A Comprehensive Analysis of Nostr: A Revolutionary Social Media Protocol
Original compilation: Peng SUN, Foresight News
Original compilation: Peng SUN, Foresight News
A new technology that appears to appear spontaneously and without warning is actually the culmination of decades of research and development by multiple scientists. Political idealists exalt it as a symbol of liberation and revolution, while establishment elites denigrate and deny it. However, technologists are attracted by its great potential, and they use their spare time to experiment.
Eventually, businesses and entire industries started using this technology, with huge impact. In retrospect, many have wondered why the technology's enormous potential wasn't immediately apparent.
What technology am I talking about? Refers to any innovative and disruptive technology, such as automobiles, personal computers, the Internet, mobile phones, Bitcoin, and Nostr.
What is Nostr? Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays
Nostr is a tool for sharing relatively small amounts of data such as text postssimple agreement. It does not rely on any trusted central server, but is based on encryption keys and signatures, so it is resilient and immutable. It also does not rely on peer-to-peer data transfers and is therefore reliable.
andActivityPub、ATProtocolandSecure ScuttlebuttWoolen cloth? Yes, these protocols all create federated Gossip networks - in order to be a "first-class" independent (censorship-resistant) user of these networks, you do need to run your own server. I can tell you from experience (having been selling plug-and-play bitcoin nodes for a few years) that asking people to run servers greatly limits your market potential. Nostr is more lightweight, and you can subscribe to various relays without being tied to any single server administrator.
Nostr is not a blockchain, social network, consensus protocol, peer-to-peer network, or tradable cryptographic token.
Key properties of Nostr
decentralized. Nostr is a decentralized protocol, not controlled by any central authority or company. Instead, the network is just a collection of data relays (servers) that operate independently. This means that Nostr as a whole is not vulnerable to censorship or manipulation by any single entity.
anonymous. Unlike many social media platforms, Nostr does not collect and sell user data to third-party advertisers. No email addresses, phone numbers or government identities are associated with Nostr accounts. Just like Bitcoin, the system verifies the validity of data only through public keys and cryptographic signatures.
Monetization. Nostr offers a unique monetization system for content creators. Unlike other social media platforms that rely on advertising revenue to pay content creators, Nostr allows content creators to directly monetize their content, with fans tipping (aka “zaps”). Nostr infrastructure providers can also monetize the services they provide through Lightning Network payments.
Operation mode
Operation mode
Nostr is a decentralized note storage system where notes are just blobs of text, and notes happen to have public keys and their signatures as proof of authorship.
Nostr clients subscribe to any number of relayers (servers) they want, publish notes and query notes related to other public keys (users). The servers are independent of each other, and there is no concept of synchronization/consensus.
Under the hood, that's what Nostr is all about. Of course, there are variouspossibility of realizationin development.
Nostr tackles censorship disaster landslide
Nostr solves the governance and censorship problems inherent in centralized social networks by replacing the subjective policy of governments and officials with open markets. Almost every social media company that achieves mass adoption has run into this thorny problem, and ends up having to solve it subjectively, creating perverse incentives for those who operate services that can serve as “town squares,” despite all social interaction. Occurs on private property.
Centralized platforms are also subject to external pressure from nation-states. If you operate a business in a particular jurisdiction, you must comply with the laws of that jurisdiction. The Nostr agreement is not limited by jurisdiction.
All people should have the right to speak, but no one has an obligation to listen. Nostr provides a more reliable home for controversial statements. While Relays can prevent users from posting anything to them, they cannot prevent anyone from posting anything to other Relays. Since users are identified by public key, if they are banned by a relay, they will not lose their identity and followers.
On Nostr, you can be confident that you won't be banned from social media for any reason.
differentiating features
Nostr enabled something social networking had never supported: the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Want to see what other people's information actually looks like? Just set up a read-only account with their public key. If this feature is interesting enough, the nostr client could add a "view info as" feature, which could be as simple as a button on a user's profile screen.
Not bound by the Federation. All other "free speech" platforms still have a centralized aspect. If you find out that the app you are using has a "Terms of Service" associated with it, then you have no sovereignty over this social media. Mastodon users have discovered the severity of this problem. Going back to my earlier point, running a server is demanding on users... very few people can handle the abuse of power by administrators in "public spaces".
Unaffected by Anti-Feature
Nostr is clean and elegant, it doesn't have many junk features like:
Ads that harass you.
Algorithms that distort account ranges and disrupt presentations in unknown ways.
Feel free to limit the length and type of content you post.
Unpredictable rules about how embedded media should be rendered.
Regulatory warning for posting negative speech.
Administrators can read unencrypted private messages.
Accounts face scrutiny for violations of increasingly complex and ever-changing terms of service.
challenge
challenge
key management. Currently, most Nostr users do not keep private key information securely, they keep their keys on devices connected to the internet, which is bound to be bad. The ability to delegate and revoke keys is important for personal security as well as supporting enterprise/team account ownership. The benefit of using a centralized service with an API is the ability to grant access to third-party integrations. But in a private key-based protocol, there must be a (currently) irrevocable "God Mode" for the integration.NIP-26 supports this, although unfortunately it only supports expiration-based delegation, not indefinite revocation. passNIP-041 Implementing key invalidation is something I'm focusing on.
expansion. At the time of writing, Nostr had fewer than 100,000 daily active users. When we see spikes in growth, the infrastructure that powers the relay is under a lot of pressure, we find weak spots, and it's up to the developers to fix them. For example, recently I saw Nostr developers implementing a CDN and image optimizer to reduce bandwidth usage. On the long road to mainstream adoption, there will be no shortage of scaling challenges ahead.
andhttps://nostr.watch/relays/findandhttps://nostr.info/relays/The early stages of such a service are seen on .
Thwart spammers.NIP-013 describes a method of requiring notes to be accompanied by proof-of-work as an anti-spam mechanism, although I don't think it has seen much adoption. For example, Iris now only accepts events that are within three degrees of separation (note: refer to the theory of six degrees of separation) from your social network. Relay subscriptions can also act as an anti-spam paywall.
andnostr.directoryandhive.oneintegration with identity and reputation services such as , so that when someone opens a new account, they can actually find people to follow.
Inconsistent experience. It's unclear how much of a problem this is; for marketers who like metrics, it's sure to be annoying. The nature of Nostr is that you can never be absolutely sure that you're seeing 100% of the data available because it's spread across any number of separate servers.
This consistency problem also extends to metrics and interactions in general. For example, when I look at my account among different clients, they give me different amounts of replies/likes/reposts/tips.
Long-term data availability. This is a similar question to the one above, but more focused on the long-term issue of link rot/data rot. I wouldn't be surprised if we see mirror services crawling popular relays and checking the integrity of your historical notes, then republishing notes to new relays when not many copies exist.
Network partition. As an extreme example of the above, what happens if you share 0 trunks with someone else with whom you wish to share notes? At this moment, you will not be able to communicate with that person. But there are event hints that can be used so your client software knows how to connect to and interact with other people's relays. This is still an area of active development and could become a bigger problem if the total number of relays gets larger.
Search/index. Another issue is a side effect of data partitioning - it is naturally more difficult to search across the entire Nostr universe without querying every single relay. I wish we could see search engines optimized for Nostr to solve this problem.
Information display/recommendation. Although "algorithm" was pointed out earlier as a garbage feature, it may still be interesting / there may be a market demand for customizable automatic display algorithms. These have to be built on top of other indexing services, which can then sift through all content from your raw feed and adjacent/algorithmically similar accounts in order to filter out spam and recommend new signals. Each client can decide how to best present posts to users, so there is always a choice to consume what you want the way you want - from using AI to decide the order in which updates you will see to Just read them in chronological order.
Reliability of any server. This is one thing I see dragging down a lot of Nostr web clients - they are making dozens or even hundreds of network calls to many different servers scattered across the web because:
NIP-05 Let people set custom JSON files on personal domains
There is no "nostr image host" or other media content host, so people upload embedded content to sometimes unreliable web servers.
The point is that we get the incentives right, because we want to avoid going down the path of easy and arbitrary censorship, the kind of censorshipkill email。
Disrupting Web Architecture
What's interesting about all the challenges I listed in the previous section is that traditionally, all of these functions have been implemented in the infrastructure of web services, such as Twitter or Facebook. However, since there is no central nostr service host, these functions are effectively "outsourced" to third parties.
This is where the free market comes into play. The ideal outcome is that each of these desirable functions becomes a competitive market for service providers, rather than a single relay/server/company monopolizing them.
It's early days for Nostr
I did several engagement tests on different social media platforms and Nostr has consistently performed better than expected. Even though my Twitter audience is almost 100x the size of my tweets, my Nostr notes tend to get 25% to 100%+ engagement. Maybe it's just an ecstatic honeymoon period, and we'll see if it lasts.
Nostr is improving every day. When I started using it a few months ago, there wasn't even a way to retweet or like someone else's note, let alone tip through the Lightning Network.
we can get fromnostr.netAs seen in the project list on , many people are building tools and applications to help increase the utility of the protocol. Twitter-like functionality is by no means the only application of Nostr - we see blogging platforms, Pastebin clones, encrypted chats, and even games (chess) on nostr! At the same time, relay operators are improving infrastructure tools such as CDNs, image optimizers, data indexers, spam filters, and more.
Nostr already has its firstpodcastand the firstMeeting！
andnostr.bandandnostr.iostatistics to monitor the growth trajectory of nostr. The tipping (zap) stats in particular are interesting because they are not a costless activity - we don't see these stats being manipulated by people running spam (as the mid-February spike below shows ).
Unleash your inner Nostrich
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