Technically I don’t have much to say; to be honest my understanding of blockchain is ≈ 0. I mainly want to talk about my emotional reaction (a bit sentimental).
It feels like time has been rolled back to when Sina Weibo and various branded Weibo platforms were just getting started.
In the feed I saw this post:
I remember the early 1990s, when I watched the HTTP and HTML protocols evolving day to day on the lists for Mosaic and httpd. Nostr gives me that feeling again.
I didn’t live through the 1990s, but this feeling is similar to what I experienced in the first half of the 2010s. Everyone was just showing up for the first time: “Hello world”, “This is xxx”. At that moment a certain condition took shape: lots of people posting in one channel, everyone wants to post, everyone wants to read, and everyone will be seen.
The “center” hasn’t had time to form yet (though now people are already sharing the addresses of Twitter’s founder and other celebrities in the global channel, so it seems “fan centralization” is already on the way).
My impression is that Weibo changed something like this: at the beginning there was also a global feed, people followed each other back and forth, and over time more and more friends filled up the feed, forming a state similar to today’s WeChat Moments. Later, some users with good content stood out and became “small V” accounts, and some celebrities, thanks to their halo, became “small V” or “big V” even without producing high‑quality content. After that, as promotion and monetization gradually became accepted, full‑time bloggers appeared, using content as a means of making a living, a bit like how Bilibili up主 are these years. Along with the “centralization of fans,” ordinary people’s voices grew quieter; maybe they could only get a few likes by posting extreme or brilliant comments under various V accounts, to experience that feeling of “being seen, being noticed.”
It’s like a sped‑up simulation of society, where the majority always end up as nobodies. This simulation keeps replaying, along with the rise and fall of various platforms like Zhihu, Jike, and Bilibili. At the start, it feels like being in a meeting (you’re at the round table, gesturing grandly over the map); later it feels like attending a rally (the leader is speaking on stage, and you can only listen whether they’re right or wrong; even if you want to exchange ideas with the comrade sitting next to you, the loud speakers are too noisy for that). Thinking about it this way, on v2, when I post my thoughts and they actually get seen by others, it’s incredibly comfortable.
Back to playing with damus: witnessing this historical moment when such a “society” starts to operate. However, I’m not very optimistic about how it will develop afterward. After all, before this there was matrix, which has only really found use within tech circles. How to avoid risk and cybercrime later on, how to deal with spam, whether a public/private key authentication method can be widely accepted, and how many ordinary users can accept setting avatars and posting images by pasting image URLs—these are all problems that need to be solved. Maybe all that’s missing is a genius product manager? Or we just fast‑forward directly to some year in the 20xxs:
With the shutdown of the last nostr relay, the decentralized social media platform nostr has officially exited the stage of history.
Compared to killing off centralized servers, how do we kill the few “speech centers” under the spotlight on social media, so that everyone’s voice can be heard by as many people as possible, and people are no longer just mechanically speeding up their dopamine secretion according to their interests? That doesn’t really sound like a technical problem. I’m not optimistic, but I still hope it grows strong and healthy. 🌳