On Christmas Day, while most of the capital unplugged, one of Washington’s most-online senators was tinkering with a new kind of social media. With a tweet verifying her identity on the decentralized protocol Nostr, Wyoming Republican Cynthia Lummis joined a holiday season surge in interest in the Web3 social network that has also drawn the likes of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Alternative social media designs have been percolating for years, with little sign of mass adoption. But over the past year, as interest in crypto has grown and concerns have mounted about Elon Musk’s chaotic Twitter takeover, an opening has emerged for new kinds of decentralized social networks, and they’re arguably entering 2023 with the wind at their backs. The goals of these networks might include making censorship harder, or making content moderation more nimble, or generally curtailing the power of giant social media companies to shape and track what people talk about online. As with the proliferation of new platforms, choices about alternative network designs tend to be tinged with political considerations. Trump-era upstarts like Getr, Parler, Gab and Truth Social all catered to slices of the right by advertising themselves as free-speech alternatives to Twitter. In other words, they still operated as centralized platforms, but they offered different policies. Another crop of alternatives offer different plumbing. The most well-known is Mastodon, an open-source network founded in 2016 that allows anyone to set up a server. The design is often described as “federated," and may or may not fall within the blurry lines of “Web3,” depending on how you define that term. It allows users to join curated communities with customized content moderation rules, and it has become a haven in recent weeks for liberal journalists and academics repelled by Twitter’s rightward tack under Musk. Nostr, which got off the ground in 2020, is a decentralized protocol that allows users to own their identities and verify their posts with digital signatures that use public key-private key cryptography. The posts then propagate out to a network of interconnected servers. The protocol does not use blockchains, which have been found in early experiments to be too slow for social networking. But there are structural similarities, and Nostr has found an early niche among the crypto crowd (Lummis is Washington’s biggest Bitcoin advocate) with its libertarian, open-source ethos. Because Nostr users control their own identities, no external authority can revoke their access to the protocol. And because it is designed to rely on many independent servers, it should, in theory, be practically impossible to ban messages or users from the entire network, even if some servers censor them. Recently, Nostr’s biggest booster has been Dorsey , who created Twitter’s non-profit Bluesky initiative to develop a decentralized social media protocol before leaving to work fulltime on a vision of the internet he has dubbed “Web 5.” Last month, Dorsey donated about 14 Bitcoin — roughly a quarter million dollars — to promote its development, and he has tweeted a screenshot of his phone showing that he uses a social networking app built on Nostr called… Damus (Get it?). Influential endorsements aside, Web3 social projects — which also include the likes of Farcaster and Lens — aren't poised to replace the giant platforms any time soon. They're still much smaller: while Twitter claims hundreds of millions of active users and Facebook claims billions, Mastodon claimed just 2.5 million users this fall, and Nostr counts only about 220,000 unique user identities. But replacement isn't the goal — at least not yet. Because it’s a protocol rather than a platform, Nostr itself is not a direct competitor to Twitter, says Koty Auditore, the pseudonymous booster of the project who goaded Dorsey on Twitter into donating to it. And many of the projects face usability hurdles that are likely to slow mass adoption. Rather than receiving easy-to-remember usernames, Nostr users publish long, clunky public keys to establish their identities. Technologist Chris Messina, a founding member of the Open Web Foundation and a connoisseur of alternative social networks, said Mastodon has reached a point where it is “ready for public consumption,” while Nostr remains more of an “experiment.” As Web3 social projects proliferate and public conversation splinters across different apps and protocols, there could be political consequences. Messina is a longtime advocate of decentralizing social media — but even so, he says he is worried that fragmentation will further strain public discourse that has been marked in recent years by mutual hostility and misunderstanding. To mitigate this trend towards balkanization, he'd like to see Web3 designers prioritize interoperability — agreeing on common technical standards that will allow information to flow easily between different platforms, including perhaps those like Twitter that are currently dominant. Otherwise, “you’ve kind of exacerbated the filter bubble problem,” Messina told DFD. “I think there will be a decoherence that we’re not quite prepared for.”
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