nostr: first impressions

⸺ by Charles Iliya Krempeaux

⸺ published 2024-06-09T08:30:46-07:00

I joined nostr. These are my first impressions.

I have been aware of nostr for a while now. But I hadn't joined nostr until now. To be frank, I had been waiting for the damus nostr app — created by a friend of mine, William Casarin — to come to android phones. (I have an android phone.)

I know William Casarin is heavily into nostr, so I asked him:

I know Damus is currently iOS only, but — What nostr app do you recommend for android phone users?

William Casarin responded with:

Probably primal or amethyst? Or damus for android once I finish it this year.

On-Boarding

William Casarin mentioned primal first, so that is what I tried.

I searched for primal on the play store:

I installed and ran it (primal), and was greeted with this screen:

I didn't have a nostr account yet, so I tapped the “Create Account” button. That took me to this screen:

The primal nostr app prompted me to add a photo, write in my display name, and write a bit about myself. So I did:

After tapping the “Next” button, it then took me to this screen:

Here the primal nostr app was asking me to pick some interests.

(What I later realized is that, the primal nostr app used this informtion (the interests I picked) to auto-follow some people on nostr. That way I wouldn't have an empty home-food.)

I picked some interestes:

And then I tapped the “Next” button, and was then taken to this screen:

Here, I was given a chance to change the banner image for my nostr account. I did so:

And then tapped the “Create Account Now” button, and was then taken to this screen:

At this point, I had joined nostr. But there was another (optional) part of primal's on-boarding.

Here primal was giving me the option to activate a wallet or to skip it.

Out of curiousity, I tapped the “Acitivate Wallet” button to see what was there, and was then taken to this screen:

It wanted a bunch of personal information from me — my first-name, my family-name, my e-mail address, my date-of-birth, and my country of residence. (I realized later that this was all optional — and I didn't have to give this information to use primal or nostr.)

That is a lot of information — too much information — to ask for when signing up for a social-media network!

My suspicion is that they want to do a KYC look up — probably for the wallet.

I said to William Casarin:

I just installed the primal nostr app on my android phone. It wants me to "Activate My Wallet". It wants my name, e-mail address, date of birth, and country of residence.

William Casarin then said:

yeah they use a kyc wallet (strike)

I then asked William Casarin:

Do I need to activate that wallet to use nostr?

William Casarin replied with:

nope, nostr has nothing to do with bitcoin

Great. I didn't want to give them (or anyone else) all that information. So, I skipped it by pressing the “I'll do this later” link. (I will very likely not be doing that later, BTW.)

At that point I was out of the on-boarding part of the primal app, and seeing the home-feed of the primal nostr app:

What I thought was funny is that William Casarin was already in my nostr home-feed 🙂

This is when I suspected that the primal nostr app had auto-followed a bunch of people (including William Casarin) because of the interests I chose during the on-boarding. And looking at who I was following on nostr, that suspicion turned out to be correct:

I wrote my first nostr post:

And then, William Casarin followed me:

And tagged me in a public post:

Which seemed to cause a number of people to engage with me. William Casarin has a lot of followers on nostr!

I also went ahead and edited my profile — adding a username, display name, website, and about me information.

After that I looked to see if some (other) people I know were on nostr, so I could follow them. I found some.

First Thoughts

My experience with nostr, so far, is via the primal nostr app.

(When William Casarin releases an android version of his damus app, I will try that, too.)

nostr feels like a micro-blogging platform — similar to Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Farcaster, Misskey, Firefish, Sharkey, Pleroma, Akkoma, and many others.

Although unlike Twitter, which is centralized, nostr is a decentralized social-media networking platform — similar (in many ways) to the Fediverse (which includes Mastodon, Misskey, Firefish, Sharkey, Pleroma, Akkoma, and many others), Bluesky, Farcaster, and others.

nostr has nothing to do with Bitcoin or the (Bitcoin L2) Lightning Network. But there are a lot of Bitcoin and Lightning Network enthusiasts on nostr. I suspect that over time, as nostr attracts more and more people, that the type of people on nostr will become more varied.

I thought it was a good idea that the primal nostr app made it so that my home-feed wasn't empty.

Although I do think it is probably a problem that this could cause certain accounts to amass a giant number of followers, while other accounts may not get many or even any followers — and could end up talking into the void.

But, so far I have had a good experience on nostr.

And I like that with nostr there is another *decentralized social-media networking platform — in addition to the Fediverse, Bluesky, Farcaster, etc.