youtube of Web3.0. LensTube's video content is stored on Livepeer, a decentralized video storage facility. Users can share and enjoy videos with their fans based on the graph NFT, and obtain rewards from the community through rewards, collections, etc.
Teaparty, TeaParty is a community curation application designed to help creators promote their own creative content, and its functions are divided into TeaParty Hosts and TeaParty Guest. Among them, TeaParty Hosts is mainly aimed at creators and advertisers. Only when the user's forwarding gets likes and favorites does the user need to pay the fee. TeaParty Guest is aimed at ordinary users and earns rewards by reposting high-quality content. In this way, the cost-effectiveness of promoters and the quality of content on the platform can be improved. The "community curator" concept adopted by Teaparty is also the most promising economic model of the Web3.0 creator economy, which will be further expanded below.
In the wave of web3, with the blessing of token economy, we have become accustomed to the operation of an application + economic incentives. It seems that token has become the standard configuration of web3. But in the field of Web3 content social networking, many protocols and projects often break the "hidden rules" of this industry, and Nostr is the same. Rather than saying that Nostr is the next generation of web3 products, it is better to say that Nostr just restores the original appearance of the Internet. When you enter the same public key in different clients and see the same content, you can vaguely think of the era when there were third-party Weibo clients.
After the deformed Weibo and Twitter, we have seen many teams try decentralized social networking. There are many social applications with token incentives on EOS, BSV and other public chains, telling people to interact to get token rewards. Those projects are all died. It is mentioned in BlockBeats "Web3.0 Creator Economic Report: CreatorFi's Development Status and Imagination Space" that the once popular Social Token concept has not withstood the test of time and the market, and has gradually been used as an NFT map and de-Token The protocol is superseded by the identified item. Maybe, Nostr’s path of “Internet Return” can really resonate with more users.
