Own what we publish. Censorship resistant social networks. These are the promises of decentralized networks like Mastodon or Bluesky, but even these fall short of what the creators of Nostr, another decentralized alternative to Twitter, with the help of Jack Dorsey himself, wanted to achieve.

Nostr is a protocol with a structure similar to Bitcoin. This is a protocol for social networks whose interactions are not based on mysterious algorithms. Also, we don’t have ads. Instead, we have a central server and cryptographic keys, much like Bitcoin.

It is no coincidence that its creator, Ben Arc (Fiatjaf) has been a collaborator of the Bitcoin Lightning network for years. In a recent interview with Forbes, he revealed that Nostr already has 18 million users and receives $5 million from Twitter’s founder.

Sending messages based on private and public keys. Nostr’s name is short for ‘Notes and Other Stuff Transfered by Relays’ and its logo is an ostrich. As its creators explain, the protocol works like this: “Everyone manages a client. A local client, a web client, etc. relays (servers hosted by someone else or you)”.

information is yours. Working in a blockchain equivalent, information is associated with these keys and not connected to specific servers. As they explained: “Since users are identified with a public key, they don’t lose their identity and fan base when kicked out. [de un determinado relé]”.

It was also defended by Snowden. next to you Jack Dorsey ad In addition to funding the Fiatjaf project, there have been other personalities who have publicly praised this protocol. One of them is Edward Snowden, a popular whistleblower and former CIA agent who changed opinion on the internet.

Other apps that take advantage of Damus, Snort, Current and Nostr. To use this protocol, you need an application that uses it. Some examples are Damus for iOS, Coracle or Snort for web, or Plebstr and Amethyst for Android. There’s also Current, a mobile app for both iOS and Android.

Through these clients, the user can create an account, create their private and public passwords, and read other users’ messages. Multiple clients that change the interface, but whose behavior is equivalent.

Criticizing Mastodon and Bluesky for being too centralized. Some criticisms of Mastodon and Bluesky are emerging from the Nostr repository on Github. The first is that “every user’s identity remains tied to a third party controlled domain”.

The power of the administrators on the servers and the size of the locks are also criticized. Finally, they explain that “there is no clear incentive to run servers” and many of them are cases of “one-man despotism”. In Nostr, where relays are used only to receive and send messages from others, managing different “nodes” has less of this effect.

And because it works on Lightning, payments are added. Nostr also accepts Bitcoin payments out-of-the-box as working on the Lightning network and having keys makes it easier to implement these payments.

As explained by Weiyu, although this payment function is seen as an extension and not an integral part of the platform.

As explained by Forbes, Nostr has approximately 500,000 daily active users and a total of 792,000 transactions with a total value of $1.9 million.

The rise of “decentralized Twitter”. The censorship problem in social networks became clear with Twitter’s decision to expel Trump. It’s not an easy discussion as Musk lives on his own platform.

Considering this, projects have emerged in recent months that try to solve the problem from the concept of social networking. Social networks where users are left to themselves, such as who can speak or what to say.

on Xataka | Cloud storage can also be deployed. This is the system even CERN uses.