Twitter's decentralized challengers: Lens, Mastodon, and Nostr.

Twitter changed ownership recently, and Musk has banned the promotion of other social media accounts on the Twitter platform.

In the updated usage policy of Twitter, it is mentioned that if the official account is found to primarily promote social media applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Tribel, Post, Nostr, and Truth Social, the social media application of former US President Trump, the relevant content will be removed.

First-time users will have their accounts temporarily suspended, and repeat offenders will be permanently banned.

Many uninformed media and users will simply attribute Musk's decision to increase advertising revenue on Twitter and monopolize the Web2 market.

Combined with the explosive growth trend of Mastodon, a decentralized version of Twitter, and former Twitter CEO @jack's intensive promotion of another decentralized Twitter called nostr, perhaps this behavior of Musk can provide another more reasonable explanation:

Musk is really afraid, afraid that the Twitter he just bought for billions of dollars will become the first Web2 traditional application replaced by a decentralized protocol.

Social Media Protocols and Decentralization

In the first decade of the 21st century, the concept of social media developed rapidly, and in the past decade, with the support of mobile internet technology, a large number of social media giants have emerged, such as Twitter, WeChat, Instagram, and so on.

With Bitcoin leading the concept of decentralization, people are gradually beginning to pay attention to the censorship resistance (third parties cannot delete information) and tamper resistance (how to ensure the authenticity of information without trusting third-party servers) of social protocols.

Part of the Web3 social protocols we are familiar with can achieve these goals, such as Lenster, a Twitter-like application based on the Lens Protocol.

However, Lens is different from the aforementioned decentralized protocols in terms of achieving decentralization goals from the perspective of building server infrastructure. Lens relies on blockchain as a decentralized solution, storing user content on the chain and controlled by their own wallets.

From the perspective of operational strategy, the Lens solution originates from the cryptocurrency industry (Polygon + IPFS), and currently the vast majority of users are from Web3.

The technical solutions of Mastodon and nostr are implemented by a group of non-profit technical geeks (most of the developers are not from the currency circle), targeting users who believe in decentralization or have anti-censorship needs. This group is spread across various communities, more popular, and not limited to Web3 users, so the topics within the social protocol are more diverse.

The table below categorizes social network protocols from a decentralized perspective:

Some Web3 readers may be unfamiliar with the concept of Fediverse, which is a form of decentralization.

In a federated system, any third party can run a server, and regular users can either build their own server or choose a trusted third party to run a server to store their data, and then communicate with the outside world through the third party's broadcasting function.

An email is the simplest example. Using a company's internal email domain is equivalent to building a federated server, and the data is managed by the company itself.

Using a 163 domain email means that our email history is controlled by 163, while QQ email servers do not have access to detailed data from 163. However, as an email system federation, QQ can communicate with 163 email.

Federated is the pioneer of the decentralized concept in Web3. In the past decade of development, federated services have accumulated a fairly professional open-source ecosystem.

Ecology List: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

On some level, federal-style projects are more pure than current web3 projects. They do not have economic incentive systems, and simply achieving federated decentralization through technology has attracted a large number of enthusiastic users and public server providers, with P2P downloads being the most common example.

Even without incentives, there are still a large number of people occupying their own network bandwidth and hard drive space (when downloading data through P2P, you must have the file you want to download stored in someone else's computer, and they must be willing to contribute their network bandwidth to upload the same file to you).

Except for email and P2P downloads, which have been federal applications since their inception, there is also a group of applications that attempt to compete with traditional Web2 products using the decentralized concept of federation. They use core selling points such as decentralization, permissionlessness, and resistance to censorship to gain more traffic from the existing market. The most representative of these products is the Twitter-like application Mastodon.

Mastodon: Twitter's federated alternative product

Mastodon was founded in 2016 and is a free and open-source decentralized microblogging social network. Its features and operation are similar to Twitter, but the entire network is not operated by a single centralized organization. Instead, it is a decentralized social network composed of multiple servers operated independently by different operators, exchanging data in a federated manner.

Each Mastodon's operational site (operated by a third party) is called an "instance", and users can register on any open registered entity. Users on any entity can communicate with users on other entities.

Content posted by users on Mastodon is called "Toot". Users can adjust their privacy settings to restrict who can read or view their Toots.

Unlike Twitter, this service is positioned as a small independent community and community-based (rather than top-down) review and service operation. These communities can collaborate and communicate with each other but do not rely on each other.

Like Twitter, Mastodon supports sending private messages between users. However, unlike Twitter's "tweets", Mastodon's "toots" can be set to private for the user's followers, public for specific instances, or public through the instance network.

Because Mastodon is free and open source, the only way to support the development team and instance server operating costs is through donations.

Currently, Mastodon has just surpassed 2.5 million monthly active users (another estimate is 8 million). For an internet product that has been developed for over 6 years without a business model, the development process is indeed not easy.

If we evaluate Mastodon from the perspective of the decentralized industry, this kind of large-scale real monthly active data of hundreds of thousands is a phenomenal existence in the Web3 world.

Last year and early this year, a large number of "Web3 Twitter" projects with valuations of over ten million US dollars emerged. However, most of them have already shut down their servers, and even for those that have not yet shut down, their real active user numbers have basically returned to zero.

Looking back at such "Web3 Twitter" projects, it can be found that user data does not belong to the users themselves, but is stored on servers rented by the project party. The project party only added wallet login function on the front end, and ultimately still used centralized technical solutions.

From the perspective of project quality, the codebase of these pseudo Web3 projects is even less than that of a mobile app for Mastodon. However, by leveraging a simple wallet login button, they have hitched a ride on the Web3 hype and raised tens of millions of dollars.

It should be noted that Mastodon instance operators are paying real money for decentralized hosting costs, and they are giving the choice to the users. User data storage will only be on the instance server specified by the user, and the user only needs to communicate with trusted instance servers, making it impossible for other servers to access user privacy information.

All along, Mastodon has been free and open source, so there are no annoying Twitter ads. Besides relying on donations, the only way to support the development team and instance server operating costs is through donations.

If you have experienced both Mastodon and various "Web3 Twitter" platforms, you will feel how crazy and ironic it is when hot money pours in.

It should be emphasized that the federated operation mode of Mastodon does not fundamentally achieve decentralization. The major servers still operate according to the will of their owners, which largely avoids the risk of one person being too arbitrary and domineering like Musk on Twitter.

Under extreme conditions, if an instance needs to stop running, Mastodon requires server owners to notify users three months in advance that the server will be shut down, allowing users to backup and migrate their data in advance.

From the phenomenon of Mastodon, it can be seen that decentralization has inherent value. Even without an economic incentive model and a standardized team operation, Mastodon has only achieved usability, but it still attracts hundreds of thousands of users to actively use the product and can still gather a group of high-level developers to actively upgrade the codebase.

Nowadays, some Web3 giants are also paying attention to the federated track. Last week, social media leader Mask Network acquired Pawoo.net, the second largest instance service provider on the Mastodon network. We can look forward to the new trend of decentralization brought by the federated architecture to Web3.

Imagine if there was another new class of Twitter application that added blockchain incentives and achieved true decentralization, with a user experience as smooth as Mastodon. Its development potential must be higher than Mastodon, right?

There really is such a project, and it is called nostr, which will be introduced below.

Nostr: The Revolution Launched by Twitter's Former CEO

Nostr, short for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays", can be understood as a relay transmission protocol for social media information. According to the Github commit records, Nostr was initiated in November 2020. As a generic infrastructure, it is still in its early stages and there is relatively little information available about it.

Nostr is divided into two components: the client and the relay. The client is used for signing and verifying information, and is run by the user; the relay is responsible for transmitting messages and can be run on a server set up by anyone.

The client stores the user's key internally, and each message must be signed and sent to the relay. The relay does not modify the data and the authenticity of these messages is verified by the client, so users do not need to trust the relay, which is more in line with the spirit of decentralization.

Nostr not only has technical advantages over federated Mastodon, but also has the marketing support of Jack Dorsey, who served as CEO of Twitter twice during its development. There is no need to worry about Nostr facing the same promotional challenges as Mastodon and being left with no users.

Jack has been intensively promoting Nostr on his personal Twitter account every day since the 15th of this month. Coincidentally, 5 days after Jack endorsed Nostr, Twitter officially announced the rule to ban third-party social media promotion.

It's such a coincidence that it's hard not to associate these two things together. Perhaps Musk is really afraid. If Jack, like he did in the past to help Twitter, also makes Nostr bigger and causes a blood-sucking effect on Twitter, then Musk's $40 billion acquisition of Twitter at the peak of the bull market will continue to shrink significantly.

It can be said that during the turbulent period after Twitter changed hands, Jack is undoubtedly the most suitable candidate from the perspective of professionalism, influence, and news topicality to promote an alternative product to Twitter. According to media reports, Jack donated about 14 BTC, worth about $245,000, to further support the development of Nostr.

The most important thing is that the Web3 community can look forward to the Nostr storage incentive plan. Unlike Mastodon, which has experienced two full rounds of bull and bear market cycles, it has not released any intention to approach the encryption community (issuing coins).

Nostr is the opposite of ZKS, originating from the BTC community and already supporting BTC transfers. The documentation also hints at providing incentives for storage functions in the future (original sentence: "When incentive measures are clear, market forces can easily solve storage problems.").

Nostr, as a decentralized social media platform, was founded with a close connection to the cryptocurrency and Web3 communities. Compared to other Twitter-like predecessors that relied on scattered communities to start, Nostr had a much higher starting point, and its future with Web3 composability can lead to endless possibilities.

After all that has been said, let me briefly explain the methods and logic for participating in Nostr:

The general direction of the strategy is to increase one's number of followers and amount of posts by using different clients as much as possible.

Currently, Nostr has 9 third-party clients, each with different functionalities and compatibilities. You can refer to them to choose the client that suits you best.

Please note: A newly created account will be given two keys, the one starting with "npub" is the public key, which is equivalent to the account name and can be shared with others to facilitate searching and following.

Private keys starting with "nsec" are used for account login and should not be made public. In addition, there are two formats for public and private keys: one is the format starting with a specific four letters mentioned above, and the other is the 64-bit format. The nine different clients have not standardized a fixed format, and you can use 【damus.io/key】 to convert formats.

At the end

From Musk's aggressive measures to block centralized Web2 competitors and decentralized social media, it can be seen that he is concerned about the trend of Twitter being replaced.

The emerging decentralized application nostr has the potential to approach or even surpass Mastodon, the current Twitter alternative leader, in terms of technology and community. Mastodon may also further threaten Twitter's dominant position.

However, at present, nostr is still in its early stages. With 9 different clients and various key formats, it may not be as user-friendly as Mastodon clients. In the future, the Homework section of the Biteye website will provide detailed interactive assignments and relay setup methods. Interested friends can join the group to keep up with the latest developments.

Original article link

欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群：

Telegram 订阅群：https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram 交流群：https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter 官方账号：https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia