I recently discovered Nostr, a decentralized social network that I find exciting and promising.

Technically, Nostr is a protocol, not a social network. However, developers can use the Nostr protocol to create a variety of applications, including social networks.

Nostr has been around a few years, but in December 2022, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, announced that he had made a donation of 14 bitcoins, valued at approximately $250,000. The donation was made to @fiatjaf, the anonymous founder of Nostr.

In this blog post, I share my initial impressions on Nostr, compare Nostr with Mastodon and ActivityPub, and discuss the potential of Nostr's Zaps.