Nostr oltre il Social Network: Verso un Internet Decentralizzato e Resistente alla Censura

Good morning everyone, on the third day of Napulet, Italy's most important web 3 festival . Today's topic, which we'll begin with, is very interesting. Our guest will be Vincenzo Imperati, PhD in Computer Science from Sapienza University of Rome, who has extensively researched our protocol. Today, he'll focus his talk on its use for social networking and how to decentralize information. Over to you, Vincenzo.

A thousand thanks. So, exactly, my talk about Noster, but not just seen as if it were a social network, although in reality it is, but also towards a more decentralized and censorship-resistant internet. So, I am, as we've already introduced, a PhD student in computer science, and I mainly deal with distributed systems in my academic research, such as blockchain and social network systems. I'm mainly interested in the social dynamics within these networks, and it's interesting to see how a certain group of people can actually exploit certain social dynamics to benefit themselves or, in short, do something special within these networks. But we're here to talk about social networks, and all of you, all of you in this room, surely know these icons, you know their names, and we use them practically at least once a day.

They are beautiful, we like them, we like them a lot because there are lots of kittens inside and they entertain us for hours and hours of our day. we waste a lot of time and we can post, we share everything. In reality, beyond this appearance and this and these things that we like a lot, there are actually many, many more hidden sides that we are actually starting to take note of and become aware of, but what is user profiling in reality? Who knows us better than Facebook and better than our mother in reality too. Um, we share pretty much everything, but another interesting thing is that the algorithmic manipulation done by these social networks dictates the content we see.

We do not automatically decide by our own will, but we are offered a continuous flow of contents that we cannot decide. It's full of advertising, rightly so, because they want to make money off our attention, our interests, and in reality, er, there are also issues of the possibility of censorship and, in reality, of not having control over our data. These are a little more subtle, but in reality, as we can see from Trump, for example, who was banned from Twitter, he had to create his own social network to be able to say and do what he wants and in fact we also had proof that in reality the data in possession is not ours, the data we publish on social networks is not actually ours. In fact, Trump has an infinite set of tweets on Twitter, now X and he actually couldn't transfer them because they were on the platform, they were from the platform. So, a little more recently we are starting to become aware of and knowledgeable about some social networks that are a little more decentralized or that propose themselves as decentralized social alternatives to the most used platforms.

Here maybe someone doesn't know many icons, actually we have Farcaster, Blue Sky and Mastodon. Now these are billed as decentralized social networks, but are they really? I went to have a look. In reality, I can tell you and explain simply, if I can, that Blue Sky is actually a company that developed this social network and actually remodeled the concept of social by breaking down into various modules what are actually the main components for the functioning of a social network. It then shared this model and actually offers each user the opportunity to choose the various modules to compose their own social network.

The problem is that the modules, the architectural modules of the social network, are only those that are actively available and are only owned by Blue Sky, and therefore we have actually partitioned various modules that make up the social network, such as the archive of our data, digital identity, the feed, moderation. These are all modules that Blue Sky has partitioned, but in reality it owns and controls completely . So in reality, there's always a single company behind it. Even Mastodon is actually not as decentralized as one might think, in the sense that Mastodon is, uh, a collection of servers, but they don't communicate with each other, or rather, each server has its own admin and each server owns and controls its own server. Um, so actually you can connect to one of the many instances of Mastodon and you're under the laws of admin that server and your data is not decentralized at all, it just resides on one server.

If you move to another server you have a completely different identity, so you don't actually keep your identity and you have to move your data, you can do that, but you can't transport your identity. Farcaster is actually decentralized because all the nodes actually hold all the messages we distribute in the network, but in reality the fact that each node must actively hold all our data, which is shared by all the people, in order to follow the protocol actually tends towards centralization because few nodes will be interested in holding all the user data for what, after all . So in reality the nodes of the Farcaster foundation themselves will potentially be the ones that will remain active the longest or for the majority. So in reality I am proposing to you what Noster is, in reality I am introducing you to what actually has what it takes to be a decent decentralized social network . In fact, Noster is a protocol, it's a very simple protocol, it has a data formatting system which is Jason, so it actually uses a specific formatting for sharing events, the data that are within this protocol.

uses encryption. So in reality every event shared on the network is signed and verified, it is verifiable, it is signed by the user who posted it and therefore we know who the authors of the posts are and in reality it has a data exchange protocol, i.e. messaging as if it were https. We have web sockets.

Here we can see the characteristic of a Noster event. This is how an event is composed. So in fact, Noster is actually this, it's what you see on the slide, but the communication between clients is a bit similar to what we're used to knowing, but the client is much freer to do certain things. Let's see, for example, I can be Bob, I'm using a client that is perhaps Damus on iOS and I actually decide to read information from some servers. I'm free to decide which servers, let's say, which servers to read information from, but also which servers to actually write my information to, eh, as long as they let me do it.

What happens is that I can redundantly store information, so my information is distributed, and not only that, but if some server doesn't want to store my information, wants to block me, or wants to censor it, I will certainly find another server that will be willing to roast my information. But if I don't find anyone, I can create a server and then hide only my information, perhaps, and thus actually have everyone read my data, but actually only I can write to it because my server is private. This way, information remains decentralized, distributed, and even resilient to censorship. And users are free to do this, they have complete freedom, there are certainly some servers available to them , some servers that don't actually work against them in some way. In reality, we have various types of events on Noster.

The ones we saw before were for how they are composed, but in reality they can be of various types, always with the same structure because it is a standard, but based on the type in reality the information that is inside turns out to be more or less interesting, in short, or we know how to read that information. Actually there are the most useful eh event kind to make a social, so we have the user metadata, eh shorttexe, follows, repost, reaction. There are all these events that make us understand that in reality the Nost protocol is the perfect basis and the useful basis for building this social network that actually exists on Noster, but there are many other data types of events that are a bit strange. That is, for example CES. Cess is actually a type of event that allows you to transcribe the exact position of a chessboard and therefore you can exchange events on the Noster protocol and it's as if you were playing a game of chess with another person.

There are Zaps which are actually tips that can be sent on Bitcoin via the IT network and so there is much more to this protocol than just the social network. In fact, there are specific clients. Everyone can choose their own client. Maybe there are clients that only display the feeds of people we know, people who have a high reputation based on certain metrics. But we are the ones who decide which application we use to use the social network, and therefore we know the dynamics that that application adopts.

There is no potentially hidden algorithm in the application we choose to use. There are actually clients that allow us to do micro brogling. Brogling actually allows us to simply host our own blog in a simple way and we don't have to have any particular skills or many other features like private messaging like WhatsApp or Signal. In addition to this, in reality the servers, the relays that are on Noster have also adopted a media server component, so they are also able to store information, so not only the events in the format we have seen, but also simply images, videos, audio. For example, Fontain is a client that relies on the Noster protocol to read the information and content it provides us, but then the audio and podcasts it lets us listen to are hosted on the media servers of these Noster protocol relays.

So in reality there is also a possibility of data storage beyond the simple Noster format and there is a lot of other information, interesting applications that actually show us once again that Noster is not just a social network , but is actually a convenient and interoperable infrastructure that has a very simple standard through the events we have seen and also allows us to build something much more sophisticated and that is by definition and by let's say intrinsic structure of the Noster protocol decentralized and resistant to censorship. Indeed we have eh Xiaomian eh ECash Protocol. It's actually an eccashia. Well, it was done at the time, many years ago, even before Bitcoin, but the problem was that it was managed by a centralized server and in fact now it works on Noster because in reality there is no centralization. And we also have Mostro, for example, for example, it's a peer-to-peer decentralized marketplace.

There are services like Web of Trust Services, Asa Service, because in reality through these data vending machines, I won't go into detail now, but it's as if they were already provided for the infrastructure that the infrastructure already allows us through this protocol or small modifications to be able to allow us to create, let's say, APIs to pay payments and that is, people give us money, small tips and we do the work for them, we provide specific data. So, for example, I can give the example of a specific data avending machine where you provide the public key, a user's profile on Noster and it responds with perhaps its web trust, its authority on the protocol. So, actually, there are a lot of services that are already built on top of the entire protocol. The presentation ends here. If anyone has any questions or curiosities.

Yes, yes, yes. Okay If practically, since this social network is decentralized, the crypto community in general is moving or will move to these social networks. Yes. And we've actually already seen that the first users of these decentralized protocols are basically crypto enthusiasts, or, well, people from this scene. Mainly on Noster there are Bitcoin maximalists mainly, but then it actually depends because on Farcaster, for example, there is the entire Ethereum community because it is a bit more related to that world, but of course there are mainly already, let's say, people with this niche of interest, but then there are also slightly more particular case studies, even if small, of people who use the protocol because they are really censored in their country and so there are absolutely cases that are a bit more, eh, specific, but yes, I did n't understand the last thing.

Certain. Yes, yes, yes, yes. because there are already many people who perhaps use other centralized social networks X to, well, also work on them, as you said, with their own art, with their own sharing of content. Absolutely sharing an event on X is, in fact, as I said, not your property, not your control. Maybe X decides to hide your profile, decides that your profile should no longer appear in people's feeds, so he gives you, let's say, a shadow ban or actually blocks your profile, deletes your content, you and so, eh, there are also tools that allow you to post, eh, let's say, on multiple social networks in a parallel way, right?

So there are profiles on Twitter that already use Noster as a second communication channel. Certain. Or there's a trend, especially on Twitter, where people put their Noster public key , their Noster platform ID, in their bio, and then say, "Go follow me there, go get to know me there, maybe I can talk about something in more detail there, because if I say certain things on Twitter, I might actually be more obscured by the platform." Certainly. Okay