The Algorithm Market
How Nostr Brings New Optionality to Social Media
Nostr is a new decentralized communication protocol that’s gained a significant amount of attention and adoption in recent months. While Nostr isn’t specifically built for social media— it can be used for a wide variety of digital communication formats— many of the earliest use cases involve Twitter-like social media applications. In this article, we’ll explore how Nostr, as a result of its decentralized, open-source nature, allows for new, highly customizable user experiences to be built on these social media platforms.
Nostr, at its core, is a very simple protocol. That’s part of its beauty, since it can be used in a wide variety of applications. We’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible with Nostr, and we expect to see many creative use cases surface over the next few years. Currently, most of Nostr’s users interact with the protocol through simple, Twitter-like clients. These include web clients like Hamstr, Snort.social, and Iris, as well as mobile clients like Damus, Amethyst, and Current.
Each of these clients offers a similar overall product, but there are important differences between them. Individual users can use any and all of these clients. Users own their identity, so they can port that across any client. And while they’re interacting with the same protocol and same set of users, each client offers a slightly different interface and set of features.
Imagine if 10+ different developer teams each built interfaces for Twitter, and users could select which interface to use based on the UI and feature set they liked the best. That’s what you get with Nostr.
Below are screenshots from three of the most popular web clients— Iris, Snort, and Hamstr. They offer the same content, but the interfaces are quite different.
Similarly we can compare two mobile clients— Damus and Current.
This becomes even more interesting when we dive into the feature sets of each.
Hamstr offers a clean, intuitive user interface. But it doesn’t allow for Lightning payments, and it doesn’t display re-posts natively. Iris and Snort enable Lightning payments, display reposts, and offer different displays for posts vs. conversations. Damus is probably the fastest and smoothest user experience on mobile, but Current offers a native Lightning wallet and easy media uploads.
As a user, I have increased options— I can pick and choose which interface to use for which features, and I can seamlessly switch between them. Plus I benefit from the competition between clients— as clients add new features, other clients race to add those same features or other improvements. And the user ultimately wins.
All of this has been heightened by the introduction of Zaps. Zaps are small micropayment made towards individual Nostr posts over the Lightning Network. Nostr clients that support zaps are able to show tallies of sats sent towards posts. Instead of simply “liking” a post, which requires very little of the user, zaps allow users to make a small tip to the post’s creator. This is a much higher signal of appreciation and post quality than a simple like. Sites like Stacker.News have experimented with this model (outside of Nostr) as a novel sorting algorithm. Tools like Zaplife have emerged as ways to rank Nostr posts and users not by likes or reposts, but by the economic value they’ve exchanged.
Nostr offers even more customization through the process of relay selection. Relays are servers that store, send, and receive messages from users of the network. Users can choose which relays to send their messages to, and they can choose which relays to request information from. Every time they publish a message, they send it to a relay. When they want information from the network, they simply ask relays for that information.
Because users can select a set of relays to write to and read from, they have even more control over the content they see. An ecosystem of paid relays has emerged that offer users better guarantees around spam prevention and better performance. In the future, users will be able to curate their relay set in a way that fine-tunes their content experience.
So what does this mean for the future of social media on Nostr?
Instead of having a single protocol, client, and algorithm wrapped into one option (the legacy social media model), users will have an entire marketplace of experiences to select from. As a result, user experiences will be more plentiful, more customizable, and ultimately, better.
Users will decide which client(s) to use based on the interface and feature set they like best. They’ll be able to pick and choose between different sorting algorithms at the client level and different filters at the relay level. Some users may choose to see a raw, unfiltered feed. Others may sort by likes and reposts. Others may sort by zaps. We expect more novel sorting algorithms to emerge as time goes on.
And most importantly, users will be able to seamlessly switch between all of these things. Nostr marks a pivot point where users have far more control over the social media experience that they have, and we can’t wait to see what that future brings.
Want to get started on Nostr today? We put together some resources for you!