I don't have much to say about the technology, to be honest, I know almost nothing about blockchain. I mainly want to talk about my emotional feelings (being sentimental).
It feels like going back to the time when Sina Weibo and various brands of microblogs were just starting out.
I saw a post on my feed that said:
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 experience the 90s, but this feeling is similar to the first half of the 2010s that I experienced. We were all newcomers: "Hello world, this is xxx." At this moment, a certain condition was formed: many people sending messages in one channel, everyone wants to send messages, everyone wants to see, and everyone will be seen.
The center hasn't had a chance to form yet (now there are already people sharing the addresses of celebrities like the founder of Twitter in the global channel, it seems that "fan centralization" is already on its way).
In my impression, Weibo went through some changes: at the beginning, there was also a global feed, everyone followed each other and the feed was filled with friends, forming a state similar to the current Moments feature. Later on, some users with good content stood out and became "little Vs," and some celebrities, with their aura, became "little Vs" or "big Vs" without producing high-quality content. Afterwards, as promotion and monetization gradually became accepted, there were professional bloggers who used content as a means of livelihood, somewhat similar to the status of Bilibili's content creators in recent years. Along with the "centralization of fans," the voices of ordinary people became smaller and perhaps could only be expressed in the comment sections of various Vs, making extreme or brilliant comments to get some likes and experience the feeling of "being seen and being noticed."
It's like a society going through a fast-forward deduction, where most people eventually become nobody. This deduction, with the frequent rise and fall of various platforms like Zhihu, Jike, and Bilibili, is the same. At the beginning, it felt like being in a meeting (sitting at a round table, giving directions), but later it felt like attending a conference (leaders speaking on the stage, and whether they spoke well or not, I could only listen. If I wanted to exchange ideas with the comrade next to me, I couldn't because the sound system was too loud). Thinking about it again, on V2, when I send out my thoughts, they will be seen by others, which is incredibly comfortable.
Returning to playing with Damus, witnessing such a historical moment when this "society" begins to operate, but I'm not very optimistic about its future development. After all, Matrix, which came before it, is only applied in the technical circle. How to avoid risks of black production, spam messages, whether the public-private key authentication method can be widely accepted, and how many ordinary users can accept the method of posting image addresses to change avatars and send pictures, are all problems that need to be solved. Maybe it only takes a genius product manager? Or fast forward to the 20xx:
With the shutdown of the last Nostr relay, decentralized social media Nostr officially exits the stage of history.
Compared to shutting down centralized servers, how to eliminate the few speech centers in social media, so that everyone's voice can be heard by as many people as possible, and everyone is no longer just mechanically accelerating dopamine secretion based on their own interests, this doesn't seem to be a technical problem. I'm not optimistic, but I hope it grows strong 🌳.