I don't have much opinion on the technology; to be honest, my understanding of blockchain is approximately 0. I mainly want to share my emotional feelings (a bit sentimental). It feels like time has been pulled back to the early days of Sina Weibo and various brands' Weibo accounts.
I saw a post in the information stream:
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 went through in the first half of the 2010s, when everyone was new: Hello world, This is xxx. At this moment, a condition has formed: many people are sending messages in one channel, everyone wants to send messages, everyone wants to see, and everyone will be seen. The center hasn't had time to form yet (now some people are already sharing the addresses of Twitter founders and other celebrities in the global channel, and it seems that "fan centralization" is already on the way).
My impression of Weibo is that it underwent this kind of change: at the beginning, there was also a global information stream, and everyone followed each other, adding many friends in the information stream, forming a state similar to the current friend circle; later, some high-quality content users stood out and became "little Vs," while some celebrities, relying on their halo, became "little Vs" or "big Vs" without producing quality content; subsequently, as promotion and monetization gradually became accepted, professional bloggers emerged, using content as a means of livelihood, somewhat like the state of Bilibili up owners in recent years. Accompanied by "fan centralization," the voices of ordinary people became smaller and smaller, perhaps only able to express some extreme or brilliant opinions in the comment sections of various Vs to get some likes, experiencing that feeling of "being seen and being noticed."
It's like a rapid evolution of society, where most people inevitably become nobody. This evolution, with the frequent cycles of rise and fall of various platforms like Zhihu, Jike, and Bilibili, is similar. At first, it felt like being in a meeting (sitting at a round table, pointing out the situation), but later it felt like being in a conference (the leader is speaking on stage, and whether it's good or bad, right or wrong, you can only listen; wanting to exchange ideas with the person next to you is thwarted by the loudspeaker). Thinking about it this way, on v2, sending out your thoughts will indeed be seen by others, which is incredibly comforting.
Back to playing with Damus, witnessing this historical moment of a "society" starting to operate. However, I am not very optimistic about its future development; after all, the previous matrix has only been applied in the tech circle. How to avoid risks from black markets, spam messages, whether public and private key authentication methods can be widely accepted, and how many ordinary users can accept the method of changing avatars by pasting image addresses and sending pictures are all issues that need to be resolved. Perhaps it just takes a genius product manager? Or fast forward to the year 20xx:
With the shutdown of the last nostr relay, decentralized social media nostr officially exits the historical stage.
Compared to eliminating centralized servers, how to eliminate those few centers of discourse under the spotlight of social media, allowing everyone's voice to be heard by as many people as possible, and ensuring that everyone no longer mechanically speeds up dopamine secretion based on their interests, seems not to be a technical issue. I am not optimistic, but I hope it grows robustly 🌳