The Fruit of the Nostr Tree 🌱

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#Nostr isn't just a social network, that's simply the first use case to sprout from the Nostr tree.

Simple Blocks, Complex Change

Nostr isn't just a social network, in a similar way that Bitcoin isn't just a transaction network. Both of these things are true, but they each miss the more significant elements of what they accomplish.

In my mind, the source of Nostr's true potential is two fold; first, in fundamentally changing the centralized server model into an open environment of redundant relays; and second, it eliminates the association of clients with their IP address and metadata, and replaces it with identification via public keys. Within this one-two punch lies the most important tools necessary to actually rearchitect all of the major services on the internet, not just social media. Social is simply the interface by which we will connect all of them.

The combination of this simple data & ID management protocol with decentralized money in #Bitcoin and #Lightning as a global payments network, enables nostr to build marketplaces, "websites," podcast feeds, publishing of articles/video/media of all kinds, auction networks, tipping and crowdfunding applications, note taking, data backups, global bookmarks, decentralized exchanges and betting networks, browser or app profiles that follow you wherever you go, and tons more - except these can be built without all of the negative consequences of being hosted and controlled by central servers.

It separates both the data and client identity from the server hosting it. Handing the ownership back to the owner of the keys. We could think of it loosely as permission-less server federations (though this isn't entirely accurate, its useful imo). Anyone can host, anyone can join, and the data is agnostic to the computer it sits on at any given time. The walls are falling away.

Efficiency vs Robustness

There is also a major secondary problem solved by these building blocks. A byproduct of solving censorship is creating robustness, both in data integrity, but also in data continuity. While the fiat world is so foolishly focused on "efficiency" as the optimal goal of all interaction, it naively ignores the incredible fragility that comes with it. It is far more "efficient" for one big factory to produce all of the computer chips in the world. Why build redundant manufacturing to produce the same thing when one factory can do it just fine? Yet anyone who thinks for more than a few seconds about this can see just how vulnerable it would leave us, as well as how much corruption such "efficiency" would wind up enabling.

Nostr is not alone either. Holepunch is a purely P2P model (rather than based on relays) that accomplishes the same separation in a different way. One where the clients and servers become one in the same - everyone is the host. Essentially a bittorrent like protocol that removes the limitation of the data being static. The combination of their trade offs & what these protocols can do together is practically limitless. While Nostr begins building its social network, combining it with what Synonym is building with their Web of trust, (the critical ingredient of which is public key identification) we can "weigh" information by the trust of our social graph.

Not too long ago, a friend and I used Nostr to verify who we were communicating with, we shared a Keet (built on Holepunch) room key over encrypted nostr DM, and opened a P2P, encrypted chat room where we could troubleshoot a bitcoin wallet problem and safely and privately share very sensitive data. The casual ease by which we made this transaction enabled by these tools had us both pause in awe of just how powerful they could be for the privacy and security of all communication. And this is just the very beginning. The glue of #Lightning and #Bitcoin making possible the direct monetization of the infrastructure in all of the above has me more bullish on the re-architecting of the internet than ever in my life. It cannot be reasonably called an insignificant change in incentives to remove both the advertiser and the centralized payment processor from inbetween the provider and the customers online. The base plumbing of the internet itself may very well be on the verge of the greatest shift it has ever gone through.

A Tale of Two Network Effects

I would argue the most significant historical shift in the internet architecture was the rise of social media. It was when we discovered the internet was about connecting people rather than computers. The social environment quickly became the dominant window by which the average person looked into the web. It's the place where we go to be connected to others, and get a perspective of the world and a filter for its avalanche of information as seen through our trust networks and social circles. But consider how incredibly neutered the experience really is when money isn't allowed to flow freely in this environment, and how much it actually would flow, if not for both centralized payment processors and the horrible KYC and regulatory hurdle it entails for large, centralized entities.

The first time around we failed to accomplish a global, open protocol for user identity, and because of this our social connections were owned by the server on which we made them. They owned our digital social graph, without them, it is erased. This is an incredible power. The pressures of the network effect to find people, rather than websites, took a decentralized, open internet protocol, and re-centralized it into silos controlled by barely a few major corporations. The inevitable abuse of this immense social power for political gain is so blatantly obvious in retrospect that it's almost comical.

But there is a kind of beautiful irony here - the flip side of the network effect's negative feedback that centralized us into social media silos, is the exact same effect that could present an even greater force in pushing us back toward decentralization. When our notes & highlights have the same social graph as our social media, our "instagram" has the same network as our "twitter," our podcasts reach the same audience, our video publishing has the same reach, our marketplace is built in, our reputation carries with us to every application, our app profiles are encrypted and can't be spied on, our data hosting can be paid directly with zaps, our event tickets can be permanently available, our history, our personal Ai, practically anything. And every bit of it is either encrypted or public by our sole discretion, and is paid for in a global, open market of hosts competing to provide these services for the fewest sats possible. (Case in point, I'm paying sats for premium relays, and I'm paying a simple monthly fee to nostr.build for hosting media)

All of this without having to keep up with 1,000 different fucking accounts and passwords for every single, arbitrarily different utility under the sun. Without having to setup another account to try another service offering a slightly different thing or even just one feature you want to explore. Where the "confirm with your email" bullshit is finally relegated to the hack job, security duck tape that it really is. The frustrating and post-hoc security design that is so common on the internet could finally become a thing of the past and instead just one or a few secure cryptographic keys give us access & control over our digital lives.

The same network effect that centralized the internet around social media, will be the force that could decentralize it again. When ALL of these social use cases and connections compound on each other's network effect, rather than compete with each other, what centralized silo in the world can win against that?

This is not to dismiss the number of times others have tried to build similar systems, or that it's even close to the first time it was attempted to put cryptographic keys at the heart of internet communications. Which brings me to the most important piece of this little puzzle... it actually works!

I obviously don't know exactly how this will play out, and I don't know what becomes dominant in any particular area, how relays will evolve, or what applications will lean toward the relay model, while others may lean P2P, and still others may remain client/server. But I do think the next decade will experience a shift in the internet significant enough that the words "relay" and "peer" may very well, with a little hope and lot of work, replace the word "server" in the lexicon of the internet.

The tools are here, the network is proving itself, the applications are coming, the builders are building, and nostr, holepunch, bitcoin and their like are each, slowly but surely, taking over a new part of my digital life every week. Case in point; I'm publishing this short article on blogstack.io, it will travel across all of nostr, I'm accepting zaps with my LNURL, it is available on numerous sites that aggregate Kind:30023 articles, my entire social graph will get it in their feed, & there will be a plethora of different clients/apps/websites/etc through which the users will see this note, each with their own features and designs...

Seriously, why the fuck would I bother starting a Substack and beg people for their emails?

This is only the beginning, and I'm fully here for it. I came for the notes and the plebs, but it's the "Other Stuff" that will change the world.