What is Nostr?
Notwithstanding the lack of capitalisation, Nostr is an acronym for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. According to the website of its creator, Nostr was created in response to perceived issues with Twitter.
It’s important to be clear that Nostr is not an app or service that you sign up for. Rather it can be better understood as an open standard for social media that anyone can use. A useful analogy is the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) used for email. You probably know how this works:
- You write your email using Gmail, Outlook, or whichever email client you prefer.
- Your message travels through various email servers.
- The recipient can read it using any email client they choose.
Nostr works similarly:
- You write your note in an Nostr client (like Damus, Primal, and many others).
- Your note travels through Nostr relays (similar to email servers).
- Others can read it using whichever Nostr client they prefer.
The use of a standard protocol enables interoperability, allowing users to choose their preferred software. No single company controls the system.
Isn’t Mastodon a decentralised social media platform? Why do we need another one?
While Nostr and Mastodon both enable decentralised socially communication, they take fundamentally different approaches. The comparison made above equating Nostr relays with email servers is actually imperfect and better describes the approach Mastodon takes. Mastodon does rely on servers run by organisations or individuals where users create accounts. Your identity is tied to your chosen server, similar to having a Gmail address. This means you are still at the mercy of the entity running the server.
Nostr, in contrast, removes the need for servers entirely. Your identity is a cryptographic key pair, which works directly with any compatible client or relay. This key pair is mathematically linked. One is a private key (which is kept secret, like a password) and the other is a public key (which you share freely, like an email address). This enables the impressive ability to use different clients with the same identity without the need for accounts. The downside is that the onus is users to safeguard their key pairs. There is no Nostr tech support to help with a lost private key!
Nostr aligns with library values
From a librarian’s perspective, there is a lot to like about Nostr. There is no central algorithm that controls what content is shown to you. Individual relays can choose what they show, but users can connect to other relays. The diversity of relays effectively prevents single-point censorship, as there is no central authority that can remove content from the entire network. Again, more is demanded from the user in terms of selecting which relays to connect to, but this aligns with the long-held value of librarians of developing information literate citizens capable of making such choices on their own. In an age of information overload, we need to trust people to select their own sources wisely rather than rely on centralised content moderation. Nostr protects freedom of speech at the protocol level, ensuring that no central authority can arbitrarily block content from being posted.
Nostr also scores highly on privacy. No personal information is needed to generate a private-public key pair. This obviously aligns with librarianship’s historical role in championing patron privacy as a cornerstone of intellectual freedom. The lack of a centralised authority allows users to access information with reduced risk of surveillance.
Information preservation is another library value that Nostr is better aligned with compared to centralised social media platforms. A lot of historically and culturally significant content has been posted to social media, and there is a need to preserve it and make it available for future research. However, it is doubtful that for-profit social media companies will prioritise this. The biggest advance in this respect came in 2010, when the Library of Congress announced with great fanfare that it would archive all public tweets. But in the face of various challenges, the project was scaled back in 2017. I could find no further updates from the LoC, and given the current ownership of Twitter/X I think it unlikely that much progress will be made. The centralised nature of traditional social media means that preservation is the hands of a single entity.
Contrast this with Nostr’s architecture that requires multiple relays and hence multiple copies of data. This creates resilience in a way that librarians will be familiar with (“Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”). Libraries could potentially choose to create their own relays and preserve notes that are relevant to their own collection development policies. Again, the open nature of the protocol means that they would not have to seek permission to do this.
In essence, Nostr's decentralized architecture naturally aligns with core library values of intellectual freedom, privacy, and preservation, potentially providing a pathway to a truly open digital commons. Librarians and information professionals could play a pivotal role in shaping this online public square.
Getting started with Nostr
I am cautious of getting too carried away with the potential of Nostr. It currently has very few users for a social network. At the time of writing, the stats page of Nostr.Band showed the number of daily active users hovering below 20,000. This is a tiny fraction of the 245 million daily active users of Twitter/X. Given the importance of the network effect to social media, Nostr has a long way to go before it becomes a true competitor.
However, it is not inconceivable, and I would argue that the alignment of the Nostr architecture with our values makes it important for librarians to engage with and understand this technology. The best possible outcome would be a truly decentralised, censorship-resistant, online social space on top of which anyone could build apps and services. In such a world, individual citizens will need to be much more information literate and independent. As information professionals, librarians could play a leading role in adopting and advocating for this.
Nostr clients
The best way to get started is to download a client. As mentioned, there are many Nostr clients to choose from. Some offer additional features for subscribers. Try out a few to see which one you prefer and remember that you can use all of them with the same key pair!
Recommended longer read
Exploring the Nostr Ecosystem: A Study of Decentralization and Resilience: This pre-print on arxiv.org provides a more technical introduction to Nostr. The Nostr primer that starts on page 4 is particularly helpful for new users.
