Shaken Nostr'd
Good Morning Everyone,
nostr is a new protocol developed to enable the transmission of notes (information) via relays (think servers) in a way that makes the transmission of this information difficult to stop (censorship resistant).
NOSTR stands for notes and other stuff transmitted via relays.
In my humble opinion nostr has the potential to be wildly disruptive, with the first clients built on top of the protocol focussed toward addressing social media.
Social media as we know it today is deeply flawed to say the least. The first thing to understand about the problem, is that what we call "social media" is just a bunch of companies providing a product and service that appear on the surface to have no cost. Understandably most people naturally think, "wow, that's awesome!".
However in reality there is a cost, it’s just that the cost is hidden from many of us - the users (also the product).
These companies allow you to transmit and receive information using their servers and software, but in exchange they accumulate an ungodly amount of data and are able to sell that for a variety of use cases - a major one being surveillance.
On top of this, when you transmit information via these companies’ servers they own and control everything and you own and have ultimate control over nothing. These companies are akin to walled gardens.
Most if not all require some form of KYC simply to use the platform. This makes them a single point of failure and major target for data exploits. They are massive privacy and security attack vectors. They control who can and who cannot join. They can remove you, ban you, censor what information is ok for you to transmit and what is out of bounds as determined by them at the click of a keystroke and with little recourse or explanation. They own everything - even down to your identity. Everything that you think is yours associated with the platform is actually theirs. “Your” page, “your” audience, “your” posts etc.
Perhaps one of the most pervasive hidden costs of all this information being transmitted via a handful of companies is the ability to control the lions share of online public discourse by suppressing or censoring certain kinds of speech and boosting others. This completely distorts the public discourse and allows for these entities to exert some level of influence and control of the narratives being propagated in and around society.
It also significantly degrades the user experience, as you stop seeing things from friends or people you follow and find your feed is dominated by things that are placed in front of you with the primary purpose of maintaining your attention, engagement and keeping you on the platform.
Nostr offers a potential solution to this. But not only this. The potential of nostr extends far beyond just the social layer.
One of the core properties to nostr that is such a profound shift from the current status quo of walled gardens is the use of key pairs. By leveraging public key/private key pairs (cryptography) as linked to an account or identity, this enables anyone using the protocol to join without the need for any kind of predatory KYC requirements. This also means that by simply following someones public key, you can follow them across multiple clients (applications) which allows for a level of interoperability which basically does not currently exist online.
This is huge from a privacy perspective. As it reinstalls the ability for people to selectively reveal themselves to the world as they see fit, as opposed to it being a requirement to obtain entry.
As i sit at Melbourne airport headed for Costa Rica to attend the very first Nostrica un-conference, i could not be more inspired and optimistic for the future with so many brilliant people focussed toward building tools to support and enable sovereign individuals in the digital age.
The future is bright 💜
AK
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