Translated by AI.
Technically, I don’t have much to say. To be honest, my knowledge of blockchain is almost zero. I mainly want to share my emotional feelings (which may be a bit affected). It feels like time has been pulled back to the era when Sina Weibo and various brand microblogs were just starting out. I came across a post on my news feed that said:
I remember the early 1990s, when I watched the HTTP and HTML protocols evolving day to day on the lists for Mosaic and httpd. Nostr gives me that feeling again.”
I didn’t experience the 90s, but this feeling is similar to what I experienced in the first half of the 2010s. Everyone was just getting started: “Hello world, this is xxx.” At this moment, a condition was formed: many people were sending messages in a channel, and everyone wanted to send messages, everyone wanted to see them, and everyone would see them. The center had not yet formed (now someone is already sharing the addresses of celebrities like the founder of Twitter in the global channel, and it seems that “fan centralization” is already on its way).
In my memory, Weibo underwent some changes: at the beginning, there was also a global news feed. Everyone friended each other and the news feed became like a friend circle. Later, some users with good content stood out and became “little v”. Some celebrities became “little v” or “big v” just by virtue of their aura, without producing high-quality content. Later on, with the gradual acceptance of promotion and monetization, there were full-time bloggers who used content as a means of making a living, similar to the status of Bilibili up in recent years. With the “fan centralization”, the voices of ordinary people became smaller and smaller, perhaps only in the comments sections of various “v” can some extreme or wonderful speeches be uploaded and get some likes, experiencing the feeling of “being seen and followed”.
It’s like the society is evolving at a double-speed, and most people are destined to become nobody. This evolution cycles frequently with the rise and fall of various platforms, such as Zhihu, Jike, and Bilibili. In the beginning, it felt like a meeting (sitting at a round table, pointing out a strategy), but later it felt like a conference (the leader is on the podium, talking, and the listeners can only listen, unable to exchange ideas with neighbors because the sound is too loud). Thinking about it again, on v2, when your ideas are posted, they will be seen by others, which is really comfortable.
Returning to playing with Damus, witnessing such a historical moment when a “society” is starting to operate. However, I am not very optimistic about its future development, because after all, Matrix, which came before, was only applied in the technical circle. How to avoid risks and spam messages, how to get public/private key authentication widely accepted, and how many ordinary users can accept the practice of posting image links to change their avatars and send images are all problems that need to be solved. Maybe it just takes a genius product manager? Or skip directly to the 20xx era:
“With the last Nostr relay shutting down, decentralized social media Nostr officially exited the historical stage.”
Compared to taking down the servers that powered the center, how to take down the few centers of speech that gather under the spotlight on social media and let everyone’s voice be heard by as many people as possible, so that everyone is not just mechanically accelerating dopamine secretion based on their interests, this doesn’t seem to be a technical issue. I am not optimistic, but I hope it can grow healthily 🌳.