#246—Nostr and the future of social media
Hard Yaka at Nostrica
Welcome to Yaka Stuff, our weekly newsletter that covers news, industry perspectives, and updates from the Hard Yaka ecosystem. Check out our last report here.
This week:
The future of social media
It’s all come full circle
Thoughts from the crew
Universal Namespace (/uns) at Nostrica
Vote for the Nostropical hackathon community winner
Hard Yaka and friends
1. The future of social media
It’s the beginning of the internet all over again.
Amid the greatest banking crisis since the financial crisis in 2008, a crew from the Hard Yaka ecosystem, last week, found itself in hot, humid Uvita, part of Costa Rica’s Golden Triangle—also known as the Bitcoin Jungle, where an open source community is building an alternative financial economy.
But that’s not why we’re here.
Alongside Bitcoin Jungle, Jack Dorsey is co-hosting the first ever Nostr conference, Nostrica.
Nostr stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. It’s an open protocol that serves as what some describe as a “distributed note storage system.” That’s not what you care about, though. You care because with Nostr, you can build the future of social media.
From that vantage point, this is more decentralized web in the spirit of the early internet than it is web3. There’s no blockchain. There’s no token. Just 300 hobbyists, hackers, and enthusiasts working on whatever they find most fun.
And the energy is palpable.
But the parallels to the early days of Bitcoin are hard to ignore.
My first Bitcoin conference was in 2013 in San Jose. (The one in California.) There, I spoke to guys like Gavin Andresen, Roger Ver, Charlie Shrem, Chris Larsen, Erik Voorhees, and Mike Hearn. Coinbase had a booth and the Winklevii twins were the keynote speakers, for many in the thousands-strong crowd, an indication that BTC was finally bridging the mainstream.
Ten years later at Nostrica 2023, we’re hearing talks from William Casarin (Damus), Ben Arca (Diagon Alley), Derek Cross (Nostr Plebs), Martti Malmi (Iris), Martin Roesch (Snort), Joe Dillon and Arun Nedun (Current), and Christopher David (Arc).
These are the builders working on clients, relays, marketplaces, microapps, and superapps that the burgeoning ecosystem relies upon.
Nostr even has its own Satoshi Nakamoto of sorts in Fiatjaf, the protocol’s pseudoanonymous creator, who dialed in remotely while sharing a stream of a Starcraft game.
Like Bitcoin, Nostr is open, permissionless, and censorship resistant—powered by public-key cryptography. Like early Bitcoin adopters, those in attendance, many of whom are Bitcoin advocates themselves, signal values around decentralization and freedom.
And while Fiatjaf acknowledged the notable overlap in communities, he was also quick to build Chinese Walls. Nostr is its own thing and will develop independently. This, however, doesn’t temper the inherent passion for Satoshi’s blockchain. During his talk, Will explained that he viewed Damus and Nostr as a gateway drug for Bitcoin.
The close ties are undeniable, hence an early integration with Lightning. That a network like this has built-in payments so close to day one is sort of unprecedented—a fact Elon musk and Twitter are well aware of. Tips are rebranded as Zaps, arguably because such payments could eventually become so much more—from commerce to curation. Today, Zaps act as supercharged Likes, with the potential to inform news feed algorithms and content discovery.
The rise of Nostr suddenly makes Lightning that much more exciting.
And boy has Nostr risen, with accounts created surpassing 6.5 million at the time of this writing. (Though that number should be taken with a grain of salt given the amount of spam on the network, with one relay operator on Day 2 noting that it constituted 75 percent of his server traffic.)
Like Bitcoin 2013, it feels like we’re coalescing around a tipping point for this movement. But like Bitcoin 2013, these are still early, innocent times. Back in 2013, acquiring BTC was still clunky, requiring you to transfer funds to BitInstant via Western Union at your local pharmacy or meeting a stranger at Starbucks through Local Bicoins.
Nostr finds itself in a similar state.
If you’re fluent in NIPs (Nostr Implementation Possibilities—an homage, as Jun pointed out, to Bitcoin Improvement Proposals), this honeymoon period feels like a playground and paradise for experimentation and innovation. If you’re a normie (or “pleb,” as Derek put it) like me, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the plethora of clients, the complexity of relay management, the potential to see offensive or hateful content, and the difficulty of discovery—challenges that are demanding but not impossible to overcome.
That many of the ecosystem’s major contributors have only been involved for a few months is a testament to the community’s rapid growth, development, and intrinsic determination.
It’s no surprise then that, like Bitcoin 2013, the early days of the conference are infused with an intoxicating idealism. The crowd at Bitcoin 2013 buzzed with excitement about the potential of an alternative financial universe and the ultimate demise of fiat and fractional reserve banking—an alternative financial universe that, today, powers the Nostr economy. Charlie Shrem and Ross Ulbricht hadn’t yet been arrested and regulators had yet to wrap their heads around money powered by Proof of Work.
Back at Nostrica, the first presentation features an OG Nostritch (parlance for Nostr enthusiast), Rockstar, his identity obscured by long sleeves, a cap, and sunglasses (the most courageous of commitments to privacy given the heat), who proceeds to open with a well-received joke about socialists and capitalists. And yet for many here, and perhaps objectively speaking, this is what is fundamentally at stake.
Terms like DNS, identity verification, venture capital, and even algorithms are still taboo as they imply a trend toward centralization. But this idealism shouldn’t be confused with naivete. In a sense, everyone’s being intentional in enjoying this special, ephemeral moment. Many here acknowledge the need for ideological compromises as the Nostr ecosystem looks to make its next big step.
Indeed, there’s a sense of pragmatism steeped in discussions and development.
Fiatjaf admitted that they turned to DNS for identity because it was easy, available, and just worked. During Derek’s talk about the future of Nostr Plebs, which started as a DNS registration system, he shared that identity verification might be on the cards for their freemium relay service—even if those attending wouldn’t be the target demographic. Will of Damus conceded that iOS is a closed system, but he would continue focusing on the platform because that’s where the people are. Chris of Arc wants to build a superapp in the vein of WeChat because that’s the only way we’ll be able to onboard your grandmother. (He completely removed relay management from the app.)
During a panel of client builders, when broached about the inclusion of DIDs (or decentralized identifiers), the negative reaction wasn’t philosophical. Instead, the idea wasn’t compelling because the work would be complicated. I mean, come on, there’s so much stuff to work on that’s so much more fun.
That, at its core, is the genius of Nostr—its simplicity and elegance. For builders, it offers accessibility and seemingly limitless possibilities, powered by an ever growing library of NIPs and microapps. Like art, you can interpret its pathway through the lens of your own experience.
And isn’t that the true goal of censorship resistance? Everyone can find their own place.
This blend of experimentation, idealism, and pragmatism culminated in an “incredible presentation,” on Day 2 by Evan Henshaw-Plath of Planetary (part of our crew), as described by Jack, which he shared on Nostr.
Evan walks us through history—and his journey—from the inception of Twitter to his experiences with Scuttlebutt, and finally, the arrival of Nostr, while providing some challenging thought exercises as to what types of problems the community will need to start tackling for the ecosystem to grow up.
Here’s Evan during the Q&A:
A whole group of the early Twitter people, not just Jack and myself, but Blaine Cook, who created Webfinger, which is how the NIP05 and OAtch work, Alex Payne, Evan Phoenix, all believed in the idea of the protocol and platform, and we have spent the last fifteen years experimenting with decentralized protocols. I tried building it on ZeroNet; I tried building it on BitTorrent; I tried to build it on Ethereum. We need this open thing. We need to figure it out.
Nos.social [Evan’s project] is us taking the learnings of building an app on top of Scuttlebutt and saying that Nostr solves some major problems. It solves Delete; It solves syncing easily; It solves multi-device. It’s a platform for going forward.
We have a small company. There’s seven of us. We’ve been around for a few years building stuff. We’re working with Greg Kidd and Hard Yaka—Greg was Jack’s former boss—and trying to build these things and trying to revive the dream.
It almost feels like we’ve been working on this for so long and all of a sudden, when Elon Musk took over, everyone’s like, “holy shit, this is a problem.”
So I’m glad and really thrilled about the diversity of people building stuff and amazed at the velocity behind Nostr because it felt like we were a small group of people hacking on this and trying to do it, and now there are thousands of us and tremendous talent. I’m super excited about that.
One of the other things we’re doing is this thing called the Universal Namespace, which is our own NIP verification service that you can then verify, if you want to, in order to provide KYC/AML so that, if you want to, do verified transactions; if you want to, interact with the traditional banking system; if you want to be legal, our NIP05 verification system lets you do that using verifiable credentials.
You don’t have to do it, but the contact discovery, the verification, and the ability to connect to wallets, if you want it, is important.
Watch Evan’s full talk here (starts at 2:49:00).
Jack was spotted throughout the three days of the conference but made his first official appearance during the closing ceremony and Q&A (starts at 6:10:30).
But the highlight came at 6:40:58, when Daniel Latorre of Planetary, who first met Jack in 2009, asked him to reflect on the last 14 years and how we might not repeat some of the mistakes from the past.
Here’s Jack’s answer:
The biggest thing is the permissionless concept. When we started Twitter, there was kind of one path for us, and rabble talked about this—his presentation was beautiful. Where’s rabble? Oh, he’s down there. Of course, he’s always in the background somewhere.
When we started Twitter, there was a feeling that because of the simplicity, it was like a protocol level thing. It wanted to be that. I wanted it to be that. But we had no clear path to do that. Apart from Linux, we had no parallels that we could point to as a pattern of what we could do.
As far as I knew—rabble may have had a few [ideas]—but it just felt like we took this step, which was Ev graciously funding and buying the company back from investors, but becoming an investor himself, and then taking on more investors. Suddenly, there’s only one way to go there—which is you’re either acquired or you’re public. You start issuing equity, and you have all these employees who need liquidity now. So that puts an urgency around it, and pushes it.
And you don’t have a revenue model. So you need a revenue model. Hey, did you see what Google did with their revenue model? And what Facebook did with their revenue model? They did ads. Bitcoin wasn’t [there.] We started before the iPhone. We were on Nokia phones and text message—T9 for those of you in the audience old enough to remember that.
We rushed and ad model, and then you start getting trapped in these things. One step leads to another, and the momentum builds, and suddenly, it’s completely different.
So just the fact that this [Nostr] is not starting with that intent. What Fiatjaf did—which I’m so grateful for, and I think is so beautiful—is he put this in a very simple markdown document (which I know he’s got feelings about markdown). But he put it in the public domain, and he had some opinions. He built some things, and then people just saw it, and they’re like, wow—that’s it. That’s the essence.
In fact, it’s not just the Twitter thing—it’s much more.
But it solves for the Twitter problem as well.
It’s already fixed [that.]
All the things that we ended up doing—it was a very good vehicle for Twitter, to build a company around it. It was the only vehicle we had at the time. And it’s done its thing. It’s influenced. And I think it’s influenced the reason we’re all here—and probably [in] the wrong way—but nonetheless, we’re here. It’s actually Twitter’s 17th birthday, today. This is the 17th anniversary of the first tweet going [out.]
Which I would normally have mixed feelings about, but seeing this, seeing Fiatjaf’s work, seeing all the work of this panel, all the folks in this room, seeing all the people in this room… How many of you are not developers? [Half the audience raises their hands.] That’s pretty incredible. We’re mainly talking about super technical things. I’m sorry, but it’s pretty incredible that we’re putting a conference together this early with non-developers. Twitter was not that. It was all nerds and geeks for the first year and a half, two years.
So there’s something here. There’s some essence that has been found and discovered, and now it’s just pulling the thread.
But there’s no real barriers in the way. It’s just back to the relevance part. How do we build something that people want to run to and feel like, I want to be part of this because it helps me be better. It helps me see more of the world.
I think it’s here. We’re going to be impatient because we want it to move faster and faster. But this is moving pretty fast, as evidenced by this conference itself.
And that’s arguably what’s most exciting about Nostr, the community that’s developed around it, and the momentum it’s seeing.
Nostr’s entry into the broader internet’s mindspace comes at a time when crypto has had a few cycles to develop its infrastructure, reach, and usability. It comes after a hyped up web3 cycle that’s offered plenty of learnings, one way or another. It comes at a time when our trust in the technological platforms and institutions that have defined and changed us over the past two decades is at an all-time low.
It comes at a time when we just know a little bit better and have a few more tools at our disposal.
Nostr offers hope in a different kind of path forward—a path, as Jack aptly noted, simply didn’t yet exist when they were building Twitter the first time around.
Its success could eventually serve as a blueprint for future projects, protocols, and the business models that sustain them, grounded in the decentralized web.
In that sense, we’ve never been better equipped for the beginning of the internet all over again.
2. It’s all come full circle
Jack’s first tweet, exactly 17 years ago, sent from Greg’s house:
3. Thoughts from the crew
Greg Kidd, Hard Yaka partner:
I think we definitely see the seeds here for an ability to decentralize what has been the foundation of Web 2.0, social media. There’s a workable model here that could turn Twitter and Facebook into MySpace. There’s a fervent community. I think this is real. It’s early; it’s still kind of playful.
If you could make it user friendly so everybody could use it—even normies like us—then it could be transformational. The challenge is to make sure we are building things for the 99 percent—not just the one percent. That could trip this up and slow it down, but the technical foundations are there.
…
At the end of the day, when you get an identity, everything should be set up for you behind the scenes without you even knowing it. You should never need to know what your public key is. If you really need it, then, sure, you can copy it and give it to someone who’s just in the Bitcoin world. But ultimately, this is something that Nostr gets right. They started out with identity, which is a public-private key. They just didn’t put a name over it. So it’s still geeky, and it’s impossible to find. But these guys are starting to address it.
Jun Hiraga, Hard Yaka partner:
The protocol is just very simple, and it works—the fact that you’re just provided with a pair of keys and you’re there. It has the right structure and composition to scale. And then you have NIPs, this library of tools that developers can pick and choose. The protocol seems to be open enough such that it invites everybody to participate and experiment, to add their ideas for what the future of social media should look like. In conceiving a new framework, it’s sometimes easy to overcomplicate things. But it’s the simple things that have most changed how we operate today.
Bianca Lopes, serial entrepreneur, UN ambassador:
I’m still covered in gratitude and curiosity; my time here has been electrifying. I came in as a relative outsider, but my knowledge graph has completely changed. I think the enthusiasm around the interoperability and scalability of the technology, the potential business models, and the possibilities in terms of protecting human values and freedom—it’s just really cool and exciting. I don’t think you need to be a technical person interacting with NIPs every day or implementing a relay to be experiencing the ethos and desires of what’s starting here.
But when I look even at some of the client experiences, we’re still early days. There’s still a lot to be defined, and I had so many wonderful conversations with people who share my concerns around ethics and privacy—how do you build those boundaries? How do you build context and how is that done in a user-friendly way when it comes to user experience? How do we use things like credentials, decentralized identifiers, and zero-knowledge proofs to build these boundaries and still say, “Okay, in this place, over here, in this relay or in this environment, here are the rules of the game.” There’s still a lot to come, and that’s what’s really exciting here—what’s possible if the principles and the foundations are done right.
Ana Maria Jipa, /uns, co-founder and CEO of Olyn
It takes a great ecosystem to take over a platform, and Nostr can be that. It’s still really early to know, and that will depend on the interpretation and understanding of the utility, and not getting married to any particular use case or approach. To give itself the best shot, Nostr should maintain its neutrality as any other tool or protocol on the internet. And you got a sense of that here—the openness and its permissionless nature. During the last Q&A, Will of Damus mentioned that any NIPs are welcome.
So it’s really exciting to see what things will come out of it, and I think a lot of people see it going in a lot of different directions. We saw this mentioned during one of the panels—what could destroy it? My answer is pretty straightforward: if it has no utility. If people don’t see it through a product lens. Things like distribution, user acquisition, and user experience will play a big role.
A lot of people see it from the angle of decentralized social media, but I think it has much more potential than that. What sort of role will it play for digital identity? What role will it play for value exchange? When you bring in the human component, we tend to think in a very perfect way, and we have all these different opinions about the world. I think that’s the beauty about the stage Nostr is in—it’s imperfect. And its core should stay imperfect without bringing too much structure or complexity yet. The key for Nostr is to stay open to everybody. To understand its potential is to respect and maintain its simplicity.
4. Universal Namespace (/uns) at Nostrica
Aleix López demos /uns at Nostrica, Day 3:
5. Vote for the Nostropical hackathon community winner
Nos, /uns, and Hard Yaka hosted a hackathon March 22-23 at the same venue of the conference, Awake (Uvita, Costa Rica).
More on the hackathon and how to vote (by tomorrow!)—via Nos:
The Nostropical hackathon took place on March 22 and March 23 on the two days following the Nostrica conference. It was organized as an autonomous satellite event by Hard Yaka, Universal Names, and Nos.Social. For two amazing days, participants gathered at the Awake Center in Uvita, Costa Rica and built a dozen projects aimed at forwarding our shared mission of building the nostr ecosystem.
We are grateful and inspired by all of the individuals and teams that participated and the projects that were born out of this shared time together.
We will be judging the projects as follows:
The 100,000,000 Satoshi prize is divided into three pools.
Judges Selection: 25,000,000 Satoshi
Community Voting: 25,000,000 Satoshi
Completed & Presented Project: 5,000,000 Satoshi
The community vote winner will be chosen by the same algorithm we use in nos.social to address spam and highlight relevant content. It’s a friends of friends algorithm. If you’re followed by somebody who is followed by somebody who participated in the hackathon then you can vote. No new followers after this post will be counted. To vote like the reply about the project following this post. It’s approval voting, vote for as many projects as you’d like, but we’ll only count one vote per project per npub. The voting ends at noon UTC Tuesday March 28th.
Watch the final presentations here.
A big congrats to Nostr Torrent for winning the judges selection, and a huge thank you to everyone who participated and supported the event!
Best of luck to the other participants during the community vote. Get your vote in, now!
6. Hard Yaka and friends
It was amazing meeting everyone. We’ll see you all soon!
Pura vida!