Why is social media so easily corrupted by the state? Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey says guys like him are the problem.
"I was a single point of failure," Dorsey said at the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual conference hosted by the Human Rights Foundation. "It creates a chokehold. You have a company, a CEO, a board, that represents one place where an entity can put pressure on."
That was especially true during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when federal officials were in contact with every major social media platform, coercing them to remove content. Even in normal times, Google and Meta collect vast troves of personal information on their users and receive hundreds of thousands of requests every year from governments around the world to access that data. When Dorsey was running Twitter, the company's Indian offices were raided after a tweet offended a member of the ruling party. The government of France recently arrested Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, and wants to hold him criminally liable for illicit activity taking place on the network.
What if there were an alternative platform with no offices to raid and no single CEO to arrest? What if it were owned not by Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or the Chinese Communist Party, but by everybody and nobody all at once? What if there were no administrators with direct access to user personal data?
That alternative exists, and it's called Nostr. Like bitcoin, it's a community-run digital network highly resistant to censorship and corruption. If bitcoin has the potential to serve as the foundation of a new global monetary system, Nostr could do the same for communication and identity in the digital sphere.
Take it from Martti Malmi, who was one of the first developers to work on bitcoin, collaborating with Satoshi Nakamoto himself. Now, he's a Nostr developer.
"Bitcoin is freedom of money, and Nostr is freedom of everything else," Martti said during a recent bitcoin conference in Prague.
When did social media get so broken? In what feels like a lifetime ago, Arab Spring activists used Twitter and Facebook to organize, coordinate, and topple long-standing dictatorships. It was intoxicating—but this tech-powered revolution from below was a mirage. Military regimes cracked down, and the very same networks that empowered the masses were repurposed as tools of censorship, surveillance, and repression.
There are several decentralized social media networks that, like Nostr, aim to fulfill the same promise of community empowerment. But they're often heavily siloed, have integrated crypto tokens, and are funded by venture capitalists hoping for windfall returns on their investments. Handfuls of people are still in charge, making them overly susceptible to manipulation and control, just like the networks they're designed to replace.
Nostr, by contrast, is open, simple, and ownerless. You control your own feed, and you choose what algorithms to use, if any. To join, you generate a public online address and a password that secures your identity. Then you choose which Nostr-compatible social networks or services to join. If you change your mind, you can migrate your identity and data elsewhere, which is vital for human rights activists and empowering for everyone.
"To be able to, to create content and to create and build your identity and then be able to move it around under your agency, I think is the most powerful idea," Dorsey said at the Oslo Freedom Forum. "And I think the only reason people haven't really valued Nostr yet is because they haven't had that feeling yet. It's there, it's powerful, it's available for everyone."
The Nostr network is constructed like a spider web that can morph and regenerate, making it almost impossible to censor. If the Chinese government attacks Nostr again, as it did last year, the network can spin up new connections.
Martti Malmi predicts that eventually "every conceivable app we have today will be built on Nostr."
That includes payment services, like Venmo. Nostr doesn't need its own crypto token because it integrates seamlessly with bitcoin. Users routinely locate other people in the network's public directory and send them what's called a "zap," which can range from a micropayment to $10,000 worth of bitcoin.
Like every financial services app, Venmo occasionally censors transactions and de-platforms users. But nobody can stop you from sending bitcoin on Nostr. To pay or get paid you don't need to fill out paperwork. And you can be located anywhere in the world.
Nostr had only a small handful of users before Jack Dorsey started funding its development. Edward Snowden and the financial writer and investor Lyn Alden are among Nostr's biggest boosters. The entrepreneur and tech visionary Naval Ravikant recently endorsed Nostr, and the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov brought another surge of interest. Today, the network has more than 40,000 weekly active users.
"[Nostr] is coming and it's just a matter of time," Dorsey said in a 2024 talk. "And when we all decided to do it, when we all decided to remove these dependencies because we believe more in humanity than these companies and, and, corrupt governments, and how they, how they interact with each other."
Social media is how we speak, transact, and shape our identities. We can't entrust our primary communication network to a handful of corruptible humans. And now we don't have to.
This video is adapted from Can Nostr Make Twitter's Dreams Come True?
Photo Credits: Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom; China News Service, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Jonathan Rashad, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Sallam from Yemen, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Syria-Frames-Of-Freedom (Pro-FSA information), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; kris krüg, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Mark Warner, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/Newscom; Envato Elements. Generative AI Images and Videos: Midjourney/Model V6.1. RunwayML/Gen-3 Alpha.
Music Credits: "Volcano," by Romeo via Artlist; "Ember," by Tristan Burton via Artlist; "Retrospection," by Peter Matri via Artlist; "Infinite Circles," by Ardie Son via Artlist; "North of Hope," by Romeo via Artlist.
- Video Editor: Regan Taylor
- Motion Graphics: Adani Samat
- Audio Production: Ian Keyser
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