Is Damus, recognized by the founder of Twitter and based on the social media protocol Nostr, poised to ignite a new social experience in Web3?

Author: Logicrw, Blockbeats

"Pura Vida." On January 1, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted this phrase, receiving countless likes.

Pura Vida, a Costa Rican phrase, symbolizes simplicity and purity, much like the lives of the locals. And what Jack, who has stepped down as Twitter CEO, desires is also very simple: a straightforward and pure social network.

No one is unaware of the frustrations with current social networking applications—complicated, cumbersome, heavily commercialized, monopolized, increasingly burdensome experiences, and stricter moderation. These are the common grievances of social app users worldwide. As the founder of the largest social platform globally, Jack's perception of these issues is far greater than ours, and his vision for a decentralized network is more profound than we can imagine.

After leaving Twitter, this Bitcoin fundamentalist immersed himself in the world of decentralized networks. On February 1, Jack excitedly announced on Twitter the launch of Damus, the first mobile client for the decentralized social protocol Nostr, becoming a new player in the decentralized social network space.

How to Register and Simple Experience

First, download the Damus client. You can search for Damus social directly in the Apple App Store, and for Google Play, please click this link. As an extremely minimalist social app, Nostr takes simplicity to the extreme. There is no need for a phone number, email account, or any personal information; you only need to fill in a nickname to create an account from scratch.

Below the personal information fields, it will provide you with an Account ID, which is your public key. This ID is similar to an encrypted address, allowing other users to search for and follow you. In other words, in the world of Nostr, this string of characters is your identity. After completing your profile, a new page will prompt you to save your account's public key and private key. The public key is your identity, while the private key is the password that proves your identity. If this password is lost, it cannot be recovered, meaning the identity associated with that password will also disappear from this world.

The Damus client operates similarly to Twitter in terms of product usage, with a nearly identical page layout. From left to right, there are the home page, direct messages, search, and notifications pages. By entering the Account ID (public key) of the user you wish to follow in the search page, you can directly access their profile page. Of course, you can also search by Username and Display Name to follow users. For example, when we enter Jack's Nostr public key in the search box, we can see Jack's posts in the Nostr network.

Additionally, the search page displays all users' latest posts in real-time, allowing you to reply, retweet, like, and share. Each post has a unique Note ID, which can also be copied and entered in the search page for direct access. If there are issues with a post's content, you can long-press the post to report it to the connected relay for involving scams, nudity, or illegal content, while also blocking the post's author (you can find and revoke them in the Blocked feature). As a product of the Bitcoin community, a peer-to-peer payment system is essential. Damus also integrates Jack's favorite Bitcoin Lightning Network feature, allowing direct payments through third-party Lightning Network wallets.

This is the experience of Damus; it seems nothing special, just our usual social habits, but much lighter. And this is the characteristic of Nostr: simplicity and anti-censorship.

The Design Logic of Nostr

Nostr is a "minimalist" social protocol aimed at creating a globally decentralized social network that is resistant to censorship: it does not rely on any trusted central servers, does not depend on P2P technology, and does not issue tokens.

The technical architecture of Nostr is very simple: users run a local client, such as Damus. When they need to publish content, they sign it with their key and send it to multiple relays (hosted servers set up by protocol participants). When they need to view content, they can query nearby relays for information. Anyone can run a relay, which only stores and forwards content. Users do not need to trust the relays, as signatures are verified only on the client side.

Relays do not communicate with one another but only directly with users. When a user wants to "follow" someone, they simply instruct their client to query the relays it knows to obtain posts from that public key. A relay can block a user from posting any content there, but this does not affect the user, as they can publish content to other relays. Anyone can also set up their own relay, which is not complicated; if they cannot find other relays to publish content, their own relay can still publish.

In addressing the issues of decentralization and mainstream social media, the Nostr protocol leaves room for operators to expand through blank spaces. Each user can publish their content updates to any number of relays, while relays can charge fees and set thresholds, ensuring resistance to censorship; relays can require payment for publishing or other forms of identity verification (such as email addresses or phone numbers) and associate these internally with public keys to combat spam. If a relay is used as a vehicle for spam, it will easily be discarded by users, and the client can continue to obtain updates from other relays.

What motivates people to run relays? The protocol developers' answer to this is quite intriguing.

The developers believe that it should not be assumed that relay operators will serve without compensation, and they point out that even without so-called "incentives," DHT nodes in historically successful P2P networks continue to operate.

This looks very much like a blockchain, but it lacks the most important consensus and economic incentives of a blockchain. This is the developers' goal: a minimalist protocol, where even incentives and consensus are complex, leading to the concentration of computing power and unintended issues. What Nostr aims to do is the simplest social interaction, where every word someone wants to say can be seen by those they want to see it—it's that simple.

For this reason, Twitter founder Jack is very fond of Nostr. In December last year, he donated about 14.17 BTC (approximately $245,000) to further fund Nostr's development. He has also been active on Nostr. If you look at his public key, you'll find that Jack on Nostr is much more active than Jack on Twitter.

Of course, besides Damus, which Jack supports, the Nostr ecosystem has many interesting social applications, such as Branle, which is similar to Twitter, Anigma, which resembles Telegram, and Nvote, which is akin to Reddit.

Branle, Branle is an experimental Web3 Twitter made using Quasar. Like Damus, it is a Nostr client. Currently, Branle can be deployed via the Netlify API, but if users want to deploy it on their own machines, they must simulate custom title and avatar proxy features through other methods. However, the app's interaction is relatively cumbersome, as operations like changing usernames and bios require generating signatures one by one using the private key, which is very inefficient.

Anigma, Anigma is a Nostr client similar to Telegram, allowing users to manage their chat groups and content like Telegram. Anigma also features wallet management to facilitate in-app tipping. Additionally, the "Global" feature is used to find publicly available chat content worldwide.

Nvote, Nvote is a decentralized, voting-driven community similar to services like Reddit and HackerNews. It is lightweight, incompatible with Javascript, and has no ads. Besides text-based posts, Nvote does not support image transmission within the app. Nvote's activity data is public and can be digested by alternative clients without special API permissions.

Strong Competitive Ecosystem: Can Success Be Achieved Through Hype Alone?

Of course, Nostr is not the first decentralized social network. Whether it's the Lens Protocol developed by Aave's founder or the current Nostr and Damus that Jack is promoting, the emergence of popular Web3 social applications seems to rely on the social influence of "crypto OGs" or "Twitter gurus." However, achieving sustainable user growth and retention cannot solely depend on endorsements from big names, especially in the Web3 content social field.

Before Damus became popular, many projects with similar concepts and technical structures had been exploring for a long time, and many of these projects had already matured or reached a certain scale. BlockBeats also conducted a comprehensive analysis of this field in the "Web3.0 Creator Economy Report: The Current State and Imagination of CreatorFi." What Damus and Nostr face may be a competitive landscape far more intense than people imagine.

Mastodon

Mastodon is free open-source software for running self-hosted social network services, announced in October 2016 on the social news site "Hacker News," and gained significant attention after Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk. Currently, the project is maintained by the German non-profit organization Mastodon gGmbH.

Mastodon's features are similar to those of Twitter and Weibo, provided by a large number of independently operated nodes (or instances), each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policies, privacy options, and content moderation policies. Each user is a member of a specific node, which can interoperate as a federated social network, allowing interactions between users across different nodes. In this technical structure, users can maintain access to the complete social network while flexibly choosing the norms and terms of service of their preferred nodes.

Mastodon also has its own mature mobile app and high user activity. Among all decentralized social networks, Mastodon has a dominant share of traffic. Additionally, there are nearly 30 third-party desktop or mobile applications (instances/nodes) built on the Mastodon protocol.

Data Source: Similarweb

Tusky is a lightweight client for Mastodon based on the GPL 3.0 protocol. It supports all Mastodon features, such as photos and videos, and its custom emoji patterns are designed according to its material management guidelines. Users can choose between dark and Tusky theme colors, and it has notification and draft features.

Mast is a Mastodon application customized for iOS, adding a "timeline" feature to help users read the latest content from the Mastodon community more comfortably. The macOS version of Mast also supports multi-column information display.

Farcaster

Farcaster is also a decentralized social network, with a technical structure very similar to Nostr. Users can build client applications on Farcaster to broadcast messages and read messages from any user. Similar to most social infrastructures, Farcaster users can freely move their social identities and graphs between applications, and developers can freely build applications with new features on the network.

Farcaster's technical composition consists of an On-Chain Registry and Off-Chain Hosts. Users can claim unique usernames in the on-chain registry, which stores the user's host URL and serves as the DNS domain system for the Farcaster network. Off-chain hosts are used to store users' social data, and users can host their content on any network server by signing with their private key, with hosting options including self-hosting and using hosted services. Self-hosting users need to configure more infrastructure, while choosing hosted services simplifies the message reception process. Overall, Farcaster still has a relatively high user threshold.

Similar to the high-quality social fission of Clubhouse, Farcaster filters and forms purer social circles and more active communities through a higher user threshold. In this case, users' needs are not for economic incentives but for more spiritual satisfaction, such as deep interactions and resonance with professional users in fields related to technology, social governance, and cultural history. In the chart below, it can be seen that Farcaster users exhibit high activity and stability in both interaction duration and content publishing.

Chart Source: "Web3.0 Creator Economy Report: The Current State and Imagination of CreatorFi"

Currently, the Farcaster ecosystem has nearly 30 active applications, with the most mainstream applications being Discove and Launchcaster.

Discove, Discove is one of the mainstream applications in the Farcaster ecosystem, allowing users and applications to create and discover community-generated feeds, serving as the main information flow source for the Farcaster network. Discove emphasizes composability, and information flows published from this application will automatically appear in other Farcaster ecosystem applications. As the Farcaster network develops, more application data sources and tools will be available for creating feeds on Discove.

Launchcaster, Launchcaster is a place to share and discover new Web3 projects. Users publish their projects to Farcaster and reply to their posts with "@launch," prompting the Launch bot to respond with a Launchcaster link, allowing users to connect their wallets to declare and edit their pages. The top 10 posts will be sent in the Launchcaster Weekly email.

Lens Protocol

Lens Protocol, developed by Aave founder Stani Kulechov, is a social network protocol based on Polygon. Lens centers around NFTs, allowing users to hold their graph NFTs (Profile NFTs) through their wallets to publish content and establish ownership. The content published by users is stored on decentralized storage infrastructures like Arweave and IPFS, and the content links are updated to the users' graph NFTs. Simultaneously, all social behaviors and relationships of users are stored on the Polygon chain in the form of NFTs, with interactions and connections between different graph NFTs achieved through a series of fixed modules.

Compared to independent content applications, Lens Protocol and its ecosystem protocols have stronger social attributes and composability. Applications built on the Lens protocol can customize these three aspects to enable interactions such as tipping, subscriptions, and community governance, allowing users to transfer or sell their graph NFTs freely.

As a social protocol that has been online for only six months and is not fully open, there are still many applications focused on rich media content production that have not completed development on Lens, significantly limiting the production of quality content in the Lens ecosystem. By the end of 2022, there were over 98,000 graph NFTs on Lens with followers, of which 53.5% of users had fewer than 10 followers. From a temporal distribution perspective, users' following behaviors are strongly correlated with project popularity, indicating that the current following behaviors in the Lens ecosystem are primarily a "byproduct" of users trying things out. However, as time goes on and more content applications become available to users, the content quality and economic benefits of the Lens ecosystem will greatly improve.

Chart Source: "Web3.0 Creator Economy Report: The Current State and Imagination of CreatorFi"

Currently, the Lens ecosystem has hundreds of projects built on its underlying technology, covering social, curation, and audio-visual content. Most of the launched applications are social applications, with relatively few audio-visual content applications. Mainstream applications include Lenster, Lenstube, Lensport, and Iris.

Lenster, Lenster is currently the main application in the Lens ecosystem, where most user interactions with the Lens protocol occur. Lenster's user interface is similar to Twitter, serving as a decentralized and permissionless social media application. Users can connect with other users' graph NFTs on Lenster or join various communities for commenting, co-creation, governance, and other interactions. Ordinary users can freely browse content dynamics on Lenster, but to interact with them, they need to hold graph NFTs.

Iris, Iris is a creator social platform. Users can share original and reposted content on Iris and develop their communities, with users paying subscription fees to follow creators. Additionally, creators can set the visibility range of their posts and impose restrictions such as "followers only."

LensTube, LensTube is a decentralized video-sharing platform aiming to become the YouTube of Web3.0. The video content on LensTube is stored on the decentralized video storage facility Livepeer, allowing users to share and enjoy videos with their fans based on graph NFTs, and earn community rewards through tipping and favoriting.

Teaparty, TeaParty is a community curation application designed to help creators promote their content. Its functions are divided into TeaParty Hosts and TeaParty Guests. TeaParty Hosts primarily target creators and advertisers, requiring payment only when a user's repost receives likes and favorites. TeaParty Guests target ordinary users, rewarding them for reposting quality content. This way, both the cost-effectiveness for promoters and the content quality on the platform can be improved. The "community curator" concept adopted by Teaparty is also one of the most promising economic models in the Web3.0 creator economy, which will be further elaborated below.

In the wave of Web3, supported by token economics, we have become accustomed to the operation of an application + economic incentives, as if tokens have become a standard feature of Web3. However, in the Web3 content social field, many protocols and projects often break this "unwritten rule" of the industry, and Nostr is no exception. Rather than saying Nostr is the next-generation Web3 product, it is more accurate to say that Nostr restores the original state of the internet. When you enter the same public key in different clients and see the same content, it can evoke memories of the era when there were third-party microblogging clients.

After the transformations of Weibo and Twitter, we have seen many teams attempt decentralized social networking. Public chains like EOS and BSV have also had social applications with token incentives, telling people to interact to earn token rewards, but those projects have all failed. In BlockBeats' "Web3.0 Creator Economy Report: The Current State and Imagination of CreatorFi," it was mentioned that the once-popular concept of Social Tokens did not withstand the test of time and market, gradually being replaced by projects characterized by NFT graphs and de-tokenized protocols. Perhaps Nostr's path of "returning to the internet" can truly resonate with more users.