A Great Hit of Damus! Where will it lead Web3?

After ChatGPT, a new social media product called Damus is taking off.

On February 1 2023, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, posted a tweet that Damus, a social media product built on Nostr decentralized social media protocol, is available for anyone to download in App Store.

Jack Dorsey also shared his Nostr public key in his twitter profile and stated that Nostr and Damus is “A milestone for open protocols”.

Right after this tweet, on the afternoon of February 1, a string of mysterious codes(public key of a person's Damus account) popped up on many people's social media platforms with a brief signal.

Damus became the first hit of Web3 in 2023

What is Damus?

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter offered 14 BTC(about $245,000 at that time) to support the development of Nostr, a open decentralized social network based on cryptographic keypairs.

According to the introduction of Nostr, Damus is one of Nostr projects under development.

From Damus official website, we can see that Damus views itself as The social network you control, which means that users have controll of their accounts, data and any potential values of their accounts. It is in accordance with the core of Web3.

Damus, which was launched for internal test in April 2022, is now available for download from Apple's iphone, iPad and Google's store. Users can create an account directly by entering their preferred username without phone number, e-mail, name, or other personal information.

Beosin also registered our own Damus account. The registration only took about 5 sec by entering username. It is our honor to have you follow our Damus account by searching:

npub1ra26qkz70004mayv6qdgvfsd069q5grxtlxqs4qv3kck64ldehzq4n3jzn

When you open Damus, click the search icon at the bottom of home page and paste Beosin public key above. Then, click Go to profile and you can follow us!

Overall, the page design of Damus is simple and elegant but many functions are imperfect. For example, the posting function does not support style editing. Post can not be deleted. Click on like or retweet can not be undone. The picture needs to be turned into a link to be published. In addition, trends, filters and other advanced functions also need to be added in the future.

What's the biggest difference between Damus and other social platforms?

Instead of centralized server deployment, Damus is based on the decentralized social protocol Nostr.

Nostr, which is "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays", is a relay transfer protocol for social media information. It is an open protocol aiming to create a global social network that resists censorship. It is not a single website, but a network of thousands of users who can publish contents to each other's relay servers, which can seamlessly interact with each other.

For easy understanding, each user on Nostr protocol runs a client, which can be a local client, a Web client, and so on. To publish something, a user simply signs it with his/her personal private key and sends it to multiple relayers(servers hosted by others or himself/herself). Updates from others are also available through relayers.

Nostr emphasizes its no-censorship policy: no supervisor controls what is and is not allowed. Nostr is based on relay, and Damus that uses the protocol only provides contents recommendation, with more new contents popping up in the following uses, which allows Damus to have no registration and encryption features, to guarantee user privacy and freedom as much as possible.

For example, Twitter admits that it collects data on users' purchase history, contact information, browser history, usage data, location, user content, identity, search history, diagnosis, and so on, while Damus says directly that it does not collect any data of users.

Will Damus drive the next step of Web3?

The cryptocurrency industry has raised higher expectations of Web3 which is that Web3 will break the monopoly of traditional internet giants and create a new free world.

But so-called “Freedom” often has its opposite, such as anti-censorship. Now there are many kinds of garbage and violence information on Damus.

For this case, William Casarin, founder of Damus, revealed in tweet reply that a keyword filtering feature would soon be available to block spam on the home page in response to recent problems such as Damus bot spam attack.

Damus, a decentralized social networking application based on Nostr protocol, was removed from the Chinese mainland App Store on February 3. Damus was available on App Store on February 1 and within two days it was in the top 10 list of free social apps in App Store in the US, overtaking popular social apps such as Signal, WeChat and Line.

It is still too early to predict Nostr protocol to be a success. When Damus has sparked a lot of controversy on mainstream social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, it also offered us a new option without doubt. It may also drive the next step of Web3.

What do you think of Damus? Welcome to share your opinions with us.

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