Nostr: Social as a Service
An entire universe of new applications awaits..
Despite being extremely early days for Nostr, it’s already shown incredible promise, not unlike what the early internet or Bitcoin did.
Like both, it is technically imperfect, but it’s also composable, extensible, simple, scalable and most importantly it has captured the interest and imagination of brilliant engineers from all over the world. It has the early momentum necessary for a STANDARD to develop.
It’s an exciting time to be building something in this space.
This will be a short note, just to help frame the way I see Nostr, and how I imagine the protocol being used in the future.
“X” for Nostr
Right now we’re still in the “x” for Nostr stage, meaning the taking of something existing and putting it on Nostr. The standout app over the last 12mths was Damus. It showed that you could build a twitter-like experience on Nostr, while allowing the users ownership of their identity and interacting with a social graph that lived at the protocol layer — and not with the platform itself (Damus, in this case).
With the support of Jack Dorsey, we had the first real wave of people come across, and discover something unique and special (and many have remained).
But…at the same time, due of the nature of the Damus app, and the support from the founder of Twitter — people have come to conceptualise Nostr as just another “twitter clone” — which of course, couldn’t be further from truth. The truth is, Nostr is a substrate for an entire universe of new applications that couldn’t be built before. It’s like a “Social Graph as a Service” that all future applications will be able to leverage, to make what they’re building more useful, relevant and meaningful to the user.
Lyn Alden recently posted the following on Nostr which is a more accurate way to conceptualise what we’re dealing with:
I don’t say this in any way to disparage Damus or Jack. Quite the contrary. This HAD to happen. This support was ABSOLUTELY necessary. Dorsey in this case was like Laszlo Hanyecz (the Bitcoin Pizza guy), and the twitter use-case was like the Pizza.
This is the path Nostr needed to take, and the use case that was necessary to capture that early cohort of devout supporters. In the early days, people thought the internet was just a higher bandwidth telephone line that we would use for video conferencing one day — they had no idea what it was really going to become. Nostr is the same. And the future will blow the minds and expectations of everyone who will come to one day interact with any application on the web.
The next wave
The next wave of Nostr interest will come from products that are more like the “x + y + z” for Nostr — meaning that you will be able to blend concepts together unlike ever before. Some early examples are already emerging.
- Highlighter is like Substack & Patreon but on Nostr. People can support creators like they might on Patreon, creators can build subscriber lists like they can on Substack, and ultimately, they are held together by the Nostr social graph, which is like the “relevance glue” for it all.
- Primal is like Zelle meets Twitter. It’s looking to create both the simplest wallet to pay and get paid small amounts of money, but blending it with a micro-blogging centric social app. This is Elon’s dream in many ways, but made possible because it’s built on a truly digital-native, open foundation.
- Satlantis, is like Trip Advisor, meets Instagram and Google Places. Imagine a travel platform, that is location centric, and leverages people’s social graph to influence everything from ratings & reviews on restaurants, to the quality of life rating and cost of living score for a city. Satlantis will become the place people go to discover the world, through a unique lens.
Of course, I’ve done none of these products justice. You’ll have to experience them for yourself to really get a sense of each. Speaking of which….If you’re a content creator of any kind, and you’re not yet on Nostr, it’s about time you change that.
If you have a Substack, and you write — set up on Highlighter, create your public key (nPub), store it and begin writing on both. You can never be kicked off Nostr, nor can you lose your followers. In this way, not only do you have a back up if Substack goes woke, but in time, as more people join Nostr, your audience will grow and this will become the place you post.
Likewise with Primal and Satlantis. If you’re already on Twitter, you should set up on Primal. It might not have the same reach now, but I can tell you from personal experience, the momentum is there. While I’ve added 200 followers on Twitter in the last 2wks, I’ve added almost 2000 on Nostr.
And finally, with Satlantis. If you have an Instagram, or you use Google Maps, you need to set up on Satlantis. This is going to be where you showcase anything travel, food, community, business, farmers market, health and lifestyle related. For everyone saying that Nostr is not “cool” — well…. this is where all the cool, visual content is going to be posted & displayed. Food, Travel, Lifestyle, Health, Experiences.
And the best part of all of ????
If you set up on either Primal, Highlighter or Satlantis — you are automagically a user on ALL THREE! Your account, your identity, your followers, your content — are all visible (in different ways) on all three. You can post and your audience can interact with your content across all of them.
The magic of this experience is real, and it’s an echo of the early promise of the internet. The feeling of being connected — not just being sucked into a vortex of clickbait hell.
The bright purple future
What’s to come over the next decade or two, will be products that have no direct current comparison. They will find ways to integrate and embed the largest and most censorship-resistant social graph in the world, into their apps. Every digital product and service (or physical that has a digital presence) will become more relevant by using Nostr for “Social as a service.”
Content, reputation, trust — all of it will change, and this will truly be the era when things get interesting.
A whole new suite of use-cases await: An entire universe of applications.
Speaking of which — if you will be in Europe between 13–15 June, come see the Nostr Booth at BTC Prague, which was crowdfunded by Satlantis, Primal, Highlighter and the Nostr community at large. The “Universe of Apps” theme is exactly what we are presenting to the world. This is going to be a turning point for Nostr.
If you enjoyed this, and want to learn more about what we’re doing at Satlantis, go to Satlantis.io and follow along on Nostr, IG & Twitter
(yes — we still use them all).
