Nostr vs Twitter: What 51K Nodes Reveal About Decentralization
Nostr vs Twitter: What 51K Nodes Reveal About Decentralization
We crawl the Nostr follow graph continuously. As of February 2026, our scoring engine indexes 51,551 nodes (unique pubkeys) and 622,402 edges (follow relationships).
We ran standard graph metrics on this data. One number stood out.
Gini Coefficient: 0.049
The Gini coefficient measures inequality. 0 means perfect equality. 1 means total concentration.
Nostr’s follow graph has a Gini of 0.049. That’s extraordinarily flat.
Twitter’s follower distribution has an estimated Gini of ~0.9. Most accounts have near-zero followers while a handful have millions. Nostr is fundamentally different: attention is distributed more evenly across the network.
Why This Matters for Trust
On Twitter, follower count is the primary trust signal. But when 0.01% of accounts hold most of the followers, that signal is easily gamed.
On Nostr, the flat distribution means PageRank-style algorithms work much better. When connections are distributed, graph topology reveals genuine trust patterns that raw follower counts miss.
The account ranked #42 in trust score out of 51K nodes has only 3 followers. #43 has 2 followers. They’re trusted not because of popularity, but because of WHO follows them.
Power Law: Alpha ~2.0
The degree distribution follows a power law with alpha ~2.0 — the classic scale-free pattern. But the hubs in Nostr are much less extreme than Twitter’s. Top accounts have hundreds of followers, not millions.
Try It
All of these metrics come from our /network-health endpoint:
curl https://wot.klabo.world/network-health
Or explore interactively at wot.klabo.world/demo — the Network Health card loads automatically.
Live demo: Thursday Feb 12, 8am PST on Zap.Stream/nosfabrica as part of the WoT-a-thon.