Notes and Other Stuff

Exploring the Universe of Twitter Alternatives

Last week, Substack caused a stir when they announced the creation of Notes, a new platform for short-form content within Substack. At its core, Notes is a Twitter competitor. Twitter took note and promptly retaliated by banning engagement on Substack links, among other things. This move, predictably, caused a lot of controversy. Some saw it as a legitimate business maneuver to block a competitor, while others saw it as yet another arbitrary policy change at Twitter.

For a long time, Twitter has been the town square of the tech world. Despite a number of alternatives emerging over the years, none was ever able to take much market share away from Twitter. Recently, however, things seem to be changing a bit more. Twitter’s ownership change, recent tech and policy changes, and other factors seem to have, for the first time ever, driven a lot of people to consider an alternative.

A number of potential Twitter competitors have emerged— Nostr, Substack Notes, BlueSky, Farcaster, Mastodon, Post, and many others. Each of these platforms takes a slightly different approach to differentiating from Twitter.

In today’s article, we’re going to focus on two platforms— Nostr and Substack Notes— that represent fundamentally different approaches to replacing Twitter. We’ll discuss their features and tradeoffs.

Substack Notes

Substack Notes provides a new platform for short-form content within Substack. The core thesis behind Notes is that Twitter’s problems ultimately stem from its ad-driven revenue model.

Here’s a quote from Substack’s announcement post:

While Notes may look like familiar social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. This changes everything. 

The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention. In legacy social networks, people get rewarded for creating content that goes viral within the context of the feed, regardless of whether or not people value it, locking readers in a perpetual scroll. Almost all the attendant financial rewards then go to the owner of the platform. 

By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.

Substack Notes is built on the premise that changing the model from ads to subscriptions solves the fundamental problems with social media (Twitter and others). The ad model farms attention from users and drives value to the owners of the platform, not the content creators. Substack changes this by foregoing ads entirely and allowing users to pay content creators directly. Substack provides the infrastructure for this and takes a cut of those payments.

Nostr

Nostr, which stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays,” isn’t a platform in the traditional sense— it’s a protocol. There’s no single company or brand behind Nostr. It’s an open protocol upon which many different parties are choosing to build applications and services, many of which provide Twitter-like functionality.

Unlike Substack Notes, Nostr is built on the premise that the fundamental problem with Twitter and other platforms isn’t their ad model— it’s that they’re centralized.

From the Nostr Github:

The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all.

It doesn't rely on any trusted central server, hence it is resilient; it is based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is tamperproof; it does not rely on P2P techniques, and therefore it works.

Interestingly, the Nostr spec also mentions ads as a major problem with Twitter— just not the only problem. It mentions a number of issues— arbitrary algorithm changes, shadowbanning, and censorship, among others. Nostr’s architecture means that these things aren’t possible at a protocol level.

Nostr doesn’t specify a business model— it’s an open protocol, not a business. What has emerged naturally, however, is a synergy between Bitcoin, Lightning Network, and Nostr. As we wrote in our paid relay article, Bitcoin (via Lightning Network) has emerged as the “money layer” of Nostr.

Various apps and services within the Nostr ecosystem each have their own business models. Some rely on one-off direct payments, other rely on subscriptions. New features like zaps have emerged. And some services may rely on ads, as well.

Nostr is a decentralized communications protocol with a decentralized money woven into it. Developers and users can choose any business model they want, without relying on any middleman.

Two Approaches — Centralized and Decentralized

Substack Notes and Nostr represent two fundamentally different approaches to building Twitter competitors.

Substack Notes is centralized. The platform is created and managed by a single entity. This comes with certain advantages. It’s extremely easy to onboard onto the platform, users don’t have to worry about complex key management, the mobile and web apps are super easy to use, and Substack can leverage existing network effects from its newsletter business.

Substack’s approach is admirable, and we expect the product to be a success. But in our opinion, while Substack has solved some of the most pressing issues with Twitter, they have not found solutions to the fundamental problems behind Twitter and other major social platforms. Nostr has.

Substack Notes feels very different from Twitter. And because it’s run by a different company, it is. But that company still holds the same power that Twitter held. Substack’s platform is centralized. They control the algorithm that determines the home feed. They can still censor or shadowban users. Yes, users still own their email lists and can migrate those elsewhere, but the creation of Substack Notes is an attempt to further lock users into the Substack platform specifically. And within Notes, they’re at the mercy of the company.

Nostr, on the other hand, takes a fundamentally different approach. It’s a free, open protocol designed to be resistant to censorship. Users aren’t locked into any single platform, app, or service. At the protocol level, they can’t be censored. If a single application or relay bans a user, they can simply migrate elsewhere. If a user doesn’t like the content algorithm of a particular app, they can use another. Users pay one another directly with Bitcoin, so there’s no financial middleman that can censor payments. Because users have full control of their identity via their key pair, they can plug into the network however they’d like.

Nostr doesn’t attempt to solve for a single feature in Twitter (like Substack does via lack of ads). Instead, it creates a protocol that is not control by any single entity and leaves everything else up to developers and users.

With Nostr, users don’t have to choose between one siloed company that’s ad driven and another that’s subscription-driven. They don’t have to migrate to an entirely different network because an algorithm change throttled the reach of their content. Instead, they can just migrate between apps and services while remaining on the same network, keeping their followers, and owning their identity.

Substack Notes solves many of the functional problems with Twitter. For many people, it may be a preferable alternative.

Nostr solves the fundamental problems with Twitter and many other social media and communications platforms on the Internet. If our goal is to build towards a more open, free, and user-centric web, we believe this approach is far preferable.