Decentralized Social Protocol: Nostr to the left, Farcaster to the right

Author: 0xOrange, Deep Tide TechFlow

On February 1, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted that the social products Damus and Amethyst, based on the distributed social media protocol Nostr, have officially launched on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Unsurprisingly, the WeChat Moments and Twitter timelines were flooded with their respective public key letters, decentralized social media has once again become a hot topic of discussion.

At the same time, people inevitably compare it with classic WEB2 social products like Twitter, but some may make incorrect matches during the comparison, such as comparing Twitter with Nostr, or equating Damus with Nostr. The misconception here is that Nostr is essentially a protocol, while Damus is a third-party application developed based on that protocol. There are many applications similar to Damus, and below is a comparison of different client implementations of Nostr.

Nostr is a simplified protocol aimed at creating a censorship-resistant global "social" network, reflecting the current social dilemma: social networks are censored and not free.

The most commonly discussed example is, of course, Twitter, but did Twitter do anything wrong?

I think not necessarily, because it is a privately held company registered in the United States (formerly a publicly traded company), which means it must comply with regulations, be accountable to shareholders, and have a profitable business model… it is a commercial company, not a guardian of free speech.

As a company, it has the right to set its own boundaries for speech censorship. For instance, when various forms of child pornography, hate speech, and racial hatred flood the platform, it inevitably leads to bad content driving out good content, thus affecting advertisers' demand. Additionally, government, public opinion, and even internal employee opinions can exert pressure, influencing speech censorship.

Who will defend the freedom of social networks? I believe that responsibility should not rest entirely on companies or applications, but rather be entrusted to protocols like Nostr and Farcaster, where code guarantees freedom.

Using the most common analogy, Nostr and Farcaster are like Layer 1 for social media, providing a truly free "public" space where various developers and private companies can build applications based on this public square. The competition among classic WEB2 applications like Twitter at Layer 2 revolves around UI/UX, curation, and operations… Each application may have different standards for speech censorship, but this does not affect the existence of "source information." Even if certain information is blocked in one application, it can still be displayed in another, allowing everyone to freely choose their preferred application.

Nostr and Farcaster are representative social protocol layers, and there are also Lens Protocol and DeSo, all of which share the same goal, but their technical routes and even "protocol characteristics" differ.

In summary, comparing Nostr and Farcaster leads to a simple conclusion: Nostr is more like Bitcoin, while Farcaster is more like Ethereum.

Essentially, Farcaster is still a company funded by venture capital, founded by former Coinbase executive Dan Romero, which raised $30 million in July 2022, led by a16z.

The early user group for Farcaster primarily consisted of VCs, project founders, and Ethereum community users.

In terms of design, Farcaster uses an Ethereum architecture. Creating a profile on Farcaster generates a mnemonic and an identity on the Ethereum Goerli test network. Farcaster chooses to host user identity information on-chain, acting as a global data registry.

Since storing information on-chain is expensive, Farcaster's trade-off is to keep a person's identity information and read/write capabilities on-chain, while other data (such as private messages) is stored on off-chain servers known as Farcaster Hubs, ensuring that users have complete control over their identity, social relationships, and data.

Currently, there are over 30 applications built on the Farcaster protocol.

Compared to Farcaster's tens of millions in funding, Nostr appears rather modest. It was established by a group of anonymous developers without external funding, later receiving a donation of 14 BTC from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, which is the only external funding.

In its early days, Nostr's supporters were primarily Bitcoin enthusiasts led by Jack, including core developer Martti Malmi, who set up the Bitcoin forum for Satoshi Nakamoto and developed the client iris.to based on the Nostr protocol.

Like Bitcoin, Nostr pursues "simplicity." Each user's identity information is simply their public key, and it consists of two core components: the client and the relay (also known as the forwarder).

Everyone runs a client, and when you want to publish certain content, you sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by others or yourself). To receive updates from others, you can query multiple relays to see if they know about those other users.

Anyone can run a relay, and we do not need to trust the relay; the signature is verified on the client side.

In the words of BTCStudy Ajian, Nostr is a public key-based, minimalist, censorship-resistant information transmission protocol.

In addition to Nostr and Farcaster, the hottest social protocol is undoubtedly Lens Protocol, a decentralized social media protocol built on Polygon by Stani Kulechov, founder of the DeFi lending project Aave.

The core of Lens Protocol lies in fully utilizing the potential of NFTs, building a social graph based on NFTs.

For example, when you create a Lens profile, an NFT is minted in your Ethereum wallet; when you follow someone on Lenster, you mint a "fan" NFT (Follow NFT) on-chain, and each NFT has a unique number that records the order of creation/following.

Thus, under the Lens Protocol, social relationships are not just data, but transferable trading assets.

From the perspective of ecological development, Lens Protocol is currently the hottest social protocol, partly due to its modular design.

Lens Protocol is exceptionally developer-friendly, allowing developers to build their social applications on Lens using modular components, including a wide range of Web3 and Web2 tools, as well as on-chain and off-chain data, all bound together by LensAPI. For instance, applications can choose decentralized storage methods like IPFS and Arweave, or traditional methods like AWS; they can choose XMTP or Dialect for direct messaging, and Push or Notify for sending notifications.

In the traditional internet realm, social media is a pearl due to its strong network effects, and the oligopoly effect brought by social graphs is particularly evident. For example, most social applications, including Tantan and Momo, ultimately lead to WeChat, making it difficult for anyone to escape the social relationships established on WeChat.

Without discussing whether decentralized social can disrupt traditional social relationships and graphs, one question to ask is, does decentralized social still have network effects? Who will be the winner?

The network effects and monopoly advantages of traditional internet social platforms largely stem from their closed and permissioned nature, creating their own backyards. After a while, the cost for users to exit these platforms becomes very high because they cannot take their social relationships and graphs with them.

However, in decentralized social, with permissionless access and users controlling their social relationships (provided they truly have control), the cost of exiting is lower, making it more difficult to accumulate network effects.

Or rather, decentralized protocols can accumulate some network effects, but applications find it hard to do so.

This may be a form of crypto freedom.

Just throwing out some ideas for discussion with everyone.