Why Nostr? What is Njump?
2024-09-06 13:38:00
in reply to

bostonwine on Nostr: Would love to rewatch it sometime ☺️ I think this writeup does a great job of ...

Would love to rewatch it sometime ☺️

I think this writeup does a great job of articulating the “form and function” of nostr as a communication protocol, and some of the ways it’s different from other attempts at decentralized social media.

One thing that felt like it was missing was the use of public-private key cryptography — even though it’s on the technical side, I think it’s also the reason that one’s autonomy is as strong as it is on Nostr. It’s a shift from the permissioned “account” model where you “sign up” somewhere, to where instead you have *your own* mathematically-derived access credentials. And the protocol respects that math, regardless of what an individual client or relay wants to do. It’s really powerful, and (at least for me) that was part of the lightbulb moment around Nostr’s unique value offer.

Your article hints at this with the side by side screenshot of different clients, btw.

It also ties into the “other stuff”, beyond what people usually think of around social media (short form text + images and replies). Streaming (you mention), blogging, recipes, wiki-freedia, highlighter, podcasting, the list goes on. I view Nostr as a revolution in digital information and communication, across-the-spectrum, beyond its (very impressive) social media use cases.

All of which is to say, a mention of Bitcoin certainly isn’t required in order to convey what makes Nostr so powerful, and so interesting. I still think of it with a sort of “😮🤯🤩” perspective a lot of the time, when looking at everything it’s capable of.
Author Public Key
npub14qz92uedt0a8jte8jqg63jr3s5cc99cej36jh883z6tprlu354uqqe2q26