Why should I care about nostr?
Unlike Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Twitter and almost all the other social media sites, nostr is not a platform.
It is a protocol, similar to the HTTP protocol that we use everyday to access websites using one of many universally compatible web browsers. If the concept of a protocol, or the term HTTP sounds too scary or complicated to you, fret not — hopefully this article will still articulate the powerful differences between a platform and a protocol sufficiently.
Did you know? NOSTR stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.
Clients and relays
Before we get started, lets quickly define the two main components of nostr.
Client:
A client is something that a user or content creator might use to interact with NOSTR.
Facebook also uses clients. Users may use multiple clients to access Facebook's content: they may use the official website on a laptop, the official mobile app on an Android phone or an iPhone, and some may even use unofficial clients to access and interact with their Facebook profile.
Nostr has no official website and no official applications, each client is created and designed to present its creators vision of a useful application that users might desire.
Some clients are focused towards photos in order to provide an instagram-like interface, others are designed to show short text notes like Twitter, and others may present long form articles and personal blog posts, but all clients fetch data from the same source, filter as appropriate, organise and present the data to fulfil a vision.
Relay:
The relationship between a client and a relay is similar to that between Facebook clients and Facebook servers. A relay is a type of web server that clients connect to in order to fetch and post data on your behalf, but as we'll explore, relays have much less power to control or manipulate your data or its discoverability than Facebook does.
Relays are much simpler than web servers; when asking a relay for content, clients are very specific about what content they want, and relays must return only the relevant information.
Relays can not provide sponsored content or advertisements like Facebook does, and relays cannot tamper with user content for any reason; Attempts to do either of these things is trivial for a client to detect and is easy to discard.
One identity, multiple apps
Imagine you have an account on Facebook, TikTok and Twitter; you will have multiple accounts, each probably with a different profile picture and bio, but likely with some shared information like your name, email address and other identifiable information.
Your identity also has as much to do with the content you post, as the profile you define. Many influencers and content creators need to post the same message on multiple platforms in order to reach different users and relay information to their many followers across these platforms.
Nostr is not a platform; it is a free and open standard that allows us to create an identity and to share information securely without locking in the data with a single platform run by a big tech firm.
Instead of registering for accounts on multiple platforms, on nostr we can define a single unique profile and use its associated keys to post images, notes, videos, streams and anything else we wish to share with the world.
As we touched on above when describing clients, there will be different clients, each specialising and becoming popular for relaying specific content types and experiences. With a single identity, you can simply publish all manner of content, and each app will display only the appropriate content for its purpose to its users.
An Instagram-like application will present your photos proud and clearly, while a Twitter-like application will focus on presenting your notes in a feed.
Misplaced trust
On a platform like Facebook, every user is entrusting a company to accurately relay their content and abstain from modifying or misrepresenting it before presenting it to their followers.
Although platforms are not known for doing these things, in order to provide any sort of assurances, these platforms take full control of our content, including how and when to display it. This in turn affords them power over both content providers and their followers, demanding that users watch advertisements before viewing the content they wanted to see and demanding content providers pay to ensure their content is presented in an egaging manner.
With identities on nostr, we eliminate the need to trust such platforms by introducing digitally signed content which employs cryptography, similar to how WhatsApp employs cryptography to provide end to end ecrypted messaging; it's mostly transparent to us as the complexities will be handled by your nostr client of choice.
It is worth mentioning that nostr can also be used to send encrypted direct messages (DMs) which provides similar protections to WhatsApp, and as time progresses, more privacy features will develop. Also existing features are constantly being discussed in public and improvements to existing features should be expected as more clients appear, and as more users arrive.
Digital signatures provide two things to our content:
- A digital signature confirms whom the note was created by, as only the user who created an identity can produce a signature.
- It also acts as a seal for the original content, as the signature will not match any modified or tampered version of the content.
This technology eliminates the need to rely on "big tech" to guard, arbitrate and declare which content was created, by whom, and when. This in turn allows the data to flow freely between relays which compete to become the source of your data, which further in turn creates an environment where arbitrary censorship and so called "algorithmic bias" is difficult, if not impossible to impose onto users.
With nostr, clients request exactly what you want: they specify the identities that you are interested in following, as well as the topics, time ranges and types of content you wish to see. Relays merely provide what data they have, and clients can easily detect and discard unsolicited data. Of course, relays and clients may work together to serve unsolicited content and advertisements, but users can easily switch clients and read from different relays, so this is unlikely to be a fruitful strategy to employ on nostr.
Another point worth mentioning, is that relays may share data with one another, and users may also push content discovered on one relay to another relay. This helps to ensure that your data is less likely to be lost or deleted, as it naturally spreads across the network, and it further fosters competition among relays keeping them honest.
Direct engagement and ZAPS!
With no intermediary, nostr can foster a much closer connection between content creators and their followers. Although relays cannot effectively block or hide messages from you, there are still tools you can use to flag sensitive or offensive comments and share those flags on the network.
Compared to top down censorship, user based flagging can become more effective at allowing different clients, such as those that are child friendly, to take a more liberal approach to hiding content, while allowing other clients to present more content, even if they have been marked as spam, offensive or controversial.
When it comes to monetisation, platforms usually use your engagement numbers to collect revenue from marketing companies and paying customers, and then offer you a small percentage of that revenue. On top of this, many platforms like Youtube and Twitch allow users to tip their favourite content creators, but once again, platforms will facilitate the payment, taking their cut along the way.
A payment protocol was developed fairly early on into nostr. The feature is called "zaps" and was initially developed to allow users to tip content creators, acknowledging their appreciation for it.
Today, zaps are quite often given towards funny posts, memes, and thought provoking posts. Nostr has also become useful for asking questions, getting answers and receiving small tips for providing a useful answer.
What type of money though?
It is not possible to create a protocol to facilitate bank transfers worldwide; banks require intermediaries like Visa and Mastercard to facilitate the payment, which then requires a company to collect and distribute the payments, all which involve fees and often require different solutions depending on your country of origin.
Instead, zaps focus on facilitating payments using Bitcoin on the Lightning Network. This allows fast, cheap micropayments (sub-penny tips that add up when you garner a good amount of engagement) and allows payments to be made directly from user to content creator without a greedy intermediary. It is a great showcase to illustrate how Bitcoin can succeed at facilitating free trade and innovative payment use cases where traditional banking just cannot.
An interesting development that has become somewhat cultural amongst the circles I follow, is how the authors of popular clients will post about the new updates that they have released, detailing new features and many users will zap a small amount as a token of their appreciation. These many small zaps add up and it has become a great showcase of the value 4 value idea:
Everything is optional, but features are complimentary
Just as clients are free to pick and choose features to provide, relays can do the same; some relays may provide very few features, but will be very fast at providing content, while others will provide more feature rich content but might require a paid subscription to read from or publish to.
Fortunately, relays have a standard way to broadcast what features they do and do not support and any notable limitations in a standard, machine readable way. This will allow clients to more effectively manage how it interacts with relays in order to provide a much smoother experience for their users.
Anyone can operate a relay too. A tech smart family member can set up a private relay that only serves known identities and serves to host and relay private content such as family photos and private communications.
For an influencer, a personal relay could also serve as a more reliable source for people to discover your content without needing to be concerned about which relays might be attempting to censor you.
Relays can be politcally left leaning, while others may be right leaning, some may be focused on music and entertainment, while others focus on preserving news articles.
As a user, you can connect to whichever relays you wish to, and disconnect any that are unhelpful. In this way, relays compliment each other and work together to provide all of the data you expect.
Just like in the early days of the internet, there is a lot of room for anyone with talent to set up, and participate in the development and evolution of this new technology, and it's super exciting!
Nostr is for public content only (for now)
It is important to note, that there are not yet any clients or standard features that protect the visibility of your posts, so all shared notes should be considered public.
It is not recommended to use nostr for sharing personal photos of your children, or sharing personal or sensitive information about yourself unless you truly want to share this information with the whole world publicly.
The only protected feature on nostr is the DM (direct messaging) feature. Similar to WhatsApp, these messages are protected with end to end encryption, which will protect your messages from prying eyes, however there is still metadata that is public.
With metadata, it is possible for others to see things like what identities are messaging together, how often, and at what times. This is at least not as bad as WhatsApp where they also collect things like your location and your phone number as you use the application.
Hopefully in the future, more progress will be made in this area with features that enable private group chats, and access control management which might mature nostr into a protocol that is suitable for sharing information limited to trusted friends and family.
Just the tip of the iceberg
Nostr is much much more than just a social media protocol. At its most basic level, nostr provides a way for anyone and anything to communicate reliably and publicly, without gatekeepers.
This technology can be used to disrupt many existing services, especially those that cannot function today without intermediaries that profit, purely by positioning themsleves as middlemen.
Things like Uber, AirBnB, Deliveroo and likely other such services may find competition powered by nostr, and who knows what else.
Nostr today
This article has been presented to you on a nostr client, and is available to read on many different apps and websites, but it is going to be best viewed on a blogging client like
That said, the most popular clients built for nostr provide a Twitter-like experience. I thought I'd close this piece with a few examples of the innovative and unique features I've seen on my favourite client Amethyst (for Android phones only):
Express more than a like with emoticons
The image above shows a post by Carla, and my own reaction (the laughing emoji: 🤣) is shown where a heart symbol would usually be (see the post below it).
Details can be expanded underneath the post to show all the other reactions people have submitted to the post.
Best of all, you can submit multiple reactions, you don't have to stick to just one!
Tamper proof image links
An image can be worth a thousand words, but in a post, an image is loaded by a link to another website. The site that hosts your image could change that image very easily, very abruptly changing the context and meaning of your post.
The purple ribbon on the top right indicates that a unique identifier was captured when the image was uploaded and that the contents of the image have not changed since the post was first created, and tapping the icon will provide a short message to explain this to the reader.
With this feature, your words and your images are safe from manipulation and if a host were to change the image some time in the future, users will immediately know that the images in your post were tampered with after its creation.
Donate with a zap
A great platform for raising money, either for a project or for a charity, is called Geyser Fund. On this platform, donations are paid in Bitcoin and are also paid directly with no middlemen to collect any cuts.
Since both Bitcoin and nostr development are done openly and collaboratively, it is scary how interopable they can be.
Upon noticing a note that asked for donations, it occurred to me that many may make the mistake of zapping the author of the note instead of donating on Geyser Fund.
I learnt that Geyser Fund allows us to accept donations via a Lightning Address, and that my nostr client allows me to specify an alternative destination for zaps when creating notes using Lightning Addresses too.
When using the zap feature, it is possible to send an accompanying message, and I wanted to know what might happen if I send a zap with a message to a note that redirected its zaps to a Guyser fund.
To my surprise, the integration was flawless. The message I sent was received along with the donation to the Geyser Fund platform and was displayed on the site like magic!
Note: The full title of the fund was called "BITCOIN TO MY MUM AND SISTER'S CHARITY CHALLENGE" and funds were promised to an African charity called FOGADD. Details can be found here
Zapple Pay
Last but not least, is a feature that was designed specifically for Apple iPhones.
Very recently, Apple threatened to take a nostr client for Apple called Damus off the app store unless they removed the zap feature, citing that it violated their terms of service by offering content or products for payments without using Apple Pay.
Arguably, the value for value model of tipping posts AFTER they have been shared should not be considered a payment for content, but regardless, after a few attempts to reason had failed, Damus removed the feature.
Within weeks, a website called Zapple Pay was created to provide users of Damus (and any other clients for on the Apple app store that would also have zaps removed) the ability to work around the ban. Users are able to assign an emoticon to a specific zap action such as "tipping 100 satoshis" to the note author.
To Damus, you are simply reacting to a note with an emoticon; to Apple, Damus has broken no rules; yet for the user, they have successfully circumvented the ban and can continue to enjoy the zap feature.
This is a great example of how open and collaborative nostr development can be; strangers around the world were able to work together and build something for themselves and their users despite Apple's obvious reach for power over their users.
