Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has begun celebrating the arrival of the first Nostr iPhone app, Damus, in Apple’s App Store.
Nostr (an acronym of “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays,”) functions as a decentralized network based on cryptographic keypairs and that is not peer-to-peer. It also allows anyone to create their own social network platform to share with anyone you choose. It doesn’t require a platform, functions as a protocol, and at present, there is no Nostr company, only developers contributing to an open source protocol. All users need is a public key, or pubkey, which in turn identifies them.
At present, one of the main cases is to create Damus, which behaves as a Twitter-like service. Nostr is to social networking what HTTP is for information or IMAP is for communication. It’s a base-level protocol on which users can build almost anything they like.
There’s also currently no gatekeeper controllers which content is or isn’t allowed, given that the service is built on top of relays. Damus includes some recommended ones out of the gate and new ones are popping up daily.
The Damus app has been available within the developer scene for a while now, but required a TestFlight link from its Github project to use the beta. Users can now download it from the App Store.
The app is designed to look and feel like the iOS Twitter app, but one immediate difference users will notice between it and any other social networking app is the privacy disclosure Apple requires of all apps. The official Twitter app disclosure lists the following data collection:
Purchases
Contact Info
Browsing history
Usage data
Location
User content
Identifiers
Search history
Diagnostics
Other data
Damus, in contrast, has the following disclosure that the developer does not collect any data from this app.
Nostr clients like Damus also include access to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network for sending tips to creators. Using an app like Strike, a Damus user could send $0.10 to someone as a thank you for a blog article, podcast, or even just a quality post.
While it’s not feasible to send someone a mere $0.10 with a debit card, the Lightning network allows anyone in the world to send money to anyone else in the world for virtually no cost, without needing access to a bank.
It remains to be seen whether the Nostr protocol takes off, but at a time when large social networks like Twitter and Facebook are proving increasingly contentious, this might be worth trying out to see what you make of it.
Finally, O’Grady’s PowerPage public key is as follows on Damus:
npub1au623ytdg6x5alh5adndj2u30zvmcr2n595cguzqumw99cs3k9cqzgwwf9
If you’ve tried the Damus app, please let us know about your experience in the comments.