What Is Nostr? A Social Account Nobody Can Delete

In October and November 2023, while Gaza was being bombed, many of us posted about it. And many of us watched our posts vanish, our accounts get restricted, our reach drop to nothing. Human Rights Watch documented more than 1,050 cases of Instagram and Facebook removing or suppressing content about Palestine in those two months. Of those, 1,049 were peaceful content in support of Palestinians, and in more than 300 cases people couldn't even appeal.

It's the same lesson as money. If someone else holds the key, it isn't really yours.

So what is Nostr? Self-custody for your voice. It's a way of posting online where your account is a key you hold, rather than a username a company lends you. No company can delete it, because no company owns it, just as no bank can freeze Bitcoin whose keys only you hold.

Technically, it's an open protocol rather than an app, much as email is: a set of rules many different apps follow, so you can use whichever app you like and take your account and followers with you. The name stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays". A developer known as fiatjaf created it in 2020, Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey gave the project 14 BTC in December 2022, and it has grown since, mostly among Bitcoin users.

What changes, and what doesn't

You don't need to believe anything sinister about any company to see the problem. On a platform, your account, your followers and years of your posts belong to whoever owns the servers, under rules they can change overnight. If you're a scholar, a teacher, a charity, or just someone saying things platforms find inconvenient, that's a fragile place to build.

Nostr changes who holds the account. It doesn't change who's listening: the audience is far smaller than on X or Instagram, and I'd be misleading you to pretend otherwise. Think of it as the one account that can't be taken from you, kept alongside the ones that can.

How Nostr works

Four pieces, and you only need to understand the first one properly.

Your keys. When you sign up, the app makes a key pair. The public key, starting npub, is your identity; share it like a handle. The private key, starting nsec, signs your posts. It's your password and your ownership in one, and like a Bitcoin seed phrase, nobody can reset it. Lose it and the account is gone. Leak it and someone else can post as you, permanently.

Relays. Your posts don't live inside an app. They go to relays, which are simply servers that store notes and pass them on, and you choose several. Some are free and open to anyone, some charge a small fee to keep out spam, some are run by communities for their own members. If one relay bans you, the others still carry your posts, and you can add more. Because apps can connect to different relays, two people sometimes see slightly different feeds. That's normal.

Apps. Popular ones include Primal (web, iPhone and Android, and the easiest place to start), Damus (iPhone) and Amethyst (Android). Log into any of them with the same key and your follows are already there.

Zaps. Posts can be tipped in Bitcoin over Lightning, which Nostr calls zaps. It's how many writers and podcasters there are paid directly by their readers, without ads. You'll need a Lightning wallet for it, and here's how those work.

Every post carries a signature

There's a feature here that Muslims, of all people, should appreciate. Every note on Nostr is signed with its author's private key, and apps check that signature before showing it. A post claiming to come from a scholar's account either carries his signature or it doesn't, and nobody can alter a signed post afterwards without the signature breaking.

Our tradition built a whole science, isnad, on asking who said something and how it reached us. On today's platforms a screenshot of a fake quote travels faster than any correction, and that gets worse as more scholarly rulings circulate as images. A signed note can't be forged under someone else's key. It won't tell you whether what was said is right. It does settle who said it.

What it can't do

Get these straight before you move your voice there.

It isn't private. Posts are public and copied across many relays, so treat anything you post as permanent, the same lesson Bitcoin's public ledger teaches. Direct messages are encrypted, but the older method (NIP-04) still showed who was talking to whom and when. The newer standard (NIP-17) hides that too. Use an app that supports it, and keep anything truly sensitive off Nostr messages altogether.

It isn't total sovereignty. You own your identity; you don't own the relays. If every relay you use dropped you, you'd have to find or run others. You can, which is the point, but it takes effort.

It doesn't moderate for you. No central team removes content, so what you see depends on whom you follow, which relays you use and your mute list. Follow carefully and pick well-run relays and your feed stays clean. It's closer to choosing which gatherings you attend than trusting a platform to sweep the street.

How to start, safely

1. Install Primal, Damus or Amethyst and create an account.
2. Find your nsec in the settings and write it on paper, the way you'd write down a seed phrase. Never paste it into a website. If you use several apps, use a signer app (Amber on Android, for instance) so the key lives in one place and the apps ask it to sign.
3. Set a name and picture. To show you're really you, add a verified address (NIP-05) on a domain you control, such as name@yoursite.com. Impersonation is common, as it is on every other network scammers use.
4. Open your relay settings. Keep a few of the defaults, and consider adding one paid relay for fewer spam replies.
5. Connect a Lightning wallet so you can send and receive zaps.

Is it worth your time?

If you only want to scroll, probably not yet. The conversation is narrower than on the big platforms and leans heavily towards Bitcoin.

If you publish anything at all, I'd claim your key now. It costs nothing, takes five minutes, and gives you one account nobody can switch off. The reasoning that makes holding your own Bitcoin keys worth the effort applies to your voice as well. What you don't hold, you're only borrowing.