What is Nostr? A few months ago I had no idea. A tweet by Edward Snowden perked my interest.

What is #nostr? Unlike the old social media "platforms" where the platform-owner (FB, Tiktok, Twitter) gets to decide who can speak—and what can be heard—#nostr is an open protocol. If a platform is a silo, a protocol is a river: no one owns it, and everyone is free to swim. https://t.co/NOW06ouJIw — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 1, 2023

Out of curiosity I downloaded the Damus iOS client to check it out. Generate a key pair, choose a username, upload a profile photo, and you're on your way. There is also a web client Snort. Your profile is based on your public key so it follows you regardless of client (unlike Mastodon).

It's simple; it's easy to host; it's easy to write clients for. Just set up server; add it as a relay using any client; and you've got social media that can't be censored. You can't be shadow-banned or cancelled. Of course this isn't always a good thing. But both the servers and clients allow plenty of options to hide and filter content you don't want.

In fact it's so simple and flexible, this blog is now based on Nostr — it leverages the long-form text message type. ✵ I'm currently working on converting Extrabits into a general-purpose blog engine with a comments section and everything.

Well, well well, this whole Web3 thing is coming together isn't it? We've got Blockchain for payments & authorization, IPFS for file/media storage, and now Nostr for messaging.