On Friday, while Twitter’s new management was stirring up a fresh round of controversy, the head of Twitter’s old management remained blissfully unaware of the turmoil. Jack Dorsey, the guru-esque former CEO of Twitter, hasn’t been seen on his old platform since January. Instead, he’s been spending his time on NOSTR, an open-source social media protocol launched in 2020 that has become popular with Bitcoin enthusiasts. That includes Dorsey, who has been posting up a stream-of-consciousness storm lately on the network. On Friday, amid Dorsey’s posting tsunami, I created a NOSTR identity for myself to learn more about its users’ decentralized vision for social media’s future. To access the network, I used the Damus iPhone app, one of several software clients available for accessing the protocol. I found the Damus user experience comparable to Twitter’s, but clunkier, and with some minor issues getting a custom profile picture and wallpaper image to stick. I also decided to ask Dorsey himself about NOSTR. In a brief Friday afternoon interview with DFD, Dorsey said he had not even heard about Twitter’s decision to block engagement with tweets that link to the rival platform Substack. Instead, he pushed for his vision of an internet in which fights over the power of social media platforms would essentially cease to be relevant. Dorsey was the face of Twitter during Donald Trump’s rise to power, when the platform’s capacity for un-mediated online conversation upended political communication in the U.S. and much of the rest of world. But in late 2021, he left the CEO job to focus on his payments startup Square, which he rebranded Block — as in blockchain — to focus on his vision for “Web5,” a Bitcoin-centric decentralized internet. In recent months, Dorsey has become increasingly focused on this new social media protocol as a potential vehicle for his decentralized internet vision. It's a protocol, like email, that anyone can build software on top of. Users access the network with a personalized private key — essentially a password that they are responsible for keeping track of (there’s no one to reset it if they lose it), that lets them retain control of their identity no matter which software interface they use to access the network. It’s sort of like the right to take your phone number with you when you switch cell service providers, except that right is baked into the code of the protocol itself. Because anyone can set up a NOSTR server, content or accounts blocked by one server can still be found on other servers, and NOSTR clients tend to scan several servers to avoid missing posts. In December, shortly after publishing a blog post reflecting on content moderation in response to the Twitter files, Dorsey donated 14 Bitcoin — then worth roughly a quarter million dollars — to support the protocol’s development. He last posted on Twitter in late January to note that a NOSTR client, Damus, had become available in the Apple store. Since then, he has been prolific on NOSTR, offering his thoughts on everything from the World Economic Forum (“dangerous”) to methods for lowering your heart rate (“breathe through your nose always”). On Friday alone, he posted over 100 times, including replies. In the middle of all that posting, Dorsey agreed to be interviewed, with a catch: “We can interview in the replies, not the DMs. Open interview.” In the resultant back-and-forth, Dorsey revealed that Block is working on NOSTR-compatible products. He declined to offer any further response to a March report by short-seller Hindenburg Research that argues Block's Cash App has inflated user numbers. He also argued that the user experience on NOSTR had already surpassed that of Twitter, citing “Zaps” a feature that lets users tip each other in Bitcoin — part of a vision in which information and money flow together around the internet without obstruction. Dorsey said he was unaware of Twitter’s recent Substack blockade, but didn't seem to like the idea: “I don’t believe Twitter should block any links,” he wrote (immediately following the interview, he published several “notes” — NOSTR’s term for a post — bringing attention to the rift). He also said NOSTR was becoming popular outside the Bitcoiner niche, citing a “Growing artist community” that he said would be drawn in by the tipping function. “That will grow faster with zaps and the fact we finally have global permissionless payments on the internet.” Dorsey’s chosen interview format matched the “open” theme around which he’s staking his business career and personal brand. His followers peppered the thread with their own commentary during the back-and-forth, and Dorsey engaged them in conversation during the proceedings. Following the exchange, Dorsey announced it would form the model for his new personal media policy: “No more closed interviews for me. Over NOSTR or live pods only.” At a time when no one can agree who should have power to police social media content, a system designed to be controlled by no one holds obvious appeal, especially when it integrates payments and gives individual users control of their identities. But the value of a general-purpose communications network is highly dependent on attracting a large number of users. More than a million NOSTR “accounts” have been created (the number of individual humans actually using it is harder to estimate), but real mass adoption faces a behavioral obstacle: To date, most internet users have been happy to trade away control of their identity for the convenience and scale offered by centralized platforms. For anyone who doesn’t want to talk about Bitcoin and the structure of the internet all day, NOSTR offers slim pickings. It would take something like artists — or a critical mass of Dorsey-level public figures — flocking to the network to provide a level of vibrancy that would make the transition worth it for average netizens. Either that or the protocol needs to play host to a series of extremely compelling interviews-in-the-replies, conducted exclusively by DFD... To make sure you don’t miss the next round of live NOSTR interviews, you can follow me on the protocol using my public key: npub1vz4yqatycf5tlk4swknndaryrd84xs266a2xtp6ucvpj7pm0tmkqzfq7se
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