Are you tired of social media apps:
- Censoring/shadowbanning you, no matter how many times their CEO told you “we care about free speech for real this time”
- Creating an obstacle course of entry-barriers stopping you from monetizing your content
- Acting as completely separate silos from one another, requiring you to constantly make the “Hey guys, go follow me on this other platform, and this other platform…” posts, starting from scratch with each move (while also requiring you to learn a completely different algorithm/set of censorship policies every time you switch)
What if there was an alternative social media network where:
- There is no mystery algorithm, CEO, or “fact-checking team” that can decide whether you thrive or die based on whether or not they agree with your opinions
- Instant content-monetization capability for EVERYONE, DAY 1, no matter the size of your account
- The network is a PROTOCOL (like email) rather than a PLATFORM (like X, IG, etc.), allowing a whole ecosystem of apps to be built ON TOP of your social graph, so your followers stick with you everywhere you go
READ ON, because this social media network of the future already exists, and it’s going to change absolutely everything ⚡️
What Is Nostr?
Nostr is a decentralized social media PROTOCOL (like email), rather than a PLATFORM (like X or Instagram).
Nostr is not a company, so it has no CEO, no board of directors, no “fact-checking team” that can censor you, ban you, or manipulate the content you’re able to send and receive through mysterious algorithms. Rather, it’s a foundational set of rails that allows app-developers to build ON TOP of the underlying protocol.
Note: we’ll be using email as the best analogy for an internet protocol throughout this post, as it will help you see how Nostr functions in a similar way.
Here’s how the email protocol works in a nutshell:
Email = the protocol
Gmail, Outlook, Protonmail, etc. = the apps (or clients) built ON TOP of the protocol
Nobody within this ecosystem of apps built by Google, Microsoft, etc. controls email; they merely work on top of it, as they all build independently within an environment where the different apps interoperate seamlessly with each other.
Example: I can send you an email from Gmail and you will receive it in Outlook just fine, as these platforms both plug into the same foundational protocol of email
Nostr works the exact same way, just for social media.
Unlike the current social media structure where you have a bunch of centralized platforms like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. all operating completely separately (which is a huge pain for users), Nostr is a protocol that acts as a social glue, where apps just like these can all be freely-built ON TOP of the universal Nostr protocol, which allows users to carry the same followers with them across all of the different apps. And as this ecosystem of apps develops, it will have its own versions of all the social apps people know and love, like Instagram, X, etc.
Looking even further into the future, Nostr megabulls like myself foresee that the Instagrams and X’es of the world will eventually have to become Nostr clients themselves, as people will no longer see the point of investing energy into these platforms where they can be deplatformed at any time, their followers don’t even get to see their content due to mystery algorithms throttling their posts, all while making far less (or zero) money than they can on Nostr.
FOLLOWING ME SO FAR?
Awesome.
Let’s continue…
How Does Nostr Work?
“At it’s most basic level, Nostr is a communication protocol that acts as the social glue that binds all of your apps together.”
– Derek Ross
(Keep in mind there will be plenty of repetition of concepts/analogies throughout this post – I really want to drill in the fundamentals).
We’re now going to introduce a couple of vocabulary words that are commonly used in the social media conversation, to bolster your awareness as we dive deeper into the past, present, and future of social networking:
Client: Basically just a fancy word for “app”. Gmail, Outlook, etc. in our earlier email example, as well as the X and Instagram apps you can download and open on your phone, are all clients.
Relay: A Nostr-birthed term that basically just means “server” in the Nostr ecosystem. X, Instagram, and TikTok all have ONE server that holds allllll of the posts from their entire user base in a singular, massive database. The Nostr model, alternatively, allows all users to run their own servers (which we call “relays”), giving Nostr users the ability to post their content to a wide array of different relays (including their own if they choose to run one), thus eliminating the single-point-of-failure power of centralized Big Tech platforms.
“Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don’t have to be trusted.”
– @fiatjaf
So, to summarize the above into simple bullets 👇
Instagram / X / TikTok have:
- A single CLIENT (i.e. the app you tap on your phone to open it up)
- A single centralized server (or RELAY) where all the posts/content from every user on Earth flows through
Nostr breaks up both of these pieces (CLIENTS and RELAYS). So:
- There’s an open marketplace of different CLIENTS you can choose from (just like in our email example where you can select between Gmail, Outlook, etc.), or, if you’re a developer, you’re free to build your own
- This open ecosystem of Nostr clients are all COMPETING for your use in a free market environment (there are already tons of awesome ones out there for you to try, see nostrapps.com)
- There’s also an open market of RELAYS, meaning when you post, it doesn’t just go to one gigantic centralized server that can easily censor, shadowban, or manipulate how others see your content. Rather, you as a user can post your content to as many relays as you want (most people connect to 10-20 by default, and there are already thousands for you to choose from)
- Since anyone can run their own relay, even if every other relay on Earth decides to team up and ban you from being able to post on theirs, you can still run your own, then anyone who wants to follow you just needs to connect to your relay. BOOM, completely ban-proof! (Keep in mind this is just a thought exercise. Since the open market of relays is incentivized to not be ban-heavy—as everyone can publicly see who they censor—you’re not going to get kicked off of all of them and have to rely on your own unless you’re posting REALLY bad stuff)
The game-changer of Nostr censorship-resistance in a nutshell:
If you don’t like a certain Nostr Client, you can move to a new one, or build your own.
If you’re getting censored by a certain Nostr Relay, you can move to a new one, or run your own.
While all of this is happening, you can get paid in Bitcoin (censorship-proof money) for your content with one tap, from anyone on Earth who values your content (more on that in the next section!)
One last point of clarification on relays before moving on, as this is a very common question:
“If ANYONE can post ANYTHING on Nostr…won’t scrolling the feed be a total mess of vulgar/disgusting content that I don’t want to see?”
2-part answer:
- You would have to go out of your way to find the “Global” feed that shows every post flowing through every Nostr relay. Client developers know this isn’t what the average user wants, so the default view on all top clients shows only the content from the people you’ve chosen to follow, trending posts, and other stuff like that (similar to how when you make a new account on IG or X, you don’t get fed a page full of Chinese characters and hentai porn (which are being posted by weird corners of the internet); the apps are designed to give you a pleasant starting feed of recommendations. Nostr clients do the exact same thing)
- As touched on earlier, individual relays DO have the power to censor content, and all the most popular relays implement filters to keep the vulgar garbage out. The difference is, everyone in the network can see which relays are censoring what content, so if you don’t agree with how heavy-handed a relay is getting on culling certain content, you can just move to a different relay, or again, take ultimate control and run YOUR OWN relay where YOU can decide exactly what type of content you want to see.
Again, most of the above points will be irrelevant once you’ve created a follow list (since that’s going to be what populates your feed).
Due to the above factors at play, the free market of Clients and Relays is highly incentivized to block out ONLY the universally-agreed-upon really bad stuff (you can use your imagination on what I mean by that…) from users’ feeds, and NOTHING ELSE. Thus, the average user will have an experience just like they do on the legacy apps, where all they ever see is content from the accounts they follow, and perhaps trending/recommended content if they so choose to. (More on how this choice of algorithms works on Nostr later.)
Now, we need to talk about a huge, downright revolutionary piece of Nostr, which we’ve only grazed thus far: INSTANT, DIRECT CONTENT-MONETIZATION!
Content-Monetization on Nostr
“Payments make social media better because it’s less about engagement and views, and more about value being transferred.”
– Lyn Alden
On legacy social media apps, in order to start earning money for your content, you typically have to hit a certain threshold of followers, impressions, or other arbitrary metrics imposed by the platform’s overlords. Then, when you finally finish jumping through all of the hoops they’ve made up…you find out firsthand that creators ALWAYS get the short end of the stick on these monetization models, as at the end of the day, these are all Big Tech companies who are incentivized to pay their creators as little as possible, so they can dish out massive CEO bonuses and pad the pockets of their shareholders. (Just ask anyone who’s been grinding to make money on YouTube, Twitter, or the other platforms that have relatively easy/well-paying monetization programs. 9 out of 10 of these creators are unsatisfied with what they’re receiving in return for their hard work).
How Nostr Fixes This
Firstly, the arbitrary obstacles required to monetize your account are GONE. All you have to do to monetize on Day 1 is attach a Bitcoin Lightning wallet to your Nostr account and voilà, you’re all set to receive payments from anyone who wants to “zap” your content! (Some clients, including Primal, even allow you to create a wallet from WITHIN their client, removing the step of needing to spin up a Lightning wallet somewhere else. This is a big reason why I recommend Primal as a fantastic starting client where beginners can create their account and start posting.)
Now let’s take another quick vocab break to brush-up on some Nostr lingo you’ll hear commonly used within the Nostrverse:
Zap: The term for sending small fractions of Bitcoin (satoshis, or “sats”, which are one one-hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin each) to other users on Nostr. On all top clients, you can zap users on their posts, or directly through their profile.
Red arrow: zap button (it looks slightly different on each client, this is Primal)
Blue arrow: total zaps on the post (notice this kind stranger sent me a 21K zap [~$21 based on the current BTC price of ~$100K as of this writing] just for an off-the-cuff quote post. You’d be amazed how generous nostriches are!)
On her very first post, the wife of the Bitcoin legend Hal Finney earned ~1 Million sats ($1,000) from 809 zappers:
Ian Carroll, who did a great job posting a “Nostr 101” video to all of his platforms in order to bring his audience over, earned 674,000 sats ($700) from 636 zappers on his very first post alone:
Now, it’s important to stop and clarify HOW this money is being made, as it operates in a completely different way than the centralized platforms.
On X, TikTok, YouTube and similar, you create content, and get paid based on how many eyeballs you bring to advertisements. It is ALL ad-based.
On Nostr, all value-exchange runs on the “Value-4-Value” model.
Value-4-Value: A monetization ethos based on completely voluntary exchange, where Supporter A can choose to send money to Creator B in a fully-open, peer-to-peer way. Think busking but digital.
Some good resources to learn more about Value-4-Value, and why it’s awesome:
- My podcast episodes discussing V4V with creators who are building & thriving on the revolutionary payment model
- The Freedom of Value – How Value-for-Value Fixes the Monetization of Information (amazing article by Dergigi breaking down how V4V is the content-monetization model of the future)
- Lots more resources on V4V (WhyBitcoinOnly.com)
A quick summary to wrap up the above:
On Nostr,
- There are NO hoops to jump through to start earning for your content (other than plugging in any Bitcoin Lightning wallet to your account, which takes seconds). You can stack sats for your posts immediately on Day 1
- There is no centralized leader (like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) you need to beg for money from, or pray the payment model doesn’t reduce creators’ cut, as on Nostr, payments flow directly between users, without any middleman!
- Creators’ income is no longer dependent on pleasing advertisers. As those who’ve pushed the boundaries of “the narrative” on the centralized socials in recent years know, the second you start getting a little too close to the truth, places like YouTube will completely cut off your ability to monetize, as advertisers don’t want anything to do with controversy. To the contrary, many Nostr creators (myself included) have seen a healthy premium paid out for pushing the boundaries and being fearless in sharing controversial content, as those who follow you APPRECIATE you for being fearless in speaking your truth!
One may reasonably ask themselves: “Why would anyone pay money for MY content? Won’t folks be really stingy with their hard-earned bitcoin?”
To that I’d simply answer: Go start posting and find out for yourself! You will soon find that, despite being a relatively tiny user base at this early stage, the people of Nostr are VERY generous with sending zaps all over the place to content they enjoy.
Some more examples of heavily-zapped posts, in addition to the above screenshots I shared (the number next to the “⚡️” signifies the number of sats earned):
- A couple carnivore friends making their #introductions posts, earning $17 and $23 right away
- Filmmaker Max DeMarco earning a whopping 5 MILLION SATS on his Nostr documentary
~5 Million sats ($5,000) from 600+ zappers
Obviously these aren’t universal/guaranteed outcomes (Max’s Nostr documentary is one of the most zapped posts in Nostr history so far), but they lay the template for how much potential there is for creators to build a brand on Nostr that earns solid money, without any need for an over-arching Big Tech company gatekeeping their paycheck.
To the contrary, given how miniscule the Nostr user base is compared to all the legacy centralized apps, I’d venture to say top Nostr creators will be out-earning ALL of the top influencers on the legacy apps in the very near future…
How Algorithms Work On Nostr
Simply put — on Nostr — YOU HAVE CONTROL of your algorithm.
Unlike the centralized social media platforms where you have practically zero control over what content you see (despite the fact that you physically choose who you want to follow…), Nostr clients are already giving users superior control over how they want their feed to look.
Primal, the Nostr client I’ve mentioned a couple times now, is doing this as well as anyone.
On Nostr, anyone can build an algorithm. pic.twitter.com/TbwgO7vGPs
— primal (@primal_app) December 27, 2024
I should probably add in here that I have zero financial affiliation with Primal, other than being a big fan since they’re leading the charge on so many of the cool Nostr features I care about! I’ve also met multiple members of the team in person so I know they’re in it for the right reasons, and on a killer trajectory to continue being a pioneer in the Nostr Client game.
Primal gives you the ability to hand-select EXACTLY what type of feed you want, from options like:
- Chronological
- Trending (1hr, 24hr, 1 week, etc.)
- Text only (for an old school Twitter-like experience)
- Images only (for an Instagram-like experience)
- Vertical videos only (for a TikTok-like experience)
You can also choose certain hashtags you want to see, certain topics you want to see, and build your own CUSTOM FEEDS that can be any combination of any of the above that you want.
Example: Let’s say I want to have a Custom Feed that contains exclusively videos that are less than 1 minute long that include the word “doggo”:
The result:
(Switching to mobile so you can see how it looks on there as well)
…then, in 1 tap you can save this to your Custom Feeds, and switch to that algorithm any time you want to scroll dog videos to your heart’s content!
TLDR: On Nostr, YOU have complete control over the social media experience, not some corporatized Big Tech algorithm that’s incentivized to keep you emotional and addicted.
HOW COOL IS THAT??
X or Instagram could never.
What Makes Nostr Different from Other “Decentralized Social Media” Attempts?
Short answer: Because all other so-called “decentralized social media platforms” are just that – PLATFORMS – and thus were never able to solve the actual problem.
We’ve all heard the “decentralized” buzzword spammed to death in recent years, and with this has come with many supposed “decentralized social media” products. A few that have seen their turn in the limelight:
- Bluesky
- Mastodon
- Steemit
- Gab
- Hive
So, why have none of these truly taken off?
In short, because they aren’t built on a foundation that actually fosters the core ethos of decentralization in the first place. They are still centralized platforms, or in Mastodon’s case, broken up shards of centralized platforms that ultimately still lead to censorship that prohibits users’ ability to both speak, and be heard by those who want to hear them.
Basically, while all of these platforms market themselves as “decentralized”, they’re just centralized with extra steps. They still have CEOs, “moderators”, or other arbiters of speech that can stop users from posting content, often with a scammy crypto coin to sell you on top of the grift.
Here are 2 excellent videos with the man who I believe breaks down the difference between all of these next-gen social media contenders better than anyone, Rabble 👇
As Bitcoin and Email have taught us, OPEN PROTOCOLS are the way, and Nostr is the first social media network that has perfectly implemented this concept into the social communication layer.
Nostr In Action
How Ainsley Costello supercharged her musical career with Nostr
Kathryn, a singer new to Nostr, already earning more money from zaps than she ever did before
How UK musicians are using Nostr to supercharge their artistic ventures
Kathryn “getting Nostr immediately”
Bitcoin is being used for payments in Brazil
Buying gas in El Salvador with bitcoin using a… social media app?
NVK paying for a surfboard on the beach with Bitcoin in Costa Rica
ALRIGHT, I think we’re finally ready to start bringing things home! 👇👇👇
Nostr Fixes…
Censorship
“You have people debating ‘How much should we censor?’ One way to end that debate is to make everything uncensorable. If there are enough people using Nostr and it’s a working freedom web of communication, and you also have [customizable] algorithms to help you sort it to make sure it’s usable, then that ends the debate.”
– Lyn Alden
Centralized social media platforms will always cave into censorship eventually, as they are enormous honeypots of social discourse, and therefore the social zeitgeist itself.
The powerful forces of this world will always want to control this public discourse, so no matter how cool or “pro free speech” a social media platform’s CEO seems, recent history has proven that it doesn’t matter – they will always end up bending the knee to allowing certain narratives to thrive, and “wrongthink” to be squashed by either demonetization, direct account-cancellation, or opaque shadow bans.
A new social media structure is needed where there is no top-down control over the content being shared. Nostr achieves this perfectly, as both the client and relay sides are decentralized, i.e. open to a free market of competition where ANYONE can run their own, and nobody can stop you (unless they literally sent police to your house to shut down your relay, which would be impractical/impossible at scale).
Monetization
“Nostr has Venmo-like capability where I can just look you up and pay you. It’s a big, organic, public payment directory, with its own built-in fraud detection since you can just look at someone’s followers and know it’s them.”
– Lyn Alden
The process of monetizing your content on centralized platforms is a total mess, even for those who have a strong following that WANTS to support them.
This is unlikely to ever change, as the centralized structure of companies like Instagram, X, YouTube, etc. have ALL of the power over the flow of money within their walled garden (which of course has been their plan all along). The incentives are clear for the executives of these companies to lower creators’ payouts as much as possible to siphon more money up to the top of the totem pole.
Nostr blows up both the difficulty of getting monetized AND the difficulty of earning money directly from those who want to support you, via the revolutionary Value-4-Value model that’s native to all top Nostr clients.
Having too many social media channels to juggle
It makes no sense to have to start over with zero followers every time you create an account on a new platform.
What if your social graph stayed stuck to you no matter which app you went to, so you could move from app to app and have the same follower base everywhere (plus the ability to send and receive payments for the content you create across all of them?)
This simply makes more sense, and will save creators COUNTLESS hours of grinding out those annoying “Hey everyone, go follow me over on this other platform too!” posts.
Algorithms
“If you just observe someone on their phone, they’re scrolling…tap tap…scrolling…tap tap…that company has successfully made them an employee without paying them. Every time you hit the heart or retweet something, that’s a signal to an algorithm which then takes that and uses it as a way to push content into someone else’s feed. All of these algorithms are focused on increasing the number of impressions, to increase advertising revenue for them.
It has nothing to do with you. They’re programming you. And they can (and will) keep changing the algorithm to program you in different ways.
Do you want to live in that world, give the algorithms your attention, and work for free? Or do you want to OWN something where you can build on top of it, and YOU control your media, story, and narrative, along with all the other people who are interested in unleashing themselves from this dynamic we’ve been trapped in?”
– Jack Dorsey
In recent years, as public discourse has become increasingly, let’s call it…”contested”, nearly everyone has now felt either the blessing or the curse of a mysterious algorithm either boosting or crushing the content they post.
As mentioned earlier – even when you’re given the choice to “Follow” the accounts of your choosing on these platforms, you might never see their posts, as the algorithm has blocked them from your feed for whatever reason.
This is ridiculous, and not the way social media should be.
On Nostr, you can kiss this opaque arbiter of reach goodbye, and take complete control over whichever algorithm flavor you prefer (or if you’re like me and usually want no algorithm, purely chronological).
Even if you only plan on posting tame content that wouldn’t be at odds with tyrannical algorithms on the centralized apps, I think after a few weeks on Nostr you’ll be surprised at how even the peaceful content was robbed from you over on X/IG. They truly do design it in such a way that keeps you angry and fighting with people, so whether you want a blissful, happy feed, or a hardcore truth-speaking feed, you’re going to get more of what you actually want on the freedom protocol.
“People are increasingly realizing that centralized social media is not great for our mental health, because we get stuck in these big centralized algorithms that want to advertise, bring volume, and generate a lot of activity. Negativity tends to sell—the more we’re online arguing and fighting with each other, the more we’re drawn to it—so Big Tech platforms capitalize on that.
A cool thing about Nostr is that there’s no central authority setting the algorithm like this. Different clients can have different ways of helping you discover content, and in the future, we’ll see entire marketplaces of algorithms (even on one client) where you can manage different algorithms you’ve created yourself.”
– Lyn Alden
Yes I am spamming Lyn Alden quotes in this post. It’s not my fault she’s been one of the most consistently-dialed voices on the power & potential of Nostr since the beginning!
Why Nostr Matters
This has been a consistent theme throughout the course of my podcast, so if you want a detailed answer, I recommend you check out my Nostr YouTube Playlist.
The summarized answer to “Why Nostr Matters” is this:
Up until now, social media has been a jumbled mess of:
- Popularity contest
- Algorithm-gaming contest
- Unrealistic highlight reel (lacking true humanity)
- A magnet of negative energy (negative emotions attract eyeballs and sell ads)
All of these things are slashed away on Nostr, where YOU control the algorithm, everyone can freely share and receive REAL monetary value, and genuine, non-ragebaiting humanity is rewarded rather than punished.
Like Bitcoin, it’s easy to go off the rails ranting about how this one technology will fix ALL THE THINGS EVERYWHERE…but when you truly stop and think about it, it’s impossible to overstate the amount of power the overall field of social communication holds, and how much world-changing potential is on the table if we were to fix the core problems that rot the status quo of corporate centralization.
What I can say for sure is this:
Nostr has without a doubt helped ME become a better person, and everyone I know who’s spent a significant amount of time on there has said the same.
I know that sounds like a crazy thing to say about a social media network—especially when we’ve been fatigued by so many similar ones over the years—but I really can’t praise it enough. I learn more from educational content, I laugh harder at better memes, I make better friends who have closer values to mine…the list goes on.
I will just keep coming back to this: you have to try it yourself for a while, and you will quickly understand what I’m talking about!
How Do I Join Nostr?
Easy!
1. Download any Nostr client onto your phone. I personally recommend Primal as a starter, since they have an awesome built-in Lightning wallet you can activate directly in the app (which saves you the step of having to create one elsewhere and link it to your account). If you’re on iPhone, the next one I’d download is Damus. On Android, Amethyst. On PC, Coracle or YakiHonne. (Remember, one of the coolest things about Nostr is that you get to use all the different apps you want, so I recommend you download more than one of them, and play around with having the same account/feed pop up on different clients!)
2. Upon signup, you will receive a Public Key (starting with “npub”) and a Private Key (starting with “nsec”). Just like Bitcoin, the Public Key is the thing you can share everywhere to help people find you, while the Private Key should be kept PRIVATE, as that is essentially your password (WRITE IT DOWN SOMEWHERE SAFE AND DO NOT SHARE IT)
Here’s an updated “How Nostr Works” infographic including the Public Key and Private Key. I skipped this terminology earlier in the post since I didn’t want to overwhelm you with all these fancy words – but you’ll want to understand what these mean when you sign up and start building your network of Nostr friends! 👇
3. Once you’ve filled out your profile just like you have on a million other social media platforms, you’re ready to partake in one of Nostr’s most storied traditions: Your #introductions post! This is just a post where you introduce yourself to the community, letting people know who you are, what you’re about, and what kind of value you will be adding to the wild world of Nostr. Attach a few interesting photos/videos and the hashtag #introductions (with an “s”), and watch as the Nostr community jumps in to welcome you to the future of social media! 🤙⚡️
4. From here, it’s off to the races on learning, exploring, and experimenting! Go download some other clients (Amethyst on Android / Damus on iPhone would be my picks for your next client to play with following Primal) to see how the interoperability works (i.e. the ability to switch between clients and see the same content/followers everywhere), begin following accounts that interest you, and most of all, HAVE FUN!
“Any type of social media you like, whether it’s Twitter, Pinterest, or anything in between…With Nostr, you can have that kind of experience with a big, interoperable back-end where you can access all the other ecosystems. That’s a MASSIVE idea.”
– Lyn Alden
A video covering ALL of the above setup steps if that’s more your style 👇
PRIMAL: Nostr Decentralized Social Media Meets Bitcoin! Full Tutorial (BTC Sessions)
Things To Keep In Mind / FAQ
- I mentioned this in the “How To Join” section above, but it bears repeating: Don’t EVER share your private key (starting with “nsec”). This is your password; if someone gets ahold of it, your account is as good as theirs. DO share your public key (starting with “npub”); this is how people can find and follow you!
- We are extremely early! Since Nostr itself is only a few years old, don’t expect a buttery smooth experience on any of the clients just yet, at least not on the same level as the legacy apps like X/IG which have been around for over a decade. Bugs will happen, random app crashing will happen, and the general experience will contain hiccups. Don’t worry, developers are working hard to improve their clients across the ecosystem. EMBRACE THE CHAOS! (And don’t hesitate to post bug reports and tag the client developers directly – the Nostr ecosystem is extremely feedback-friendly)
- The algorithmic playing field is leveled on Nostr, which could hurt or help you. If you’re the type of person that likes posting about trending topics that get boosted by the algorithm on legacy apps, you’ll probably see an engagement drop in the early days. On the flipside, if you’re someone like me who likes to post crazy conspiracy theories that get you blocked or banned everywhere else, you may see MORE engagement than usual once you set up a starting follower base, as you’ve freed yourself from the algorithm that’s able to handcuff certain keywords or phrases it doesn’t like.
- Again, just remember the most important rules: EMBRACE THE CHAOS, have fun, and enjoy the process!
Further Nostr Resources
Documentary: Social Media is Broken – Can We Fix It? (Max DeMarco)
Nostr 101 w/ Derek Ross (Ben Wehrman Podcast)
Building NOSTR w/ Will Casarin (Ben Wehrman Podcast)
Nostr breaks every social media paradigm w/ Rabble (Ben Wehrman Podcast)
All other NOSTR episodes on the Ben Wehrman Podcast
Nostr’s permissionless nature with Jack Dorsey
BTC Prague Panel: All Your Silos Are Broken (Martti Malmi, Aleksandar Svetski, Pablof7z, Miljan, Derek Ross)
A whooooole lot more Nostr educational resources that will answer every other question you have
We’ll call it here for now, folks! I hope you got a lot of value out of this post.
If you feel so inclined, you can jump straight into action one of the main points we highlighted today – that once you’re on the Nostr protocol, it’s extremely easy to send value to creators you’ve received value from.
So, if you enjoyed the article, spin up your Nostr account as outlined above, and send me a zap for how much you appreciated this content! 💜👇
Ben Wehrman:
npub1qqvt0m3nlvjnssmrn33w9yh7cuq2dx5nkz8wxax9hk5hrjdnj4jqz8cn3w
I’ll see you on the freedom protocol!
-Ben
