Try Nostr's first client, Damus, a new social network for Web3 endorsed by Twitter's founders

"Pura Vida". On January 1, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey typed out the words on his Twitter account, which got a lot of likes.

Pura Vida, this Costa Rican phrase symbolizes simplicity, purity, just like the life of the local people. Jack, who stepped down as CEO of Twitter, wanted a simple social network.

There should be no one who is not annoyed by the current social network application, which is cumbersome, complicated, heavily commercialized, dominated by one company, increasingly heavy experience, and increasingly strict review. This is what all social App users around the world are dissatisfied with. As the founder of the world's largest social platform, Jack has a far better perception than us. His vision for a decentralized web is much bigger than we think.

Since leaving Twitter, the Bitcoin fundamentalist has immersed himself in the world of decentralized networking. On February 1, Jack excitedly announced on Twitter the launch of Damus, the first mobile client for the decentralized social protocol Nostr, becoming a new player in decentralized social networking.

How to register and simple experience

First of all, download Damus client, you can search Damus social directly in Apple App Store, please click Google PlayThis link. As a minimalist social app, Nostr Registry takes minimalism to the extreme. There is no need for any personal information such as a mobile number or email account, just a nickname and you can create an account from scratch.

Below the profile to fill in, it will give you an Account ID, or public key. This ID is like an encrypted address, and other users can follow you through this ID search. In other words, in the world of Nostr, this string of characters is your identity. Once you've filled out your profile, the new page will let you save your account's public and private keys. The public key is your identity, and the private key is the password that proves your identity. If the password is lost, it cannot be recovered, meaning that the identity corresponding to the password is lost in this world.

The Damus client is similar to Twitter in terms of product usage and has almost the same page layout, from left to right, with the home page, private messages, search and notifications. Enter the Account ID (public key) of the user you want to follow on the search page, and the user's profile page is displayed. You can also search for Username and Display Name to follow the user. For example, when we type Jack's Nostr public key into the search box, we can see Jack's comments on the Nostr network.

In addition, the search page displays all users' latest posts in real time, and you can reply, retweet, like, and share. Each post has a unique Note ID, which can also be copied and entered on the search page. If there's a problem with the post, you can long-press the post to report fraud, nudity, and illegal content to the connected repeater, while blocking the author (found in the Blocked feature). As a product of the Bitcoin community, the peer-to-peer payment system is essential. Damus also has Jack's favorite Bitcoin Lightning network function built in, which can directly call the third-party lightning network wallet payment.

This is the Damus experience. It seems to be nothing special. It's all our usual social habits, but much lighter. And that's what makes Nostr, minimalism and censorship resistance.

Design logic of Nostr

Nostr 是一个「极简」的社交协议，旨在 「 一劳永逸 」 地创建一个抗审查的全球社交网络：不依赖于任何受信中央服务器、不依赖于 P2P 技术，不会发行 Token。

The technical architecture of Nostr is simple: the user runs a local client, such as damus. When something needs to be published, it is signed with a key and sent to multiple Repeaters (managed servers set up by protocol participants). When you need to see something, you can ask around Repeaters for information. Anyone can run a repeater, which only stores and forwards content. The user does not need to trust the repeater, and the signature is only verified on the client.

The repeater does not communicate with another repeater, only directly with the user. When wanting to "follow" someone, a user simply instructs their client to query the repeater it knows about for posts from that public key. The repeater can prevent users from Posting anything to it, but this has no effect on users, as they can post content to other Repeaters. Anyone can also build their own repeater, not complicated, if you can't find other repeater to publish content, your own repeater can still publish.

In addressing decentralization and pervasive social media, Nostr uses the void to allow operators to expand development. Each user can publish their content updates to any number of Repeaters, and Repeaters can charge users a fee and erect a threshold, which ensures censorship resistance; A repeater can require payment or other forms of authentication for a publication (such as an email address or phone) and associate these internally with a public key to combat spam. If a repeater is used as a spam carrier, it can easily be discarded by the user and clients can continue to get updates from other Repeaters.

What is the motivation for people to run Repeaters? The developer's answer to this is interesting.

The developers argue that Repeaters should not be assumed to operate for free in the first place, and point out that DHTS in historically successful P2P networks continue to operate even without the so-called "incentive".

This looks a lot like a blockchain, but it lacks the consensus and economic incentives that are most important to blockchain. This is what developers are for, minimal protocols, even incentives and consensus are complex, and tend to lead to concentration of computing power and unintended problems. Nostr wants to do is the simplest social, everyone wants to say everything, can be seen by the people he wants to see, simple as that.

That's why Twitter founder Jack is so fond of Nostr that he donated about 14.17 BTCS ($245,000) to Nostr in December to further fund its development. And he's been active on Nostr. If you look at his public key, Jack on Nostr is much more active than Jack on Twitter.

Of course, besides Jack's Damus, Nostr Ecosystem has a number of interesting social apps like Branle, which is also similar to Twitter, Anigma, which is similar to Telegram, and Nvote, which is similar to Reddit.

BranleBranle is an experimental Web3 Twitter made using Quasar and, like Damus, a Nostr client. Currently Branle can be deployed through the Netlify API, but if users want to deploy it to their machines, they must emulate the custom title and avatar proxy capabilities by other means. However, the interaction between the application is complicated. Operations such as changing the user name and Bio require the private key to generate signatures one by one, which is very inefficient.

AnigmaAnigma is a Telegram like Nostr client, users can manage their chat groups and content like Telegram. Anigma also has a wallet management feature for in-app tipping. In addition, the "Global" feature is used to find public chat content around the world.

Nvote, Nvote is a decentralized, vote-driven community similar to services like Reddit and HackerNews. It's lightweight, not Javascript compatible, has no ads, and doesn't support in-app images, except for text posts. Nvote's activity data is public and can be digested by alternative clients without special API permissions.

Ecological competitive products strong, can rely on Shouting single success?

Of course, Nostr isn't the first decentralized social network. Whether it's Lens Protocol from the founders of Aave, or Nostr and Damus from Jack, it seems that the social influence of "Crypto OG" or "Twitterati" has been a factor in the emergence of popular Web3 social apps. However, sustainable user growth and retention cannot be achieved by relying solely on big players, especially when it comes to Web3 content social.

Before Damus became popular, many projects similar to its concept and technical structure had been explored for a long time, and many of them were already mature or taking shape. BlockBeats was also published in"Web3.0 Creator Economics Report: State of the Art and Imagination of CreatorFiThe field is thoroughly dissected. Damus and Nostr may face a fast track with far more competition than one might expect.

Mastodon

Mastodon, free open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services, was announced on the social News site Hacker News in October 2016 and gained a lot of attention after Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk. Currently, the project is maintained by Mastodon gGmbH, a German non-profit organization.

Mastodon's features are similar to those of Twitter and Weibo in that these features are provided by a large number of independently operated nodes (or instances), each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policy. Each user is a member of a specific node that can interoperate as a federated social network, enabling interaction between users on different nodes. Under this technical structure, users can flexibly choose the specifications and terms of service of their preferred nodes while maintaining access to the complete social network.

Mastodon also has its own mature mobile App and high user activity. Among all decentralized social networks, Mastodon has an absolute advantage in access traffic. At the same time, there are nearly 30 third-party desktop or mobile applications (instances/nodes) based on Mastodon protocol.

Data source: Similarweb

TuskyTusky, based on the GPL 3.0 protocol, is a lightweight client for Mastodon. It supports all Mastodon features, such as photos and videos, and its custom emojis are designed according to its own material management guidelines. Users can choose between dark and Tusky theme colors, with notification and draft features.

MastMast is a Mastodon application customized for iOS that adds a "timeline" feature to Mastodon's basic functionality to make it easier for users to read the latest content from the Mastodon community. In addition, Mast on macOS supports multi-column display of information.

Farcaster

Farcaster is also a decentralized social network with the closest technical structure to Nostr. Users can build client applications on Farcaster to broadcast messages over the Farcaster network, as well as read messages from any user. Like most social infrastructure, Farcaster gives users the freedom to move their social identity and graph between apps, and developers the freedom to build apps with new features on the web.

The technical component of Farcaster is divided into two parts: On-Chain Registry and Off-Chain Hosts. The user can claim a unique user name in the on-chain registry, which is used to store the user's host URL and serves as the DNS domain name system for the Farcaster network. The host under the chain is used to store the user's social data, and the user can host his own content on any network server through the private key signature, which can be hosted in the form of self-hosting and using the hosting host. There is more infrastructure to configure for self-hosted users, and choosing a hosted host simplifies the process of receiving messages. Overall, Farcaster still has a high barrier to entry.

Similar to Clubhouse's high quality social activities, Farcaster filters through a higher user threshold to create a more pure circle of contacts and a more active sunken community. In this case, users' demands are not economic incentives, but more spiritual satisfaction, such as in-depth interaction and resonance with professional users in science and technology, social governance, humanities and history and other related fields. As you can see in the chart below, Farcaster users show high levels of activity and stability, both in terms of interaction duration and content delivery.

Source of chart:Web3.0 Creator Economics Report: State of the Art and Imagination of CreatorFi"

The Farcaster ecosystem currently has nearly 30 active apps, with Discove and Launchcaster among the most mainstream.

DiscoveDiscove is one of the mainstream apps in the Farcaster ecosystem, which allows users and apps to create and discover feeds created by the community and is the primary source of information flow on the Farcaster network. Discove emphasized composability, and streams of information released from the app will automatically appear in other Farcaster eco-apps. As the Farcaster network grows, more application data sources and tools will be available for creating feeds on Discove.

LaunchcasterLaunchcaster is a place to share and discover new Web3 projects. Users post their projects to Farcaser and reply to their post with "@launch". The Launch bot replies with a Launchcaster link. Users can use it to connect to wallets to declare and edit their own pages. The top 10 releases will be sent in the Launchcaster Weekly email.

Lens Protocol

Lens Protocol, developed by Aave founder Stani Kulechov, is a social networking protocol based on Polygon. Lens uses NFT as the core element. Users hold their Profile NFT (NFT) through a wallet to publish content and confirm the content. Content posted by users is stored on a decentralized storage infrastructure such as Arweave or IPFS, and content links are updated to the user's profile NFT. Meanwhile, all social behaviors and relationships of users are stored in the Polygon chain in the form of NFT, and the interaction and connection between different graph NFT are realized through a series of fixed modules.

Lens Protocol and its eco-protocols are more social and composable than standalone content applications. Apps built based on Lens protocol can customize all three to enable interactive behaviors such as tipping, subscription, and community governance, and users can transfer and sell their own map NFT.

As a social protocol that has only been available for half a year but is not fully open yet, Lens still has a large number of applications focused on rich media content that have not been completed, which greatly limits the production of high-quality content within the Lens ecosystem. By the end of 2022, there are more than 98,000 NFT followers on Lens, and 53.5% of them have less than 10 followers. From the perspective of time distribution, users' attention behavior is strongly correlated with project popularity. So far, Lens' attention behavior is mainly a by-product of users' first taste. But over time, as more apps become available to users, Lens Ecosystem's content quality and economics will improve dramatically.

Source of chart:Web3.0 Creator Economics Report: State of the Art and Imagination of CreatorFi"

Lens Ecosystem already has hundreds of projects that use the underlying technology to build applications ranging from social and curatorial to audio and video content. Most of the online apps are social apps, with relatively few audio and video content apps. The mainstream apps include Lenster, Lenstube, Lensport and Iris.

LensterLenster is currently the most important application of Lens. Most of the interaction between users and Lens protocol is completed in Lenster. Lenster's user interface is similar to Twitter. Lenster is a decentralized and unlicensed social media application. Users can connect with other users' graph NFT on Lenster, or join various communities for comments, co-creation, governance and other interactions. The average user can browse the content feed on Lenster at will, but to interact with it they need to own the graph NFT.

IrisIris is a social platform for creators. Iris allows users to share original and republished content and develop their own community, and users pay a subscription fee to follow the creators. In addition, the creator can set the visible scope of the content when publishing the dynamic, and set the restriction logic such as "only visible to followers" for it.

LensTubeLensTube is a decentralized video sharing platform that aims to be the Youtube of Web3.0. LensTube's video content is stored on Livepeer, a decentralized video storage facility. Users can share and enjoy videos with their fans based on graph NFT, and receive rewards from the community through tipping, favorites, etc.

TeapartyTeaParty is a community curation app designed to help creators promote their creative content. Its functions are divided into TeaParty Hosts and TeaParty Guest. TeaParty Hosts, which focuses on creators and advertisers, pays users only when their retweets are liked and liked. TeaParty Guest is aimed at regular users, who are rewarded for forwarding premium content. In this way, both the cost effectiveness of the promoter and the quality of the content on the platform can be improved. Teaparty's adoption of the "community curator" concept is also one of the most promising economic models for the Web3.0 creator economy, as described below.

In the wave of web3, with the support of token economy, we have been used to the operation of an application + economic incentive, it seems that token has become the standard of web3. However, in the Web3 content social space, many agreements and projects often break the "unspoken rules" of the industry, and Nostr is no exception. Nostr is not so much the next generation of web3 products as it is the Internet as it should be. When you input the same public key in different clients and see the same content, it reminds you of the time when there was a third-party microblog.

After the transformation of Weibo and Twitter, we see a lot of teams trying to decentralized social, EOS, BSV and other public chains there is no lack of social applications with token incentives, telling people to interact to get token rewards, those projects are dead. In BlockBeatsWeb3.0 Creator Economics Report: State of the Art and Imagination of CreatorFiAs mentioned in ", the once-popular concept of Social Token has not withstood the test of time and market, and has been gradually replaced by projects marked by NFT graph and tokenization protocol. Perhaps, Nostr's road of "Internet comeback" will really resonate with more users.

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