Recently I’ve been more active on Nostr, and I’m really excited about what’s happening there.

Nostr is a decentralized protocol for communication, mostly geared towards social media. Unlike the social media we're used to (X, Instagram, TikTok, etc), Nostr isn't owned or controlled by a company. It's not a corporation or even a platform. It's a protocol in the low-level internet infrastructure sense of the word.

What this means is that anyone anywhere can use Nostr, any developer can build on top of it, but no individual actor or group has control of the protocol. There is no central authority on Nostr. It’s simply software that anyone can tap into.

In practice, this means that social media applications built on top of Nostr offer true censorship resistance and full user control in a way that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere in the landscape of traditional social media. Even more interesting, in my opinion, is that Nostr (via Bitcoin, Lightning Network, and newer protocols like eCash) has money natively built into the protocol.

I think that this combination of features makes Nostr one of the most exciting new things happening on the internet right now.

Censorship Resistance

Users on Nostr, by definition, cannot be censored. This is because there is no central authority within Nostr that holds the power to do so.

If you use any existing social media platform, whether that's Instagram, YouTube, X, or something else, you are entirely at the mercy of the individuals in control of that company. You can be censored, shadowbanned, buried in the algorithm, or kicked off the platform entirely. You don't own your account, you don't own your relationship with your audience, and you don't have any rights to the platform that can't be taken from you. We've seen countless examples of users on these platforms being censored. We even saw the former president of the United States get banned from all of the major platforms simultaneously. It got especially bad in 2020, when anyone who questioned official narratives around COVID was banned on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. It doesn't even matter that these are all different companies— they work in lockstep and tend to enforce similar policies and ban the same individuals.

I think this is bad because I believe in free speech, and I think it’s dangerous to give any single company, set of companies, or government the power to decide who can say what online. The internet is the global town square, and it’s incredibly important for true free speech to exist there. Nostr enables that.

But it’s not just about free speech. Censorship on social media platforms isn’t just an issue for people speaking about controversial topics. In a sense, everyone on traditional social media platforms is self-censoring in some way, because they are catering what they say to the whims of the platform’s algorithm. The algorithm drives engagement and reach, so users (often subconsciously) allow the algorithm to dictate what they do or do not say. They avoid using certain words or avoid including links to external sites, since these tend to lower engagement with the algorithm. As a result, the content that’s surfaced isn’t necessarily the best content, but rather that which caters most closely to the whims of the algorithm. In an ideal world, social media would allow users to share freely and surface the best content. Instead it’s become a low-quality content mill where the content itself is shaped by the algorithm, driving quality lower and lower.

User Control

On Nostr, users have full control over their content experience. Content algorithms can and do exist on Nostr, but users are free to select which of these they use and when, and they can easily switch between them.

On many Nostr clients (including Primal, my personal favorite), you can select how you’d like your content to be displayed. You can simply get content from users you follow in the order it was published, or you can sort by various engagement metrics including likes, comments, zaps (Bitcoin micropayments), and more. Because you own your identity on Nostr, you can even switch between different clients seamlessly. So not only do you have full control and choice when it comes to content algorithms, you also have control and choice when it comes to interfaces and various UX features. And because there’s no central algorithm that dictates which content surfaces, users don’t have to cater their content to an algorithm. They’re simply free to speak their minds and share content (including external links, unpopular opinions, or controversial subjects).

Nostr, in my opinion, is an example of what social media would look like if it had been built from the ground up to serve users and developers, rather than social media corporations. That’s a really big deal.

Native Money

The final feature of Nostr, and the one I think is the most interesting, is that Nostr is built with Bitcoin as native money for the protocol. Users don’t have to engage with Bitcoin in any way, but most Nostr clients are natively integrated with Bitcoin’s Lightning Network (and other protocols like eCash) that allow users to move money around at the speed of light for fractions of a penny.

Today, for the most part, Nostr looks like an X clone with fewer users, less content, and weaker network effects. Most of the active users are there because they are ideologically aligned with Nostr’s free speech and user control ethos. But the one thing that Nostr has that truly distinguishes it from X and other social media platforms is native money. I think that this opens up new use cases for Nostr that will drive its growth over the next few years.

On Nostr, users can like posts from other users, but they can also “zap” them, which means they send a small micropayment to the user. This can be fractions of a penny, but it happens instantaneously via Lightning Network. Most clients have Lightning wallets built in, so users can also send money to one another quickly and easily. Just this week I saw a post from a user whose brother had lost his home in the LA wildfires. Users on Nostr were able to send donations instantaneously and seamlessly. Users can select a content algorithm that sorts posts not by most liked but by most zapped, which often surfaces higher-quality content. And now people like Mike Rama are doing “zapvertising” experiments where they’re paying users directly for their attention via zaps. This is an entirely new advertising model that’s more aligned with user interests and may ultimately have better economics for brands that advertise online.

The Future of Nostr

I’ve been a user of Nostr since the early days— I actually attended the first Nostr conference in Costa Rica in 2023. Back then the network was unstable and the user experience was pretty bad. It definitely wasn’t ready for any kind of mass-onboarding event, and a lot of users eventually churned as a result.

I think that’s starting to change. The user experience is getting a lot better, and the community is slowly growing. I’m not sure what will become of Nostr, but I can confidently say that it’s one of the most impressive grassroots open-source technology movements I’ve ever seen. The only thing I can compare it to is the early energy around Bitcoin back in the 2015 era. And that’s really exciting.

If you want to give Nostr a try, download Primal and find me there: npub1xwmg63hxnc87z3ww4sf0as7w25kxr7tj7dywz0f58lme2muh4fkqlf5c2p