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@ Olaoluwa Ezekiel Michael
2024-10-31 11:28:38Understanding the Future of Decentralized Social Media
The Issues with Traditional Social MediaThe issues with social media are well-documented. Facebook and Twitter started out as information distribution networks, but through censorship and algorithmic curation, the experience they used to provide continues to be tainted by politics and biases. Certain narratives are suppressed; certain personalities are de-platformed, and all the while, advertisers are in a race to bid for your eyeballs on every scroll.
The Rise of Nostr
Since the decay of legacy social media, many apps have tried to break their network effects with little or no success. Platforms like Gab, Truth Social and Mastodon launched with massive fanfare but have slowed down in recent years. While Nostr is being hailed as the next big alternative to social media apps like Twitter as its first use case for the protocol. While the platforms mentioned above specifically target a certain social media user Nostr doesn’t; it can’t. Nostr is only a protocol for relaying data between different users; how clients display this data is up to them.
How Nostr Works
Nostr relies on relays. There is no Nostr app, there is no Nostr website; there is no Nostr company. Nostr is a protocol that provides censorship-resistant communications on the internet. Nostr uses "dumb" relays to forward messages from one user to another. Anyone can spin up a private and public key pair, connect to a relay via a client of their choice and broadcast their information, in many cases a post, to one or several relays.
Key Features of Nostr
- Decentralized: Nostr is a decentralized network, meaning there is no central authority controlling the flow of information.
- Flexible: Clients can display data in various formats, from short-form content like Twitter to messageboard-style formats like Reddit.
- Censorship-Resistant: Nostr's design makes it difficult for any single entity to censor content.
How Nostr Relays Work
Every user is identified by a public key. Every post is signed. Every client validates these signatures. Clients fetch data from relays of their choice and publish data to other relays of their choice. A relay doesn’t talk to another relay, only directly to users.
The Benefits of Nostr
- Censorship Resistance: Nostr's design makes it difficult to boot someone off the platform completely.
- Flexibility: Users can choose which relays to broadcast on and which to ignore.
- Decentralized: No single entity controls the flow of information.
How is Nostr Different?
Nostr takes another stab at a decentralized social network without the need for a blockchain or the need for you to spin up a subdomain on a server. Unlike Mastodon, where user identities are attached to servers and servers have a degree of control over registered users, Nostr is far more open and fluid thanks to its reliance on relays.
Components of Nostr
There are two components at play on Nostr: Clients and Relays. Each user interacts with a client they prefer; this could be a web app, iOS app, Android app or Desktop application. While anyone can run a relay, think of this as a storage system that you can use or allow others to use to house their posts.
How Nostr Clients Work
Clients can publish data (i.e. create posts, likes, re-shares etc.) on any number of relays and fetch data from other relays to see what accounts they follow are up to online. Each user is assigned a public key. When a user follows someone, the user’s client fetches posts associated with that someone’s public key from the associated relay. This process is repeated on start-up, with the client querying data from all relays it knows for all users it follows.
Censorship Resistance in Nostr
Nostr has built-in censorship resistance. It sounds complicated, but such an implementation solves several flaws, such as the ability to back up your content locally and choosing which relays to broadcast on and which to ignore. That means when a relay rejects your content or shuts down, your data and account are still safely stored on your local or any relays that are still happy to house your content.
Running Your Own Nostr Relay
Platforms like Yakihonne and many other support the use of Nostr and Creation of Relays.
Source: https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/nostr-relay/