In today's edition of YIYL (You Invest, You Lose), we go through a little thought experiment and review the state of social media today. Many of us know that legacy social media is broken and have been looking for alternatives where you can say what you want and not get banned.
There are plenty of options these days, like Truth, Minds, Rumble and all the other competitor sites that have not got much traction except for a niche audience.
While shitcoiners have exploited this narrative of broken social media to dump shit projects on the market for years, voice, somEE, bitclout, and a host of others.
I've been a user of STEEM/HIVE for years now, it had the best performance, uptime, multiple UIs, and does what it promised, it just never took hold with the public and never will because of the complexity of using the service and the need to buy a token to use it.
Futility tokens
I think the utility token narrative is finally dead with only a few still holding on to the dream that it can be made to work and you go right ahead.
Simply the mass adoption that was promised never came, and won't come. You're not seeing venture capital lining up to use the tech for their products or services. You're not seeing communities moving their current social media activity here.
You're not seeing businesses putting any money into the ads ecosystem to try and reach hive or steem users. I do think a lot of lessons can be learned from it and there are parts of the tech than can be used going forward but one thing that won't is tokenomics.
The one thing most people focus on here, is the one thing that should have never been added or ripped out long ago. I always wondered what a system like this would look like if there was no token, how would people react to it, and in 2022 we're finally getting to see it play out with Nostr.
What is Nostr?
Nostr is a protocol built on public and private key pairs that allow you to create a self-owned account/identities so that you can take your account with you to any website.
It enables 'decentralized' social networks since information can be self hosted or on third party relays that can be called when you login to a new front end.
There are several projects building on Nostr or adding Nostr support to their existing systems. These are all concepts you should be familiar with if you've used altcoin social media serivces but one thing you'll notice is there is no coin.
There is no token, no pre-mine, no dumping on your customer base, because they need the token to use the service but you don't want to "charge" them to use it so instead you let them pay whatever they think it could possibly be worth.
Nostr is an open source project and recently got around 14 BTC in funding from Jack Dorsey. Considering the fact that someone who knows how to build a social media empire is backing this service, has to tell you something about the potential of the protocol.
Private and public key
To use Nostr you'll need to create your own private key, this will be what holds your account and there will be a corresponding public key that is used to source your information for the front end and for others to find you.
Once you set up a private and public key, you should be able to login to any Nostr frond end you prefer
An example of a public key would be:
7ecd3fe6353ec4c53672793e81445c2a319ccf0a298a91d77adcfa386b52f30d
While these private keys don't hold any signing rights to a wallet, you should still protect it in the same manner, if you aren't going to use it as a throw away account and want to build up a Nostr profile.
Key management
Now running around and copy and pasting your pubic key into websites isn't the most intuitive experience, so why not have a web wallet that handles it for you. Many people in shitcoin land should be used to these online sign ins with the help of Meta mask and other key management apps.
If you want to have the same experience with Nostr your best option is to set up an Alby wallet which has Nostr support. Alby is a Lightning web wallet so you can also send and receive sats through its interface, using their node by default or you could use your own node too.
Front ends
If you'd like to give Nostr a try, after you've created your private/public key pairing, you can use one of the following front ends to login, find and follow other users and create some posts in the process.
You'll see its quite rough at the moment, and can be a little clunky, but it should give you an idea of what is happening with Nostr.
Nostr backed profile view
A Nostr tutorial
If you're not one of those who can simply jump into a new service and test it out without some hand holding then check out this tutorial from Ben Arc, where he takes you through how to set up a Nostr account and muck about with the lads.
Source:
Have your say
What do you good people of HIVE think?
So have at it my Jessies! If you don't have something to comment, "I am a Jessie."
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