NOSTR Decentralized Social Media

A lot of people have been talking about this protocol lately.

We at Hive have to ask: is this a good or bad thing for us?
Most would assume 'bad' as NOSTR is the "competition".
Thus, adoption of NOSTR is a bad thing for Hive.
It would take market share away from Hive and into a 'competitor'.

However, that's not really how crypto operates.

The entire point of decentralization is to spread out and delegate responsibility to multiple networks. That way if one fails we have a hundred backups. In fact, it is impossible for an actually decentralized network to capture a huge percentage of market share, by definition. Decentralized networks do not scale easily. More on this later.

What Is Nostr and How Do I Use It?

First off it's noteworthy that Jack Dorsey supports this protocol and publicly donated 14 BTC for development.

Nostr stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.”

Hm, k.

Classic example of devs coming up with a name for the thing.
Whatever though, it's not a bad name.
Probably better than "Steem" even.

Think of Nostr like a social network, built similar to Twitter, where you can create posts or “notes” (like a tweet), like posts, follow and unfollow people, and “boost” posts (like a retweet). You may see “post” and “note” used interchangeably on Nostr. An “event” in Nostr can be any one of these previously mentioned actions.

One thing to make abundantly clear: Nostr is a protocol. It’s a set of rules that servers and clients use to communicate (just like Bitcoin, email or Bittorrent). Nostr is not an app nor a “platform” (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.), but many applications can be built on top of Nostr.

Unlike Twitter, Nostr is decentralized. There are no central servers or corporations who control what you can post and what others can see. Nostr is censorship-resistant and open source.

As we can see, this sounds a lot like Hive...

In fact, it sounds like it might be simpler than Hive, which would be a good thing. NOSTR could be the gateway protocol that onboards more crypto users into social media to learn the ropes.

Here's what I'm talking about:

To publish something on Nostr, you write a post (note), sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays. You have two keys: your public key and your private key. Think of the public key as your username (like your @handle on Twitter). Think of your private key as your password.

This is kind of a big deal.

If more decentralized social media protocols come out and actually gain adoption, all of a sudden hundreds of thousands or even millions of people around the globe are going to start getting acquainted with how this stuff works. The learning curve for Hive, while easy for those of us who have been around for years, is very difficult for noobs to get the hang of. Protocols like NOSTR can teach more people about public and private keys within the context of social media, and that's a good thing and a huge hurdle for onboarding on Hive itself. It will be very easy for someone on NOSTR to gain some knowledge before checking out something like Hive.

We can think of this as EMAIL back in the day or "http://www" notation. When the Internet was new and not well known, these things were completely alien to 99% of the population. Even today it's not trivial to teach grandma how to use email or Facebook. The older generations brains just aren't wired for this stuff like the younger ones who grew up with it in their youth. Technology has imprinted on our very inner-child personalities, and it's much easier for younger folks to adapt to change.

To find another Nostr user, you just need to search in your client of choice using their public key. You’ll see a lot of people posting theirs on Twitter:

Haha these assholes are using... Lightning wallets for public keys?

Amateurs I tell ya!
Once again we see Hive is way ahead of the game.
Imagine when they find out they can recover their account here when stolen.

A relay is a server hosted by you or by someone else; anyone can run a relay.

Again, this is very important.

If @theycallmedan taught me one single thing: it's that altruism can only go so far. ANYONE CAN RUN A RELAY... but who is actually going to run a relay? What is the incentive for running a relay? Why would anyone do it?

We can see here that once again, the financial incentives do not align. NOSTR may very well start out decentralized with all kinds of people running nodes because it's the shiny new thing and it's cheap, but what happens when it scales up and running infrastructure is no longer inexpensive? Basic logic dictates that a protocol like this gets more and more centralized as it scales up. They will then be forced to collect data and profit from that data by any means necessary. This is a WEB2 business model. Whoopsie!

It's just basic math and business sense. Why run a node if doing so becomes a burden? Again, the Hive community has already solved this problem with our tech over five years ago. We pay block producers, just like every other blockchain protocol that has any staying power. Those who think they can skip this step have not done the game-theory correctly and will learn the hard way within the WEB3 jungle.

In the event that something like NOSTR does go belly-up or falls victim to censorship and centralization, Hive will be there to pick up the pieces. Imagine 5 or 10 years down the line. How hard would it actually be to scrape data from a platform like NOSTR and port users over to the Hive ecosystem? We even have a DAO funding mechanism to pay for something like that. Again we find ourselves way ahead of the curve.

Kudos to @hive.fund

To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. All a relay does is accept posts from people and forward them to other people. You don’t need to trust the relays because signatures are verified on the client side (where you are interacting with Nostr).

Now here is something that Hive currently does not do.

This is a pretty cool security feature that Hive (or an app on Hive) will probably have to implement at one point or another. Clients do not verify information that comes from full node API requests, but it wouldn't be that hard to implement such a thing. Anyone could do it.

What else?

Reading the rest of the article gives basic information about how to use NOSTR, like change your profile picture, things like that. This is beyond the scope of my more global assessment of the protocol.

Conclusion

NOSTR is going to be a great addition to the crypto social media space. It poses zero threat to Hive because it won't be able to scale properly. In fact, this will end up being a great boon to Hive is NOSTR succeeds. Crypto trickle-down theory will cause users from NOSTR to bleed into other protocols like Hive because NOSTR will not be able to scale their nodes to accommodate viral social media growth. Think about it: the only reason Bitcoin itself can get away with not paying node runners is because the Bitcoin network refuses to increase the blocksize, which keeps the cost of running a node dirt cheap. This is a luxury that a social media site that is gaining adoption can not afford. In fact, it's a technical impossibility.

So not only will users from NOSTR bleed into Hive, but also those users will understand how public and private keys work, in addition to how decentralized social media works (anyone can build on it and there are multiple frontends that anyone can log into). That's powerful stuff, as WEB3 users are worth far more than WEB2 users. The problem is that they need to be far more educated for their value to come to fruition. NOSTR will help with this burden of learning-curve overhead.

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