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Twitter's Decentralized Challenger: Lens, Mastodon, and nostr

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The fact that Musk is taking such a radical approach to block centralized Web2 frenemies and decentralized social media indicates his concern about the trend of Twitter being replaced.

Original Title: "
The Decentralized Twitter That Made Musk Afraid Is Here!"

Original Author: Fishery, Biteye

Not long after Twitter changed ownership, Musk banned the promotion of other social media platforms on the Twitter platform.

The updated Twitter policy mentioned that if the officials find accounts mainly promoting social media applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Tribel, Post, Nostr, and former U.S. President Trump's Truth Social, the related content will be removed.

First-time offenders will have their accounts temporarily suspended, and repeat offenders will face permanent bans.

Many uninformed media and users may simplistically attribute Musk's decision to Twitter's efforts to increase ad revenue and monopolize the Web2 market.

However, considering the rapidly growing user base of the decentralized Twitter alternative Mastodon and former Twitter CEO @jack's intensive promotion of another decentralized Twitter, Nostr, perhaps Musk's behavior can be given another more reasonable explanation:

Musk is truly afraid, afraid that the Twitter he just acquired for billions of dollars will become the first Web2 traditional app to be replaced by a decentralized protocol.

Social Media Protocols and Decentralization

In the first decade of the 21st century, the concept of social media rapidly developed, and with the boost of mobile internet technology for nearly a decade, a group of social media giants emerged, such as Twitter, WeChat, Instagram, and so on.

As Bitcoin led the concept of decentralization, people gradually began to focus on the censorship resistance (third parties cannot delete information) and tamper resistance (how to ensure the authenticity of information without trusting a third-party server) of social protocols.

Part of the Web3 social protocol that we are familiar with can achieve these goals, such as the Lenster app, a Twitter-like app based on the Lens Protocol.

However, unlike the aforementioned decentralized protocols that achieve decentralization at the server level, Lens relies on the blockchain as a decentralized solution, storing user content on-chain and controlled by their own wallets.

From an operational strategy perspective, the Lens solution originates from the crypto community (Polygon + IPFS), with the vast majority of users currently coming from Web3.

On the other hand, Mastodon and nostr's technical approach is implemented by a group of non-profit tech geeks (most developers are not from the crypto community), targeting users who believe in decentralization or have anti-censorship needs. This user base is spread across various communities, more mainstream, and not limited to Web3 users, so the topics within the social protocol are more diverse.

The following table categorizes social network protocols from a decentralized perspective:

Some Web3 readers may be unfamiliar with the federated (Fediverse) tier, which is a form of decentralization.

In a federated system, any third party can run a server, and regular users can self-host a server or choose a third party they trust to host their data, then communicate with the outside world through the third party's broadcasting functionality.

Email is a simple example; when we use a company's internal email domain, it's like self-hosting a federated server, and the data is managed by our own company.

On the other hand, using an email with a 163 domain, our email history is held by 163, and conversely, the QQ email server has no access to detailed data on 163. However, as part of a federation, QQ and 163 emails can communicate with each other.

The Fediverse has been a pioneer of decentralization in Web3. Over the past decade, Fediverse services have built up a rather professional open-source ecosystem.

Ecosystem list: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

In a sense, Fediverse projects are purer than current Web3 projects. They lack an economic incentive system and instead attract a large number of enthusiastic users and public server providers solely based on the technical implementation of Fediverse decentralization. The most common example is P2P file sharing.

Even without incentives, many people still occupy their own network bandwidth and storage space (when downloading P2P data, someone else's computer must have the file you want to download and be willing to contribute network bandwidth to upload the same file to you).

In addition to applications like email and P2P file sharing, which have been Federated applications since their inception, there is a set of applications trying to compete with traditional Web2 products using the Federated decentralization concept. They leverage core selling points such as decentralization, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance to capture more traffic from the existing market. The most representative products in this category are Twitter-like Mastodon applications.

Mastodon: Twitter's Federated Alternative

Founded in 2016, Mastodon is a free, open-source, decentralized microblogging social network. Its functionality and operation are similar to Twitter, but the entire network is not operated by a single centralized entity; instead, it is a decentralized social network composed of multiple servers independently operated by different administrators that exchange data in a federated manner.

Each operating site of Mastodon (run by a third party) is called an "instance," where users can register on any openly registered instance, and users on one instance can interact with users on other instances.

Content posted by users on Mastodon is called a "Toot," and users can adjust privacy settings to restrict who can read or view their Toots.

Unlike Twitter, this service is positioned as a standalone operation with small-scale communities and community-based (rather than top-down) moderation and service operation. These communities can collaborate but are not interdependent.

Similar to Twitter, on Mastodon, users can send private messages to each other. However, unlike Twitter's "tweets," Mastodon's "toots" can be set to private to the user's followers, public to the specific instance, or public across the instance network.

Because Mastodon is free and open-source, it can only be supported through donations to cover the development team and instance server operating costs.

Currently, Mastodon has just surpassed 2.5 million monthly active users (another figure is 8 million), which is quite remarkable for an internet product that has been around for over 6 years without a business model.

From the perspective of the decentralized space, this large-scale real monthly active user data is considered a phenomenal presence in the Web3 world.

It's worth noting that many of the so-called "Web3 Twitter" projects that emerged at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, with valuations in the tens of millions of dollars, have mostly shut down their servers. Even for those projects that are still running, their actual active user numbers have basically been "reset."

Looking back at these "Web3 Twitter" projects, one would find that user data does not belong to the users themselves but is stored on servers leased by the projects. The projects simply added wallet login functionality to the front end, while still ultimately using centralized technical solutions.

In terms of project quality, the codebase of these pseudo-Web3 projects is not even comparable to a Mastodon mobile app. Yet, with a simple wallet login button, they rode the wave of Web3 hype and attracted millions of users.

It's important to note that Mastodon's instance operators bear the tangible data center costs for decentralization, giving the choice to the users. User data storage only occurs on the instance server specified by the user, allowing users to communicate only with trusted instance servers, preventing other servers from accessing user's private information.

Throughout its history, Mastodon has always been free and open-source, therefore it does not have the annoying Twitter ads. Besides crowdfunding, the only way to support the development team and instance server operating costs is through donations.

If you have experienced both Mastodon and various "Web3 Twitter" platforms, you will feel how crazy and ironic the influx of hot money was.

It is important to emphasize that Mastodon's federated operation model does not fundamentally achieve decentralization, as major servers still operate according to the will of their owners. Even so, this approach to a large extent avoids the risk of one person being overly autocratic, as seen with Musk on Twitter.

The advantages of federated decentralization are that users can freely choose an instance they trust (in a fully decentralized scenario, users do not need to trust instances), and servers distributed across regions also mitigate the risk of centralization and simultaneous cloud service outages bringing the entire protocol to a halt.

In extreme conditions, if an instance is to be shut down, Mastodon stipulates that server owners must inform users three months in advance that the server will be shut down, allowing users to back up and migrate their data in advance.

From the phenomenon of Mastodon, it can be seen that decentralization has inherent value. Even without an economic incentive model or a standardized team operation, Mastodon has simply focused on being user-friendly. Despite being relatively decentralized, it has attracted hundreds of thousands of active users, drawn in a group of high-level developers actively upgrading the codebase.

Today, some Web3 giants are also paying attention to the federated track. Last week, social media leader Mask Network acquired Pawoo.net, the second largest instance service provider on the Mastodon network. One can look forward to the new trend of decentralization brought to Web3 by federated architecture.

Imagine if there were a new Twitter-like application with blockchain incentives, achieving true decentralization, and delivering a smooth user experience like Mastodon. Surely, its growth potential would be higher than Mastodon!

Indeed, there is such a project, and that is what will be introduced below: nostr.

Nostr: Twitter's Former CEO on Twitter's Revolution

Nostr stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays," which can be understood as a relay transmission protocol for social media information. Based on the Github commit history, Nostr was proposed in November 2020 as a generic infrastructure and is still in its early stages, with limited related information available.

Nostr consists of two components: the client and the relay. The client is used for signing and verifying information, and is run by the user; the relay is responsible for message transmission and can be run on a server by anyone.

The client stores the user's keys internally, and each message must be signed and then sent to the relay. The relay does not modify the data, and the validation of these messages' authenticity is done by the client. Therefore, users do not need to trust the relay, aligning more with the spirit of decentralization.

Nostr not only has technical advantages over federated Mastodon but also benefits from marketing, as it is backed by Jack Dorsey, who served as Twitter's CEO twice during its development process. There is no need to worry about Nostr facing the same promotion dilemma as Mastodon.

Since the 15th of this month, Jack has been intensively promoting Nostr using his personal Twitter account every day. Interestingly, five days after Jack started promoting Nostr, Twitter officially announced a rule banning third-party social media promotions.

The timing of these events is so coincidental that it's hard not to see them as related. Perhaps Musk is genuinely concerned. If Jack, like in the past helping Twitter grow, similarly boosts Nostr, causing a vampiric effect on Twitter, Musk's plan to raise $40 billion in acquisition funding at the peak of the bull market for Twitter would continue to see a significant devaluation.

It can be said that in the turbulent period after the change of ownership of Twitter, judging from a professional, influential, or newsworthy perspective, Jack is undoubtedly the most suitable candidate to promote a Twitter alternative product. According to media reports, Jack donated about 14 BTC, worth approximately $245,000, to further support Nostr's development.

The most important point is that the Web3 community can look forward to the Nostr storage incentive plan, unlike Mastodon, which has experienced two full rounds of bull and bear cycles without releasing any hint of embracing the crypto community intention (airdrop).

On the contrary, Nostr, which originated from the BTC community, has supported BTC transfers, and the documentation also hints at future incentives for storage and other functions (original phrase: "When the incentive measures are clear, market forces can easily solve the storage problem.")

From the very beginning, Nostr as a decentralized social media platform has been closely united with the cryptocurrency and Web3 community. Compared to other Twitter-like predecessors that relied on a scattered community, Nostr's starting point is much higher. Its future interoperability with Web3 can lead to endless possibilities.

Having said so much, let's briefly talk about the method and logic of participating in Nostr:

The overall strategy is to use as many different clients as possible to increase your number of followers and the amount of content you post.

Currently, Nostr has 9 third-party clients, each with different features and compatibility. You can refer to them to choose the client that suits you.

Important note: Newly created accounts will be given two keys, one starting with npub is the public key equivalent to the account name, which can be shared with others to facilitate search and follow; one starting with nsec is the private key used for logging into the account and should not be shared publicly. Additionally, there are two formats for public and private keys: one is the format starting with a specific 4 letters as mentioned above, and the other is a base-64 format. The 9 different clients do not standardize a specific format, and you can use [damus.io/key] for format conversion.

Final Thoughts

Elon Musk's adoption of such a radical approach to block the centralization of Web2 competitors and decentralize social media measures can be seen as his concern about the trend of Twitter being replaced.

The emerging decentralized application Nostr hopes to approach or even surpass the current Twitter alternative, the big brother Mastodon, from various aspects such as technology and community. Mastodon could also further threaten Twitter's dominance.

However, Nostr is still in the early stage. With 9 clients and different key formats, beginners may find it confusing and not as straightforward as Mastodon clients. In the future, the Homework section of the Biteye website will provide detailed interactive assignments and relay setup methods. Interested friends can join the group to stay updated on the latest developments.