Reflecting on Nostrica

Nostrica was the first nostr conference and it was full of enthusiasm as any first gathering of a community which has come together is. It reminded me of the first time the secure scuttlebutt community held its scuttlecamp or the first Ruby on Rails conference. A kind of geminal moment where a community which has existed only digitally gets together to meet in person.

I first heard about nostr when it was mentioned on scuttlebutt about a year ago, but I didn't pay a lot of attention. There are many social media protocols and new ones appear all the time. I keep a database of them and even did a lightning talk recently titled 101 social media protocols.

Nostr started to get more attention after Elon Musk took over twitter and the need for an alternate went from a heretical idea to something everybody could see. Elon gave it a boost by temporarily banning twitter bios containing nostr identifiers and links. Nostr was rough but ready enough for it because @jb55 had a decent working client for iOS in TestFlight.

Nostr is an updated secure scuttlebutt that was easier to work with and used multiple cloud services for content hosting and syncing as opposed to being a local / offline first protocol. Nostr has functionally very similar to several other decentralized social media protocols like forecaster, lens, chatternet, and bluesky's at_protocol.

With one key exception:

> Nostr is created in the open with small pieces loosely joined coordinated with rough consensus and running code.

> Nostr isn't the best at anything, or even good, it's a messy chaos that works.

Nostr is like the open web, javascript, html, php, rss, asterisk, linux. Where as farcaster, lens, and bluesky are created by a closed team that has specialized knowledge and the only people who can participate in a fundamental way are the employees of those companies or a few trusted and vetted outside contributors. The other protocols are culturally more like java, xml, android, and the chrome browser. The code is released under an open license, but it's not being developed by an open community. Nostr, like the fundamental tech which has transformed the web from an academic project to digital everything, is a permission less open commons.

Secure Scuttlebutt has the same chaotic and vital openness as nostr. I've been working building secure scuttlebutt applications and the protocol for the last 4 years. The community's core is built around solarpunk values, the idea that the future is bright, sustainable, and coordinated with autonomous and communitarian values. Think hackers meet permaculture.

What about the bitcoin?

There are a lot of nostr early adopters who are enthusiastic about bitcoin, they're true believers. But nostr doesn't use bitcoin, it has no token or cryptocurrency, there is no blockchain in nostr, no mining, no minting. There is the ability to link to a version of bitcoin micro-payments through their lightning payments, but that's possible in mastodon and twitter as well.

To me the biggest worry was what kind of culture the bitcoiners would create, and how their values would be embedded in to the technology. In my experience, the bitcoin community is more socially right wing than people involved in cryptocurrencies as a whole, somewhere to the right of Ron Paul. As a leftist anarchist, this poses a problem.

I think there's space for a multitude in nostr. The space is innovating very quickly and lots of things are being tried. I'm excited for the future.