Where will the explosive Damus take Web3?

After ChatGPT, a social product called Damus has recently become popular.

On February 1, 2023, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that Damus, a social product based on the decentralized social media protocol Nostr, has been launched on the Apple App Store and anyone can download it.

Jack Dorsey also disclosed his Nostr public key in his personal social media signature and called it "a milestone for open protocols."

Then, on the afternoon of February 1, a series of mysterious codes suddenly appeared on many people’s social media platforms, and then a brief “code” was left.

This also became the first "explosion point" in the Web3 field in 2023.

What is the Damus that will explode in 2023?

Last year, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey spent 14 bitcoins (about $245,000 at the time) to fund the development of Nostr, an open decentralized social network protocol based on encryption key pairs.

According to Nostr’s official website, Damus is just one of several Nostr projects under development.

On the official website, Damus positions itself as The social network you control, where users control their own accounts, data and all potential value, echoing the spiritual core emphasized by Web3.

It is understood that the Damus product was opened for internal testing in April 2022 and is currently available for download on Apple mobile phones, iPads and Google Stores. Users can create an account directly, and when creating an account, they only need to enter their personal username, without the need for personal information such as phone number, email, or name.

We tried it out and entered our username, without any personal information like phone number, email, name, etc., and it was done in five seconds.

Beosin has also officially registered a Damus account. You can search for the "secret code" to follow us:

npub1ra26qkz70004mayv6qdgvfsd069q5grxtlxqs4qv3kck64ldehzq4n3jzn

Click the search icon at the bottom of the homepage, copy Beosin's public key ID, and click Goto profile to add friends.

Overall, the Damus page design is simple and elegant, but many functions are rough and imperfect. For example, posts do not support style editing, cannot be deleted after posting, cannot be undone after liking or retweeting, and pictures need to be converted into links before they can be posted. In addition, advanced requirements such as trends and filters are also urgently needed to be added.

What is the biggest difference between DamusY and other social platforms?

It is understood that this App does not rely on centralized server deployment, but is written on the decentralized social protocol "Nostr".

Nostr stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays", which can be understood as a relay transmission protocol for social media information.

It’s an open protocol that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network that’s not a single website, but a network of thousands of users who can post to each other’s relay servers, which can interact with each other seamlessly.

Simply put, every user on the Nostr protocol runs a client, which can be a local client, a web client, etc. To publish something, the user only needs to sign it with a personal key and send it to multiple relayers (servers hosted by others or themselves) to complete the publication. To get updates from others, it is also achieved by visiting relayers.

Nostr emphasizes its censorship-free system: there is no supervisory party controlling what content is allowed and what is not. Nostr is based on relays, and the Damus application using the protocol only provides recommended content and pops up more new messages during subsequent use.

This enables Damus to have features such as no registration and encryption, ensuring the privacy and freedom of users to the greatest extent.

For example, Twitter admits that it collects users’ purchase history, contact information, browsing history usage data, location, user content, identity, search history, diagnostics and other data, while Damus directly states that the developer does not collect any data through this app.

Will Damus drive the next development of Web3?

At present, practitioners in the cryptocurrency industry have higher expectations for Web3, hoping that it can break the monopoly of traditional Internet giants and create a new free world.

However, the so-called "freedom" often has its opposite. For example, the "anti-censorship" mentioned above also has two extremes. Now all kinds of spam and violent information have appeared on Damus.

Regarding this situation, William Casarin, the founder of Damus, revealed in a Twitter interaction that in response to the recent robot spam attacks and other problems that have occurred on Damus, a keyword filtering function will be launched soon to block spam information on the homepage.

On February 3, the decentralized social network application Damus based on the Nostr protocol was removed from the App Store in mainland China. Damus was launched on the App Store on February 1, and within two days of its launch, it had already ranked among the top ten free social apps in the US App Store, surpassing well-known social applications such as Signal, WeChat, and Line.

Whether the Nostr protocol will be successful remains to be seen, but while Damus has caused huge controversy on mainstream social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, it has undoubtedly brought us new and quite interesting options. At the same time, it may also promote the next development of Web3.