Decentralized Twitter Alternatives Bluesky and Nostr Are Growing, With Some Growing Pains

Bluesky and Nostr—two separate Twitter-like social platforms, both decentralized and both backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey—are thriving as Elon Musk continues to make controversial changes to Twitter itself.

Bluesky released its long-awaited app for Android smartphones on Friday, nearly two months after its iOS client went live on the Apple App Store. (The web client is still in pre-beta.) Bluesky access is still invite-only, but its user base growth has accelerated from about 1,000 to 2,500 new members daily, surpassing 33,000 in total this weekend.

Bluesky is in fact a proof-of-concept front-end for the underlying AT Protocol, intended to form the basis of a broad network of interoperable applications and services. Nostr is comparable to the AT Protocol, and is the framework within which more than a dozen other applications and services already operate.

Notably, they are separate from Mastodon and ActivityPub, long-running decentralized social networks and protocols founded in 2016 and early beneficiaries of the Musk-inspired exodus from Twitter. Mastodon quickly grew its user base from 300,000 to 2.5 million at the end of last year, although user growth and activity has been on the decline.

Nostr is also an acronym for “records and other stuff sent through the relay”. The ecosystem is somewhat difficult to incorporate, as decentralized protocols are based on public and private key cryptography, and thus use much of the jargon and technical language of the foundation. The user’s canonical identity is their public key, and looks like this: npub1hpgg9mnu3ckf9kaju8y5mn79e7ymqwsk0m3fwfk78wzevn2av6ksgewwvf — and although you can register with the client for a username such as [email protected], this may be charged in cryptocurrency.

As a result, while Nostr has been embraced by the technical community, Bluesky has attracted a wide variety of users—ranging from digital artists and NFT enthusiasts to political and social activists to people who post daily photos of food, cats, and other content more reminiscent of Twitter.

Even so, by some measure, Nostr is already much larger than Bluesky and AT Protocol. With multiple apps instead of just one—including Damus on iOS, Amethyst on Android, and the snort.social web interface—Nostr can have as many as 16 million users, according to Nostr.Band, and as many as 780,000 daily active users.

But measuring activity in the Nostr universe is complex: there are public keys that interact with the protocol, generating events, but a user may have dozens or hundreds of keys, and an “event” can be anything from a posted message to a query, ping, or action. automatic. As a result, different criteria will produce different results: public keys with attached user bios total 2.25 million. Daily “high quality pubkey writing events” hovers around 8,000.

Although Dorsey is publicly affiliated with Bluesky—which was first incubated on Twitter in the long-term future of the platform—he is much more active on Nostr. Dorsey ruffled some feathers this week when another Nostr user posted a Threshold article describing Bluesky as a “shameless Twitter clone”.

“Unfortunately they are too focused on the Twitter product and not the developer community,” Dorsey wrote in reply.

Soon after, the Bluesky team released a long list of projects in the AT Protocol ecosystem, and announced an update that added support for “app passwords”, otherwise known as “burner passwords” or application-specific passwords. This special password allows the user to grant access to their AT Protocol account without providing their master credentials.

“The Bluesky app demonstrates how a microblogging client can be built on the AT Protocol with an intuitive user experience,” the team wrote. “However, much remains to be done to fully explore the potential of this architecture.”

One of the initial advantages of Bluesky’s decentralized approach is that usernames can be associated with web domain names, and thus serve as a form of verification. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber’s username is @jay.bsky.team, and anyone associated with bsky.team can be considered an official member of the Bluesky team.

Newcomers to Bluesky and Nostr frequently post about how different or better Twitter is than Twitter, though most acknowledge that they were early adopters and are currently isolated from the potential chaos of a more mainstream audience.

Indeed, there has been a concerted effort to migrate communities from Twitter to Bluesky en masse, with users collecting invites and bringing leaders and influencers in various affinity groups: Black Twitter, Science Twitter, and yes, Crypto Twitter.

Along with the rapid growth came some growing pains. Some of this is technical: Bluesky periodically struggles with slow performance and broken features, and hashtags aren’t supported—though the arrival of self-proclaimed hashtag inventor Chris Messina on the service could change that. But other challenges are a familiar part of the evolution of any new community.

At Bluesky, a lot of the conversation revolves around moderation and safety, whether it’s related to overactive bots starting to interact with each other and getting stuck in an infinite loop, or intimate debates about JK Rowling or other topics that quickly fuel Godwin’s law.

Demands for the ability to block or mute other users or threads reached a fever pitch last week, prompting Graber to craft AT Protocol’s planned approach to the problem.

“We are designing an open and scalable labeling system for moderation,” Graber wrote, noting that centralized and decentralized social networks face different challenges. “We’ve improved this situation by making it easier to switch servers, and by separating moderation into a structurally independent service.”

“We need to complete the core mission first,” Bluesky’s lead developer Paul Frazee wrote when a user asked when support for GIFs and videos would be added. “We only ship curation, moderation, and federation tools first… [which are] It’s very important for us to open everything up.”

Meanwhile, over at Nostr, there has been debate about implementing “Zaps,” which are interactions distinct from likes, replies, or reposts and support blockchain integration for things like micropayments. By adding value to interactions, Nostr users hope that “Zap” will be more meaningful to give and take.

However, the evolution of “Zaps” has turned some Nostr users against the antiquated “likes”, which they suggest removing completely from the ecosystem. The latest release of Snort.social and iOS client Nostr Damus introduces an “OnlyZaps” mode, where the “like” button is hidden, which critics say will lead to an early “Balkanization” of the community.

“I love this debate,” Dorsey wrote on Nostr, calling it “#zapgate.” He wrote, “I hope one day reposts and zaps completely replace the need for likes.”

“Reposts and zaps are a true exchange of value and have a real cost: your reputation or your money,” he explains. “Likes are shallow and only exist to inform the algorithm. Relevance algorithms have their place, but are best informed by truly costly actions.”

“Wow, so this is about your reputation or your money?” another user replied. “Shame, because I thought it was all about the fun.”