Humans are evolving with social media & devices. These are powerful tools, but neither is built with their users’ health and well-being in mind.

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The big tech business incentives are a higher priority than their users’ health & well being. This results in their products being designed to capture as much attention from you as possible so they can profit.

There’s now a term for this: “enshittification”

When a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits.

Many are realizing this. Few know there are emerging, viable alternatives.

Bucky gets it.

Bitcoin is a new model for money.

Daylight Computer is a new model for computers.

And this article will explain why Nostr is primed to be the new model for social media.

“We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen, is if it’s financed by a third party who wishes to manipulate you” - Jaron Lanier

§What is Nostr and How do I use it?

Nostr is an internet protocol that allows for censorship resistant social media.

Primal is one app that organizes the content on the Nostr network.

Think of it like this; Primal is to Nostr what Proton Mail is to email: a client (app) built on top of an open protocol, giving users a polished interface without owning the underlying network.

Primal doesn’t own you, your content or identity. You do. You can take your content and followers to any Nostr app.

When you post to Primal, you can see your content in other Nostr apps.

In this gif, you can see my content in 5 different Nostr apps.

The openness of the protocol is why nostr apps are enshittification proof. No, the apps do not have the polish of legacy social media (yet), but can you see it?

If one app enshittifies, you just move to another app with all of your content & connections. This will force a healthy competition amongst the ecosystem of apps.

Open protocols give us an opportunity to actually be sovereign online. Watch my full Nostr crash course video to learn more.

How I got into Nostr

Long story short, if you’ve been in to Bitcoin, you at least know about Nostr. I used Twitter as my primary news/Bitcoin source for the past 8 years and followed the Trump and Covid dramas closely.

I’ve come to the conclusion that social media needs to be protocol based and decentralized. I resinate with this tweet from a Nostr builder below:

§The Everything App for Social Media

This is the original idea that made the lightbulb in my head go off. 1 identity for all types of content.

I have accounts on Youtube, Twitter, Nostr, Instagram, TikTok, Medium, & now Substack. That means 7 different logins, 7 different follower sets, and 7 places to post when I have something to share.

With Nostr, I have 1 identity, 1 follower set, & (potentially) 1 place to post each type of content.

Nostr apps are in their infancy, but I can imagine a future with more diverse apps specified by content type (blogs, long form vid, vertical vids, music, etc.).

The ability to post all of your content to (potentially) one app and giving your audience the choice to consume that content in whatever app they please is revolutionary.

X wants to be the everything app as well. It looks like it’s heading towards becoming the WeChat of the West. This begs the question… Does the infrastructure for social media need to be owned by singular corporations or governments?

Check out this video where @jack & @Edward Snowden discuss everything apps during the 2nd Nostr conference in Japan.

§Sovereignty

Today, our digital lives are completely owned. Our data, identity, and content can be taken away.

Nostr flips this. We own our identity & choose where our data lives. Companies no longer have singular control over the flow of information.

Bitcoin gives you private keys for money. Nostr gives you private keys for speech.

On X and Instagram, we make a username and password. We are renting these identities from these corporations. How do we know these identities are not yours? Because they can be taken away from you.

With Nostr, you and only you have your keys. You can post anytime, from any app, using your own key. If Primal stops working, no big deal. You could post from other Nostr apps.

I believe there’s something deeper going on here. Humans are sovereign beings. Being sovereign means being in full control.

With Nostr & Bitcoin, we can be in complete control of our money & speech.

These tools empower humans and reduce our need for dependence on 3rd parties.

Nostr allows us to create & share freely without the potential of being silenced for “wrongthink”.

It’s time for those who care about sovereignty to build their brands on their own land.

§Nostr is Organic

Facebook wanted to connect the world. They’ve done an absolutely fantastic job at this. But at what cost?

The ad model has been the best way for platforms to monetize their services. This leads to bad incentives. Social media sites need you to spend as much time as possible on their apps so that they can sell your attention to advertisers.

Maybe there’s more ethical ways to advertise that do not lead to perverse incentives, but this isn’t the point.

Now, social media is basically a dopamine slot machine serving us things that we’re most likely to engage with. Whatever we lend our eyes to, purposefully or not, is the content we’re fed. Engagement is the north star of current social media. This modifies the behavior of everyone on the app.

These algorithms have been weaponized at times. And many would say that they’re programming us.

Let me speak in meme for a moment here:

Nostr is organic. Information spreads because the users spread it as opposed to platforms showing you content with the primary goal of you staying engaged.

Primal Gives you Control

After using Nostr for a couple years, it’s clearer to me when I switch to another social media platform that they are doing everything they can to grab my attention. They being the platform and the creators. I can feel when people create for an algo vs. for an audience.

With Primal, I can select which algorithm I want to use or create my own feeds using Primal’s advanced search. (I expect these tools to get much better over time.) This gives the user much more control over what they see vs a singular algorithm. Algorithmic choice is something that legacy social media platforms are greatly missing.

Also, Primal’s algorithm is transparent. Here you can see who each reaction is weighted and scored. Here you can see how this post scored for Primal’s trending algorithm.

Algorithms today are black boxes. A transparent algorithm will be gamed, but it’s necessary for an “organic”, “healthy” social media in my opinion.

Algorithm transparency is a key pillar in the social media bill of rights created by Twitter cofounder, Rabble (who is also building on Nostr).

Furthermore, I can control which feed I want to see when I open the app. For example, I created this feed of one person saying “STAY FOCUSED CHAMP” so when I open the app I’m not immediately distracted. Look at what instagram does when you want to simply search for someone’s account.. or even what the Substack app is feeding us now.

I can’t help but envision a world where all of the content is posted to Nostr. The apps with the best user experiences would win because it’s all open.

I’d imagine the winners would have the best algos, least intrusive ads, and would give their users the most control over their experience.

§Monetization

Primal has a built in wallet that allows users to send bitcoin directly to creators. Creators keep 100% of what they earn.

Subscriptions are not available yet on Primal.

§Thought Experiment

Pretend you’re a super intelligent being looking down upon the earth.

The1st thing you’d notice is that they’re always staring at their phones. You’d also notice that while they have an abundant earth, they insist on chemically altering their food which is making them sick.

Then, you’d notice that the money humans work their entire lives for what can be and is manipulated by central authorities with zero effort.

And finally, you’d notice that the “digital global town square” is owned by a unelected, fallable humans and corporations.

It’s laughable!

It doesn’t have to be this way anymore. And it’s up to us to change it.

§To conclude.

This article is not meant to trash talk other platforms, those who use them, or those who created them. I use them daily. Mostly to advocate for Nostr & Bitcoin these days.

These platforms have created a ton of value for the world, & Nostr can be used alongside of them while the nostr apps UX improves and people continue joining.

Maybe if Nostr existed back then, they would’ve built on it.

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. We’ve learned priceless lessons from the evolution of social media thus far. We can use these lessons to shape tools with our health & well-being as our first priority.

We can obsolete these outdated, unhealthy systems.

Nostro and Nuestro mean ‘ours’ in Italian & Spanish. I don’t think this a coincidence. Nostr is our chance to create a better internet for our future generations.

pura vida

(meme cred @Max DeMarco also check out his nostr doc )

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