A true alternative to Twitter might be the decentralized network Nostr.

Denostr
6 min readJul 4, 2024

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The simplicity of the Nostr protocol is reminiscent of Bitcoin.

The Potential of Decentralized Networks and New Identities for Sovereign Individuals

The chaos on Twitter has spurred people to seek a truly decentralized “Jerusalem.” The decentralized protocol Nostr, which relies simply on cryptographic public-private key pairs and “relays,” grants users true autonomy over their social media presence, presenting an almost ideal vision of a decentralized social network. As a result, it has been embraced by the web3 community, particularly the anti-censorship, permissionless enthusiasts of the “Bitcoin cult.” Notably, one of the cult’s famous adherents, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, posts feverishly on Nostr every day.

“Nostr” is an acronym for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. This simple phrase encapsulates the essence of Nostr’s decentralized and censorship-resistant nature. The protocol’s first documentation clearly expressed its goal: to create a global social network that resists censorship.

The concept of a “Relay” is central to the Nostr protocol. Relays are the network’s operators responsible for forwarding users’ messages, functioning somewhat like bulletin boards. Nostr specifies the permissions for these “bulletin boards”: they are responsible for forwarding messages, can refuse to forward messages, but cannot alter them. The decentralized nature of Nostr hinges on the fact that anyone can run a relay — similar to running nodes in a blockchain network — without the need for approval from a centralized entity. For users, this means they have access to a social network that can never be entirely blocked. If a relay refuses to forward their message, they can find another relay or even run their own. Unlike Twitter, where the platform can block a user’s message at its discretion, Nostr ensures that you can always find a bulletin board to post your message, or you can create your own.

What truly captivates Web3 enthusiasts is how Nostr leverages public and private key pairs as user identities, perfectly realizing the concept of the “sovereign individual” in the Web3 realm.

The sovereign individual is considered the foundational idea behind cryptocurrencies and an essential ethos of the Web3 world. The term “sovereign individual” originates from the 1997 book “The Sovereign Individual” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. They prophetically described the transition of society from an industrial economy to an information economy, predicting the dissolution of traditional power structures and grand narratives that constrain individual rights. With the advent of technologies like digital currencies, individuals would be empowered to realize their personal value.

Public and private key pairs, a concept from asymmetric cryptography, are often used to create “digital signatures” to ensure that information is sent by a specific individual and to guarantee its integrity.

Here are the key points:

  1. Private Key: Known only to the owner, it is a random string of characters.

2. Public Key: Derived from the private key through a series o mathematical operations. This process is irreversible, so knowing the public key doesn’t allow anyone to deduce the private key.

3. Sender: Uses their private key to generate a public key, which is then sent along with the message as a signature.

4. Recipient: Even without knowing the sender’s private key, the recipient can see the public key and know the message must have come from the private key holder because only the holder of the private key could have generated that public key, making it tamper-proof.

5. Nostr Network: When a user sends a message, they first use their private key to create a signature. This signature, along with the message, is sent to a relay. The relay forwards the message to the client, which verifies the message using the public key signature, ensuring it indeed came from the private key holder.

Compared to traditional centralized social networks like Twitter, Nostr unequivocally dismantles centralized power, returning control to individual users. On the Nostr network, as long as you have a public-private key pair, you can establish an identity without having to apply for an account from a central authority like Facebook or Weibo.

Nostr goes a step further than other decentralized social networks like Mastodon. Mastodon has been popular among those fleeing Twitter because it is decentralized — anyone can run a Mastodon server and create a federation, and users can choose any federation to join. However, this model still involves a central entity since users register their identities under a specific server. When users want to migrate their data and identity to another federation, they need the cooperation of the server administrators. In contrast, with Nostr, the private key remains with the user. With a private key, you can generate an identity without needing anyone’s approval or applying to any authority.

If Mastodon is a refuge for Twitter exiles and Lens Protocol is favored by the Ethereum community, Nostr is revered by Bitcoin enthusiasts. Notably, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and a well-known Bitcoin advocate, donated 24 bitcoins to developer fiatjaf and is now very active on the Nostr network. He has even shared his Nostr public key on Twitter.

This isn’t hard to understand: in decentralization and censorship resistance, Nostr undoubtedly inherits the spirit of Bitcoin. Bitcoin aims to be a peer-to-peer value transfer protocol that deconstructs the traditional financial system, while Nostr aims to deconstruct the traditional social network structure.

Moreover, Nostr’s extremely simple protocol also echoes the principles of Bitcoin. Its most significant contribution is providing a decentralized concept of identity rather than creating a new technology. Just as Satoshi Nakamoto combined established technologies like proof of work in the Bitcoin whitepaper to create a revolutionary value transfer system, Nostr integrates mature technologies like end-to-end encryption into its network, making it robust from the outset.

Simplicity also means greater potential. For instance, as a social protocol, Nostr doesn’t dictate how users should recover their passwords or specify an economic incentive mechanism for running relays. When the community first encountered this protocol and asked about economic incentives in project forums, the response was, “That’s not something the protocol should concern itself with.” By not prioritizing economic incentives, operators are encouraged to find innovative ways to provide services and generate income, thereby stimulating ecosystem development. Nostr’s creative use of public-private key pairs for identity might one day support a wide range of applications, bringing this sovereign individual identity system to a broader audience.

This minimalist protocol also aligns with the blockchain spirit of “permissionless innovation.” When you need a specific feature, you don’t need to convince the protocol developers or seek approval from a centralized entity like Twitter; you can develop it yourself. This is permissionless. “If you don’t want the right to permissionless innovation, you can comfortably stay in Web 2.0 because the internet is mature enough, and they will always provide you with various established services. The reason we use cryptocurrencies and enter the blockchain space is precisely because we pursue this.”

As a protocol, Nostr stipulates only two things: public-private key pairs and relays. Yet, these two elements form a completely censorship-resistant, decentralized network. More excitingly, its innovative identity system may propel our world towards the concept of the sovereign individual even further.

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Denostr
Denostr

Written by Denostr

Cloud-native Nostr relay implementation that is designed to empower a massive user base on the Nostr relay. Bring on 1 billion people to #Bitcoin ecosystem⚡

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