Tech: Nostr: 3-Months-In Impressions (~3.5min read)

I've been looking for a way to reach people, or just share in general, without the middle-man of megacorpo scum censorship, ad-padding, and one person/group/platform gatekeeping, so I was happy to have run across this protocol/network and have had a fairly positive experience with it.

As a semi-techy user, I managed to get my keys and, after getting a little Bitcoin, a wallet. As an artist, it's great to be able to share what I do with people who can show appreciation directly on-the-fly (via sats[pieces of bitcoin]) rather than depending on a 3rd party to "manage" the financial part of the experience, but, it being decentralized, I think people have to realize what they're signing up for.

It's still new(ish) tech. There are still things that the devs are working on or working through, so it's going to take time to have a truly polished experience. Also, if I were to casually throw a social/psychological visualization out there, I'd call Nostr what Twitter and Bluesky would be if they had a baby social media platform.

Sometimes, the feed there seems tech bro heavy, with all the idiotic red-pill, pro-capitalism/fuck the poor, dixie/nazi flag, emotionally stunted/underdeveloped pathologies you'd expect(much like a significant part of twitter's userbase), BUT, muting, then doom scrolling enough through the search/discover section of the client does yield some people who are emotionally mature, kind, and have constructive consideration of others(much like a significant part of Bluesky's userbase).

There is representation of the arts. There are women who post there. I have not yet noticed many members of the LGBTQ+ community there, or many POCS, so for me personally, I'd like to see more of that content showing up there and I hope that more members of these underrepresented groups will find their ways there.

The point is, like any platform, it takes pruning(muting) and, of course, follows, to get your feed set up to give you posts by people who you resonate with, and it takes the occasional maintenance to keep the experience going the way you want it to. If there is content, if there are people there who are shit, then it should be ME deciding who to shut out of my attention, but that doesn't mean that they should not be able to be shit there, and to experience the social and emotional consequences of their shittiness.

It's a small bit of effort for enjoying the freedom to express without having to deal with ad-revenue focused corpo censorship.

speaking of ads...NO ADS...ANYWHERE. I don't know how long that will last, but that's how it is now. Some clients have premium services you can pay for if you want, but that's specific to those clients and their devs, and the free versions of the apps/clients I've tried so far seem to work fine for where things are in development.

Nostr has a lot of positive potential to give people back control of their online experience and I hope it can get enough attention to get more casual users involved.