As I've mentioned in the past, there are social media projects other than BBS that aim at censorship-resistance and decentralisation. An important one that I haven't yet discussed is nostr. Since Twitter banned promoting nostr, it's received quite a bit of attention. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has also expressed support for nostr. So, I thought I'd briefly explain what it is, how it differs from BBS.
What is nostr?
nostr is an extremely simple protocol aiming to create a censorship-resistant social network. Unlike most other projects which aim at this, however, there is no use of blockchain technology. In the nostr protocol, everyone runs a client. When you post, you send the post to relays. Relays are servers that store the posts. Each user is identified with a public key. The private key associated with this is used to digitally sign posts.
My feeling is that this is too simple. In fact, all it sounds like is the basic internet with a bit of cryptography. I'm not sure why the nostr protocol is any less vulnerable than the internet to centralisation. Just like the internet was monopolised, nostr could easily be too: one party could control most of the relays.
I had the honour of Dorsey personally replying to my question on nostr. :)I think nostr is looking at the social media censorship problem the wrong way. We already have a decentralised way to transfer information: the internet. What we need to use is a decentralised way to store information.
In the world of technology, creating and transferring information have open and public solutions. Until Bitcoin, we didn't have a good way to publicly store information in a decentralised fashion. nostr is a protocol. It doesn't create any database. There's no immutable record of all the posts. In my opinion, any successful attempt to demonopolise social media must address this issue.
A network like BBS is simply far harder to monopolise than nostr. The game theory securing it is extremely strong -- you'd need majority staking power over the EOS network to control BBS centrally. This would cost you millions of dollars.
It excites me that projects like nostr and Mastodon -- which are quasi-demonopolised -- are getting so much attention. I think BBS has far greater potential for change. People do seem to be increasingly concerned about monopoly around social media.
We'll see what the future holds.
Let me know what you think,
Yoav