The NOSTR documentary is here

0:01

Social media used to be a

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place of freedom and openness.

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But today the reality looks different.

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We didn't take a broad enough view of

0:12

our responsibility and that was a big mistake.

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We weren't expecting any of this when

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we created Twitter over twelve years ago.

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My kid's like a junkie.

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Ultimately there's one person that is in charge

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of what people see or don't see.

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It's very hard to leave Instagram,

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very hard to leave Twitter.

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Every day more than 2 billion people

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use a social media app called TikTok.

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The business model is to addict to you.

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That's not by accident, that's a design technique.

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Social media is broken.

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I wanted to find out if there's

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a solution to all of those problems.

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During my research, I found

0:48

a new technology called Nostr.

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Influential figures such as the Twitter founder, Edward

0:53

Snowden, as well as some of the brightest

0:55

minds on social media, all say that this

0:59

might be the future of social media.

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This is why I'm traveling right now to

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Costa Rica to meet with the guys working

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to solve all of those problems.

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I wanted to find out what all the hype is

1:11

about and you won't believe what I found out.

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Thousands of people are working on this technology because all

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of them believe we need to fix social media.

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This might be the first time that you

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hear about this invention, but it has the

1:25

potential to set the world free again.

1:28

Let me introduce you to Nostr.

The Early Days of The Internet

1:31

In order to fully understand the significance of this

1:34

new technology, we need to have a deeper look

1:36

at the early days of social media.

1:39

And who would be better to talk about

1:41

that than the two masterminds behind Twitter.

1:44

I'm Rabble. I was the first employee, architect, lead engineer,

1:49

de facto CTO of this company, Odeo.

1:52

We are most famous because we pivoted

1:56

from doing podcasting to building a text

1:58

based social network called Twitter.

2:00

Jack Dorsey co founded Twitter in 2006 when he and

2:04

a few pals started sending messages to each other.

2:07

I'm Jack.

2:09

That's all.

2:11

So how did the early days look like?

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Late 80s and early 90s with the emergence

2:16

of the web, it was like everything is possible.

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It was so exciting because we were doing the

2:20

things for the first time they'd ever been done.

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The internet created the ability to share data

2:25

in real time from anywhere in the world.

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Like you had no idea who these people

2:29

were, where they were around the world.

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And it was just a very magic, but also weird time.

2:36

The initial idea of the internet was that everybody

2:39

can build whatever they want on this technology.

2:41

And there was a reason for this.

2:43

The internet was started because people

2:46

agreed upon ways of communicating with

2:49

each other, which was a protocol.

2:51

The internet uses protocols to send data

2:53

from place A to place B.

2:55

Imagine them like streets on which

2:57

your data is being transported.

2:59

The email is one of the most famous examples.

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So if you send a message, it travels this street

3:05

or protocol until it arrives at your friend's destination.

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We have apps like gmail, for example, who are able

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to interact and translate everything that's happening

3:14

on the protocol layer for us to see in a live layout.

3:17

The beauty of email is that this protocol is

3:20

open for anybody to build an app on this.

3:23

And this is the reason why we not

3:25

only have one email company, we have thousands.

3:28

And in the beginning of the internet, almost everything

3:31

was structured like this, as an open protocol.

3:34

I think the first problem that a lot of

3:37

these early internet companies solved was the discovery problem.

3:42

You have to understand that back in

3:43

the days, everything was super chaotic.

3:45

You didn't just find the information like you

3:47

want because there was no way to interact

3:49

with all of this data on the protocol.

3:52

A video didn't get viral because it

3:53

was on YouTube and the algorithm pushed it.

3:55

No, people sent it to their

3:57

friends via email or in forums.

4:00

There was no way to simply google

4:02

it or find it in any way.

4:04

The protocols were full of data and information

4:07

which no one knew how to organize yet.

4:09

The internet was almost entirely

4:11

decentralized, so finding something and bringing

4:13

all these things together was challenging.

4:17

And this is how the

4:17

first successful internet companies evolved.

4:20

They found a way to organize this data.

4:23

Google was organizing the world's information.

4:25

Then you had things like facebook,

4:27

and of course twitter and MySpace.

4:29

All of those companies focused on one

4:31

specific task in organizing this information, be

4:34

it news, friends, or knowledge.

4:36

Twitter focused on sharing short messages, which actually

4:40

is not that innovative

Social Media is Born

4:41

Like twitter's magic was

4:44

not that it was an innovative company.

4:46

Twitter's magic was that it was a

4:48

company that created an innovative ecosystem.

4:51

The innovative thing about Twitter was that the

4:53

code was open source, similar to the email.

4:56

Anybody who wanted can look at the code and

4:58

add their own code on top of this.

5:00

Yeah, so if you wanted to

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build something inside twitter, the company,

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you needed consensus and everything else.

5:05

If you wanted to just use twitter

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and build something outside, you didn't.

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And so all the innovation happened on the outside.

5:12

The word tweet, using the app

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for a username, hashtags, real time search, trending

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topics, short links, inline images, inline video.

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Everything that we think of as twitter,

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except the 140 characters come from the

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third parties, from the developers.

5:28

And this is what open protocols enable.

5:30

Anybody can help to innovate and build

5:33

different products on top of this.

5:35

But back in the days, those open

5:37

protocols have also been quite inefficient.

5:41

One of the things that really creates new products, new

5:44

companies and people pay for is to save time.

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And this is why social media companies decided to just

5:50

take the data and put it into their own database.

5:53

Of course, this was way more efficient.

5:55

But back in the days, no one was

5:57

able to see what consequences this would have.

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And the web just kind of blew up and it

6:02

turned into these destinations that you could go to that

6:07

allowed you to discover things and people much faster.

6:11

But the problem was it centralized them into

6:14

a company.

6:14

Any business to have data, but

6:17

data is held in their database.

6:19

And so that means you have

6:20

these natural monopolies forming around data.

6:23

So a facebook, once you're on the

6:25

platform, you're stuck on the platform.

6:26

It's a walled garden because they're the only

6:28

ones that have access to that data.

6:30

And this is the reason why

6:31

every social media today is centralized.

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Those companies aggregate the information

6:37

and keep them for themselves.

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There is no openness anymore.

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You went to them to discover content, and now

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it's the only way you can discover content.

A Broken Business Model

6:48

And because they are now in this

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position, they use the power against us.

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We got really used to not paying for things.

6:57

We got really used to basically free products, and

7:00

you never had to pay to have an account,

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you never had to pay to have the product.

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And these companies raised a lot of funding,

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which was used to support the growth of

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the company at the start and create a

7:10

really great product at the start for everyone.

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There was no way to get that money without

7:14

going to a particular kind of venture capital.

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And then at some point, investors, rightly, so were like,

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well we need to make money from our investment.

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And so then it's like, well we can either charge people

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to use it, which is very difficult, if people are really

7:30

used to not paying for something, or we can find another

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way to basically provide returns to our investors.

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And that way became advertising.

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And this is the point where the social

7:41

media companies turned against their own users.

7:45

That way became then controlling your feed to maximize the

7:49

amount of time that you're spending on the app.

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So this making it really, really addictive.

7:52

The infinite scroll.

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All of this just to keep you

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on the platform, to sell your time to advertisers.

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They have to do whatever it takes to maximize

8:03

revenue, maximize profit, no matter what they say.

8:08

That is their goal.

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It's not necessarily about who they're serving.

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And so how can they get you to spend as

8:14

much of your time as possible on the app?

8:16

It's very hard to leave instagram, it's very hard

8:19

to leave TikTok, it's very hard to leave twitter.

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You're being subtly manipulated by algorithms that are

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watching everything you do constantly, and then sending

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you changes in your media feed that are

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calculated to adjust to you slightly to the

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liking of some unseen advertiser.

8:38

What you're seeing is in the hands of

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these companies that help you discover it.

8:43

Did you know that facebook convinced all of the media

8:48

companies to switch to using video instead of text, by

8:53

lying about the viewer numbers on videos on Facebook.

8:57

So they'd be like, I want The

8:59

Washington Post to make videos instead of

9:00

articles because it's better to sell ads.

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So I'm going to say, your text post got 10% of

9:05

the views and your videos got 20 times more views.

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They lied.

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They fucking lied.

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Social media used to be open and fun,

9:16

but today it's controlled by greedy companies.

9:19

We actually forgot about the openness of

9:21

the early Internet and are facing incentive

9:24

structures which are simply wrong.

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And this is the root cause of why you

9:29

feel miserable when using social media, because social media

9:33

is no longer about giving you value.

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In order to keep their business running, social media

9:38

companies need to keep you addicted and outraged so

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they can then sell your time to their advertisers.

Censorship

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Elon Musk was the breaking point.

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Like the fact that he was able to take over Twitter

9:52

claiming that he was going to make it open, like, if

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you look at his claims, he's going to open source it,

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open source the algorithm, build it on an open protocol, support

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all this stuff, make it super free speech.

10:04

And now he's banning journalists for

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life for insulting him.

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In general,

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There is so much censorship going on now, I think

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as a result of the last couple of years.

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That is very concerning.

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Now, everything that you just saw allows social

10:25

media companies to censor whatever information they want,

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and this makes them extremely powerful.

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Even though we don't have an authoritarian regime.

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If you have platforms which are effectively shadow

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banning people or outright banning people because of

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what they say, and you have the major

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means of communication are through these basically for profit

10:47

centralized platforms, then what happens is the information

10:52

you receive begins to look very similar to the

10:54

information you receive in a dictatorship such as China.

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Except that rather than the central government determining who

11:05

gets to say what, it's a for profit platform.

11:10

This censorship problem might not be that

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obvious because we are normal people, right?

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We won't get censored.

11:18

Generally speaking, I don't think I'm a bad guy.

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I don't think I do anything that's wrong.

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It took me a while to realize that

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it's not about what I feel about myself.

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It's not if I feel that I'm a good guy or a bad guy.

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It matters what somebody else thinks

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and who's controlling that platform.

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The degree to which various government agencies had

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effectively had full access to everything that was

11:44

going on on Twitter blew my mind.

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I was not aware of that.

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Would that include people's DMs?

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Ah, yes.

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Ultimately, there's one person that is in charge of

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what people see or don't see, what they react

11:59

to, how they can contribute, or not.

12:02

I could think that nothing I'm doing

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is wrong, but that doesn't matter.

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It's what they think because I'm using their platform.

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So that centralized power doesn't really speak to the

12:13

nature of I think what the internet wants to

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be, which is there are no single deciders, there's

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no single point of failure.

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There's no one person that's on the hook for all

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these decisions of millions, if not billions of people.

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If this is our public space, this is how we communicate

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with our friends and our family and where we do business

12:31

and everything else, then we need to not just own our

12:35

content because the content doesn't matter so much.

12:37

You can download your content from

12:39

Instagram but you lose your connections.

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Those connections, those social connections of who's

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following whom, how they're connected, who can

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see whom, what algorithms they use.

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Those are things that people

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need to control themselves.

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Imagine if we didn't have a protocol for email.

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You had to go to a company like email and

12:56

if they didn't like the email you sent, they would

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just like prevent you from sending an email.

13:00

That would be disastrous for the corporate world because

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now you don't be worrying about censoring yourself or

13:04

they can monitor all the corporations communications.

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So when you look at the social media it's like, why

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do we entrust it all in one corporation for all of

13:12

our communications that are like just talking to your friends?

We Need a New Technology

13:15

And this just blew my mind because the tech we're

13:18

using for social media is just wrong.

13:21

Right now, the majority of social

13:23

communication happens over websites.

13:27

That protocol that websites use was

13:30

not designed specifically for that.

13:35

So I don't think any amount

13:36

of tweaking can fully heal it.

13:40

At Twitter I realized a bunch of our issues

13:42

being a centralized company and what that meant for

13:44

what we were trying to build, which our purpose,

13:46

which was to serve the public conversation.

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We can't truly serve the

13:50

public conversation as a corporation.

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We can help but we can't be

13:54

the only thing and the reason why is we and

13:57

I at that time could be called to Congress.

14:00

We could be compelled by the governments around the

14:02

world to take down content that they don't agree

14:05

with but is perfectly reasonable outside of state lines.

14:10

We could have employees that make decisions on

14:12

themselves because we don't have the right checkpoints.

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We could have me who might have a bias,

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make decisions that inform one direction or not.

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All those things are single points

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of failures and ultimate failures.

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So as I was really understanding, that brought me back

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to why I love the internet and why I love

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the early internet in particular and why I love the

14:33

protocol aspects of the internet and decided to start funding

14:39

a protocol for social media because it didn't have one.

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And this is the key here.

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Social media didn't have a protocol yet because it

14:47

worked over websites and you can't open source those.

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The companies running those websites own the data and

14:54

can decide whatever they want to do with it.

14:57

But now we have better technology where we can

15:00

decentralize discovery problem a little bit more, and we

15:03

don't have to be reliant upon a particular company

15:06

or one organization to help us navigate Internet.

15:10

Like, we have really good machine learning.

15:13

We have really good decentralized

15:15

tech that didn't exist.

15:16

We have really good cryptography that didn't exist.

15:19

There's tons of research in all this

15:21

stuff and that didn't exist before.

Introducing NOSTR

15:25

So the new protocol that Jack

15:27

talked about is called Nostr.

15:29

And the main intention with this is to try

15:32

to decentralize the fixed structures of social media because

15:37

this then would allow the users to have more

15:40

control over their data and also reduce the power

15:43

of the large social media companies.

15:45

So how does Nostr do that?

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So imagine if Twitter, rather than all the information

15:50

being stored on our Twitter database, and the only

15:52

way I can access people's tweets is via Twitter.

15:55

Imagine that information is stored

15:57

in a distributed way.

15:59

And now anyone can build an

16:00

app that gets the same tweets.

16:03

It's a little bit like the email.

16:04

We have this layer where all the information, posts,

16:07

text, and everything is stored, but this data isn't

16:11

connected to one specific social media platform.

16:14

No, anybody can build a social media

16:17

platform which accesses all of this information.

16:21

Elon always talks about, oh, we're

16:22

going to open source the algorithm.

16:23

It's like, well that doesn't really okay,

16:25

now we understand how it works, but

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I'm still forced to use the algorithm.

16:28

Well, the real solution is to let the user choose

16:31

the algorithm and let the user turn off the algorithm.

16:33

I can't build the client for Twitter because they control

16:36

the language and I'm not allowed to build that.

16:39

But when you're building on a protocol,

16:40

the client, anyone can build a client.

16:41

So right now in Nostr, we have 20 clients, probably

16:44

30, 40.

16:45

Say, I think people shouldn't drink coffee.

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On my platform that I build, I'm not

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going to let you see any posts about

16:52

coffee because I think coffee should be banned.

16:54

The information about coffee or the

16:56

pictures are not being deleted.

16:58

It's just that this one particular app

17:01

doesn't showcase it to their users.

17:04

That would be relatively known.

17:05

Like it would be obvious I'm

17:06

not getting posts about coffee.

17:08

Someone would say, have you banned coffee?

17:11

And it would become quite obvious.

17:12

My friend Sarah, she's like, well,

17:15

I think people should drink coffee.

17:17

So she can just go and build another

17:18

app, access all the same information, and provide

17:21

all of that information, including the coffee.

17:23

So now you understand how everything works, but

17:25

this is happening in the background, right?

17:27

All of those algorithms, you don't see that.

17:29

But the interesting thing about Nostr is that

NOSTR Apps are Different & Innovative

17:32

the layout of the apps can also be

17:34

completely different, which allows you to see the

17:37

same information of your friends in different layouts.

17:41

So let me show you an example.

17:43

So this app looks like Twitter, right?

17:45

We have pictures being posted, but also text.

17:50

But I can see the same content on another app.

17:54

Let's look into it.

17:55

This app looks more like Instagram, and as

17:58

you can see, it's the same post.

18:00

I just see the pictures of my friends, of course, like

18:02

in Instagram, but I see the same steak as you can

18:06

see here, and I also see the same dog.

18:09

So it's really up to me how I want to see

18:12

this, because Nostr is a toolkit where the apps can decide

18:16

themselves what data they want to pull from the protocol and

18:20

then how they want to display it to me, the user.

18:25

So all of the social platforms now, the business model

18:27

is get data, give ads, get money for ads. Very basic.

18:32

And the business model, that's just

18:33

not going to work anymore.

18:34

What you're going to have to do is actually build

18:36

a platform that people love and they actually just want

18:39

to come to every day because they love it.

18:41

Because if you stop providing that value to a

18:44

customer or to a person, someone else is going

18:46

to come in and do something better.

18:47

So we move back to providing the social

18:50

media user with the best experience possible.

18:53

It's happened in the old world.

18:55

It's a company like Twitter.

18:56

It got to where it is, it has a monopoly position.

18:59

It stopped innovating.

19:00

It just is what it is.

19:02

It's not changing.

19:03

Whereas now companies are going to have

19:05

to keep innovating and

19:06

they're going to have to keep providing ways of providing value

19:09

to a consumer, to a person, to a customer, in order

19:12

to get a little bit of value in return.

19:14

Because if I don't like what the app

19:16

does, I can simply switch to another app.

19:18

I choose one, I log in, and then I

19:21

have the same setup, the same content, the same

19:23

friends, just provided by a different app.

19:26

With Nostr, with these open protocols, we're once

19:30

again given license and ability to play again.

19:34

We're not users, we're not

19:35

consumers, we're co-creators in this.

19:38

And that's super exciting.

19:40

Built by us, for us, it's the

19:43

users that are building the community, it's

19:45

the users that are providing the feedback.

19:47

Because it is an open protocol, everybody can access

19:51

it and basically build their own social media.

19:54

I was talking to this guy who's

19:56

running a gay, like hardcore gay Relay.

20:01

There's other people who are running Relays for

20:03

their church groups and there's other people who

20:06

are running Relays for like, hardcore bitcoiner folks.

20:08

A diverse Internet, a diverse ecosystem,

20:11

lets all of those things exist.

20:13

All of this data, including your connections, pictures

20:17

and messages, are stored in this open protocol.

20:21

And this is why it's so revolutionary,

20:23

because you control your own data.

Why we need this Technology

20:26

If you've never been censored, if you've never been

20:30

moderated, if you've never lived under an oppressive regime,

20:34

then these features don't resonate with you.

20:37

But if you think outside of your privilege and you think

20:41

about the other 8 billion people in the world and where

20:44

they might live and what they might be experiencing.

20:47

It'll start to click that.

20:48

You'll start to realize that Nostr is really powerful

20:52

for other people on the planet, not just me.

20:56

But the cool thing is that Nostr

20:58

is not only about social media.

21:00

This open protocol can be used for way more use cases.

21:05

Nostr at its basic level is just text communication.

21:10

So you can use it to push around

21:12

messages, you can use it to push authentication.

21:16

And if we think about it, messaging and

21:18

communication is the base layer for all services.

21:22

It's the base layer for Uber, it's the base

21:25

layer for LinkedIn, it's the base layer for Yelp.

21:27

Being able to build on this means that I

21:30

have no idea what it's going to be.

21:31

And that's the most amazing thing.

21:32

I'm not setting the direction.

21:34

I can have opinions, but my opinions

21:36

don't matter unless I build something.

21:38

All these apps that we use today on our

21:41

phones to do reviews and request services, anything really

21:46

could be built on top of Nostr.

21:48

With an open protocol.

21:49

With open source, you don't ask permission. You build.

21:52

If you have an idea, you just build it.

21:54

And if the market finds it and they love

21:56

it and they use it, then it becomes big.

21:58

It becomes a thing.

22:00

And to me, that's natural.

22:02

Even though right now the majority of use cases

22:04

on Nostr is basically like a Twitter replacement, that's

22:07

not as exciting as what will come.

22:10

The things that people are now just starting to

22:12

think about and now just starting to work on

22:15

will be the cool things in the future.

Democratising Social Media

22:24

So now I hope you understand why

22:26

Nostr is such a big deal.

22:28

But I also wanted to know why

22:31

all of those people are doing this.

22:33

I think it's a safe assumption to make that every

22:35

single person on this planet will eventually be connected or

22:39

one degree away from connection to the Internet.

22:42

Probably one of the most important things we

22:43

do to stay connected to really advance humanity.

22:48

We're all on this planet together.

22:50

We're all facing eventually the same issues.

22:53

If the meteor comes and strikes

22:55

the Earth, we're all in it.

22:58

But the borders and the boundaries aren't

23:00

going to matter as much anymore.

23:01

World War Three happens.

23:03

Nuclear war, we're all in it.

23:05

None of those borders are going to matter anymore.

23:07

So the Internet represents that.

23:09

I think a lot of the energy we're seeing

23:11

today is re-recognizing that and making sure that

23:14

those borders don't get solidified into corporate or state

23:18

norms that we can't go over.

23:20

20 years ago, you couldn't make your own TV show.

23:26

You need to ask for a gatekeeper.

23:28

You need to ask for someone who has a

23:29

television channel or a cable network do it.

23:31

You couldn't make your own radio program and

23:34

have anyone listen to it without some radio

23:38

station and distribution company saying, yeah.

23:41

I hope that more and more people find that.

23:43

I hope more and more people stop asking for permission.

23:47

Just build what they want.

23:48

We're democratizing things.

23:50

We're transforming things.

23:52

This thing has moved so fast, faster than

23:55

any other thing I've been a part of.

23:56

So it's been really amazing.

23:59

That I can be here on this YouTube channel.

24:02

Talking to people is unimaginable 20 years ago.

24:08

And we can't imagine what we'll be

24:11

able to do in 20 years.

24:13

But we only get to do it if we do it together.

24:19

And that's the exciting part

24:21

about designing the future.

24:28

If you now want to join Nostr, you can

24:31

find everything you need down in the description.

24:33

This has been a long and challenging journey

24:35

for me, and I have something special for

24:37

you at the end of the video.

24:39

But I'm an independent filmmaker.

24:41

I self funded this documentary and put

24:43

my heart and soul into it.

24:45

I hope you saw that from the animator's

24:47

work to the equipment costs, every aspect of

24:50

this documentary was actually self funded.

24:53

And if you liked the video, I would be

24:56

so grateful if you could consider making a donation.

24:59

Any amount you can contribute, no matter how small,

25:03

will help me to fund my next project.

25:05

You can do so easily by sending Bitcoin here

25:08

or when you want to send me normal money.

25:10

You can find a link in the description as well.

25:12

I also want to give a special shout out

25:14

to the Geyser fund because they helped me with

25:16

a value for value contribution which actually covered some

25:20

of the costs for creating this film.

25:22

So thank you for watching this video.

25:24

I hope hope you liked it.

25:25

Don't forget to subscribe and

Outro

25:27

like this video down below.

25:29

And I'm going to se