Nostr, the word that we are hearing and reading about a lot the past couple of weeks. In the end of this article, you will understand a little bit more what Nostr is, and how it works.
Before talking about Nostr and how it works, let’s talk about how traditional social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on, work.
When you want to join a traditional social network, you need an email and a password to sign up, and when you sign up, you can then, post content like text, images and videos to the platform, but once this website is down you can’t access it, or when this website bans you from the platform, you will lose access permanently to that website. So, traditional social media networks are like a closed box where you put your content and pray not to lose access to that platform.
What is Nostr and how it is different than traditional social media networks?
Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays or in short “Nostr” is a protocol that helps us build decentralized social media.
What are relays?
Relays are servers that anyone can host, which store something we call “events”. Relays don’t talk to each other, only the ones that you are connected to, read and store your events.
What are events?
Events, are everything transmitted on Nostr, it can be a text, an image, a video or anything.
How can people talk with each other?
Person A and person B should be connected to at least one shared relay, to be able to talk with each other.
What are clients?
Clients are websites or mobile apps, that help us interact with people using Nostr. There are numerous clients, some are designed like Twitter, others like Reddit and even like Telegram.
How can we get on Nostr and have an account?
To have an account and use the Nostr protocol, you don’t need an email address or a password, all you need is, a public key and a private key.
You can get these keys from the client itself or even use “Get Alby” extension for example, where you can generate and store your keys.
In traditional social media if you lose your password you can click on a link to reset it, or even talk to support so they can help you gain access again to your account. In Nostr, this is none existent, if you lose your keys, there is no way to regain access to your account, so it is best for you to keep your keys somewhere safe so you won’t lose them.
What is the power of Nostr? And why Nostr?
We started this article saying that in traditional social media you can get banned for many reasons, the power of Nostr is that no one can ban you, and if you were connected to a relay where people doesn’t like you for example, you can host your own relay and people will connect to your relay and continue talking to you like nothing happened.
The second thing that is powerful with Nostr is that you can login with your same keys to many different clients, so if one client goes down or shuts down, no problem, go to another client and login there, you will have the same content and profile.
One important thing that gives more power for Nostr is that in some clients, users can “zap” sats to you if they love your content and the events that you are posting.
This is a small introduction to Nostr, if you have questions please ask me in the comments below.
This is a guest post by Cryptonatorguy. Follow him on Twitter
@cryptonator_1. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Satoshi’s Journal.
