Decentralized Twitters are emerging rapidly. Will the Twitter taken over by Musk really be replaced?

Author: Biteye Core Contributor Fishery

Editor: Biteye Core Contributor Crush

Just a few days after the ownership of Twitter changed hands, Musk prohibited the promotion of other social media accounts on the Twitter platform.

The updated usage policy on Twitter states that if an account is primarily used to promote social media applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Tribel, Post, Nostr, and former U.S. President Trump's Truth Social, the relevant content will be removed.

First-time offenders will have their accounts temporarily suspended, while repeat offenders will face permanent bans.

Many media outlets and users who are unaware of the truth attribute Musk's decision simply to Twitter's desire to increase advertising revenue and monopolize the Web2 market.

However, considering the rapid growth trend of decentralized Twitter Mastodon and former Twitter CEO @jack's intensive promotion of another decentralized Twitter, Nostr, it may provide a more reasonable explanation for Musk's actions:

Musk is genuinely afraid—afraid that the Twitter he just bought for hundreds of billions of dollars will become the first traditional Web2 application to be replaced by a decentralized protocol.

Social Media Protocols and Decentralization

The concept of social media rapidly developed in the first decade of the 21st century, and with nearly a decade of mobile internet technology support, a large number of social media giants emerged, such as Twitter, WeChat, Instagram, etc.

With Bitcoin leading the concept of decentralization, people gradually began to care about the censorship resistance of social protocols (where third parties cannot delete information) and immutability (how to ensure the authenticity of information without trusting third-party servers).

Some of the Web3 social protocols we are familiar with can achieve these goals, such as Lenster, a Twitter-like application based on Lens Protocol.

However, unlike the aforementioned decentralized protocols that achieve decentralization from the server construction level, Lens relies on blockchain as a decentralized solution, storing user content on-chain and controlled by their own wallets.

From an operational strategy perspective, the Lens solution originates from the crypto space (Polygon + IPFS), and currently, the vast majority of users come from Web3.

In contrast, the technical solutions of Mastodon and Nostr are implemented by a group of non-profit tech enthusiasts (most developers are not from the crypto space), targeting users who believe in decentralization or have censorship resistance needs. This group is spread across various communities, making the topics within social protocols more diverse.

The table below categorizes social network protocols from the perspective of decentralization:

Some Web3 readers may be unfamiliar with the term "Fediverse," which is a form of decentralization.

In a federated system, any third party can run a server, and ordinary users can either build their own servers or choose a trusted third-party server to store their data, communicating with the outside world through the broadcasting function of the third party.

Email is the simplest example; using a company’s internal email domain is akin to building a federated server, with data stored by the company itself.

In contrast, using an email with a 163 domain means that the history of our email exchanges is controlled by 163. While QQ email servers cannot access detailed data from 163, the email system as a federation allows QQ to communicate with 163 email.

The federated model is a pioneer of the decentralization concept in Web3. Over the past decade, federated services have accumulated a fairly professional open-source ecosystem.

Ecosystem List:

https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

In some respects, federated projects are purer than current Web3 projects; they lack an economic incentive system, and merely achieving technical decentralization has attracted a large number of dedicated active users and public server providers. A common example is P2P downloading.

Without incentives, many people still occupy their own network bandwidth and hard drive space (when downloading P2P files, there must be someone else's computer that has the file you want to download and is willing to contribute their bandwidth to upload the same file to you).

In addition to email and P2P downloading, which have always been federated applications, there are also a number of applications attempting to use the concept of federated decentralization to compete with traditional Web2 products. They leverage decentralization, permissionless access, and censorship resistance as core selling points to capture more traffic from the existing market. The most representative of these products is the Twitter-like application Mastodon.

Mastodon: A Federated Alternative to Twitter

Founded in 2016, Mastodon is a free and open-source decentralized microblogging social network. Its functions and operations are similar to Twitter, but the entire network is not operated by a single centralized entity; instead, it consists of multiple independently operated servers exchanging data in a federated manner.

Each Mastodon operating site (run by third parties) is called an "instance," and users can register at any open instance. Users on one instance can communicate with users on other instances.

Content published by users on Mastodon is called a "Toot," and users can adjust privacy settings to restrict who can read or view their Toots.

Unlike Twitter, this service is positioned as a small community operating independently, with community-based (rather than top-down) moderation and service operation. These communities can cooperate and communicate but do not rely on each other.

Like Twitter, Mastodon allows users to send private messages, but unlike Twitter's "tweets," Mastodon's "Toots" can be made private to the user's followers, public to specific instances, or public through the instance network.

Since Mastodon is free and open-source, it can only support the development team and instance server's operating costs through donations.

Currently, Mastodon has just surpassed 2.5 million monthly active users (another claim is 8 million). For an internet product that has developed for over six years without a business model, this growth is indeed remarkable.

From the perspective of the decentralization track, this substantial number of real monthly active users is phenomenal in the Web3 world.

It is worth noting that many of the "Web3 Twitter" projects that emerged at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, claiming valuations in the tens of millions of dollars, have mostly shut down their servers. Even those that have not shut down have seen their real active user numbers effectively "drop to zero."

Looking back at these "Web3 Twitter" projects, one can find that user data does not belong to the users themselves; it is stored on servers rented by the project team, which merely added a wallet login feature on the front end, ultimately still using centralized technical solutions.

In terms of project quality, the codebase of these pseudo-Web3 projects is even less than that of a single mobile app for Mastodon, yet they leveraged a simple wallet login button to ride the Web3 hype and raised tens of millions.

It is important to note that Mastodon's instance operators are genuinely investing real money in server costs for decentralization, giving users the choice of where their data is stored, which will only be on the instance servers designated by the users. Users only need to communicate with trusted instance servers, preventing other servers from accessing their private information.

Mastodon has always been free and open-source, which means there are no annoying ads like on Twitter. Besides relying on love to power its development, it can only support the operating costs of the development team and instance servers through donations.

If you have experienced both Mastodon and various "Web3 Twitter" platforms, you will feel how crazy and ironic it is when hot money floods in.

It is important to emphasize that Mastodon's federated operation model does not fundamentally achieve decentralization; major servers still operate according to the wishes of their owners. Even so, it significantly mitigates the risk of Musk's unilateral and arbitrary control over Twitter.

The advantages of federated decentralization lie in the fact that users can freely choose instances they trust (in a fully decentralized scenario, users need not trust instances). The distribution of servers across various regions also avoids the risk of centralized cloud services going down and halting the entire protocol.

In extreme conditions, if an instance needs to stop operating, Mastodon requires server owners to notify users three months in advance of shutting down the server, allowing users to back up and migrate their data.

From the phenomenon of Mastodon, it can be seen that decentralization has intrinsic value. Even without an economic incentive model or a regulated team operation, Mastodon has simply made a usable product that is relatively decentralized, attracting hundreds of thousands of active users and gathering a group of high-level developers who actively upgrade the codebase.

Now, some Web3 giants are also paying attention to the federated track. Last week, social media leader Mask Network acquired Pawoo.net, the second-largest instance service provider on the Mastodon network, raising expectations for new trends in decentralization brought by federated architecture in Web3.

Imagine if another Twitter-like application were to incorporate blockchain incentives, achieve true decentralization, and provide a user experience as smooth as Mastodon's; its growth potential would surely surpass that of Mastodon!

Such a project indeed exists, and it is the Nostr that will be introduced next.

Nostr: A Revolution Initiated by Twitter's Former CEO Against Twitter

Nostr, short for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays," can be understood as a relay transmission protocol for social media information. According to GitHub commit records, Nostr was initiated in November 2020 and is currently in its early stages as a general-purpose infrastructure, with relatively little related documentation available.

Nostr consists of two components: clients and relays. Clients are used for signing and verifying information, operated by users; relays are responsible for transmitting messages and can be set up by anyone.

The client internally stores the user's keys, and each message must be signed before being sent to the relay. The relay does not modify the data; the verification of the authenticity of these messages is completed by the client, so users do not need to trust the relays, which aligns more closely with the spirit of decentralization.

Nostr not only has technical advantages over the federated Mastodon but also benefits from the marketing efforts of Jack Dorsey, who served as CEO of Twitter twice during its development, ensuring that Nostr does not face the promotional dilemmas that Mastodon encountered.

Since the 15th of this month, Jack has been intensively promoting Nostr using his personal Twitter account. Coincidentally, just five days after Jack began promoting Nostr, Twitter officially announced the ban on promoting third-party social media.

The timing is so coincidental that it is hard not to connect these two events; Musk may genuinely be afraid. If Jack helps Nostr grow as he did with Twitter, it could have a draining effect on Twitter, leading to a significant decrease in the market value of Twitter, which Musk acquired for $40 billion at the peak of the bull market.

It can be said that during this turbulent period following Twitter's change of ownership, Jack is undoubtedly the most suitable candidate to promote a Twitter alternative, judging from his professionalism, influence, and newsworthiness. According to media reports, Jack donated approximately 14 BTC, worth about $245,000, to further fund the development of Nostr.

Most importantly, the Web3 community can look forward to Nostr's storage incentive plan, which differs from Mastodon, which has gone through two complete cycles of bull and bear markets without releasing any intentions to align with the crypto community (such as issuing tokens).

Nostr, on the other hand, originates from the BTC community, supports BTC transfers, and the documentation hints at future incentives for storage and other functions (the original statement: "When incentives are clear, market forces can easily solve storage issues.").

As a decentralized social media platform, Nostr has tightly united the cryptocurrency and Web3 communities from the outset. Compared to other Twitter predecessors that started from loose communities, Nostr has a much higher starting point, and its future compatibility with Web3 opens up infinite possibilities.

To summarize, here’s a simple explanation of how to participate in Nostr:

The strategic direction is to use as many different clients as possible to increase your follower count and posting volume.

Currently, Nostr has nine third-party clients, each with different functions and compatibility. You can refer to the list to choose a client that suits you.

https://github.com/vishalxl/Nostr-Clients-Features-List

Note: Newly created accounts will be given two keys; the one starting with npub is the public key, which is roughly equivalent to the account name and can be shared with others for easy searching and following; the one starting with nsec is the private key used for account login and should not be shared. Additionally, public and private keys come in two formats: one is the aforementioned format starting with specific four letters, and the other is a 64-bit format. The nine different clients do not standardize a fixed format, and you can use 【damus.io/key】 for format conversion.

In Conclusion

Musk's aggressive measures to block centralized Web2 competitors and decentralized social media indicate his concern about the trend of Twitter being replaced.

The emerging decentralized application Nostr has the potential to approach or even surpass the current Twitter alternative leader, Mastodon, from both technical and community perspectives, and Mastodon may further threaten Twitter's dominance.

However, Nostr is still in its early stages, and the nine clients, along with different key formats, may confuse newcomers, making it not as user-friendly as the Mastodon client. In the future, Biteye's official website will provide detailed interactive assignments and relay setup methods in the Homework section, and interested friends can join the group to track the latest developments.

References: [1] What is Mastodon? https://docs-hello.2heng.xin/

[2] Mastodon Wikipedia

[3] What Is Nostr? https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/what-is-nostr/