101 - Ben Arc: Nostr, Anarchy & Algorithms

Nostr, Social Media, Algorithms, Censorship, Freedom of Speech, Cryptography, Anarchism, Hutting, Próspera, Honduras, Fountain App, Amethyst.

Timothy Allen talks with Ben Arc.

You may have noticed recently that I’ve been talking a fair bit about Nostr on this podcast. We’re even reading out Nostr messages at the beginning of each episode. Well, it’s time to take a deeper dive, but before we do, I want to give my best 101 intro to start you off.

This is important. As far as I can tell, Nostr is not just another fly-by-night social media platform that will never get enough onboarders to change the world. Yes, it’s true that most people are using the protocol for social media right now, but that misses the point of this incredible new technology.

Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is a decentralized, censorship-resistant protocol for creating and sharing content.
It uses no central servers or authorities.

As an open protocol, anyone can use, implement, and build upon it without requiring permission.

In the same way Bitcoin works, users identify themselves with cryptographic public-private key pairs and send messages through a network of relays. This makes censorship on the platform incredibly difficult since users can connect to whichever relays they choose. So, if a relay is censoring content, you just switch to another that isn’t.

Social media apps are just the start, as you’ll hear in this episode. As we speak, there is a massive and growing community of people building out a new censorship-resistant version of the internet on top of Nostr.

On Nostr, you own your own identity and data—or what people refer to as your social graph—and you can take it to whichever app the sits on the protocol that you like.

Ben Arc is the founder of LNbits and a developer who was involved in Nostr from its early beginnings.

Enjoy the conversation.

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:30) Introduction

(11:29) Nostr, Bluesky and Jack Dorsey

(21:30) Freedom of speech requires a free space