• And is this a new phenomenon?
• So what should we do?
• On NOSTR the signal is the only noise
• The money is yours, the content belongs to everyone
• But Nelson, who will I show my work to if no one follows me?
• And well…

A few pointed thoughts come to mind that we can debate.

Freedom of expression is confused with the freedom to say whatever the fuck you please. The freedom to express yourself does not mean you have to post something every two hours — it isn’t necessary. The worst form of censorship is self-censorship: out of fear of what others will say, we stop expressing what truly lives inside us.

§And is this a new phenomenon?

Not really. Forms of self-censorship were already studied by Coetzee in the past when he wrote about Stalinist practices — saying only what was necessary to avoid “future investigations” — and there are also malicious practices we’ve detected from the admissions of social-media promoters themselves. I remember when Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan’s show and admitted that the U.S. government pressured him to start removing COVID-19 content and leave only what aligned with the official government narrative.

While we already knew there was a symbiosis between them, that confirmed and endorsed what was essentially vox populi.

Dictatorial practices within democracies are becoming more common, because we no longer consume culture that forms us and makes us reflect on the role of majority societies in life.

We point fingers at other, less democratic countries, yet the practices are the same: disinformation wars, social networks controlled by government narratives with the help of an oligopolistic group of managers and financiers whose only mission is to plunder and feed themselves in a pantagruelian campaign of sabotage — so that before the narrative changes, they can rearrange themselves and start all over again.

§So what should we do?

Disappearing from social networks is a utopian mission that many have already undertaken; there are figures I admire, like @6e468...eee93 or @04c91...becc9 , who not only put money where their mouth is but whose actions match their speeches.

What can I recommend? What I’ve been practicing: reduce informational noise and keep what satisfies you — mentally, physically, and spiritually. As a person who loves to read, for a long time I made the mistake of opening too many information sources that, at the end of the day, if a drop of water were information, I had built an ocean around myself without knowing how to swim, believing I could handle everything. But no. You must escape the nets of noise and go to protocols of stability that can gather information for the trinity of well-being.

That’s where NOSTR is unmatched. But look at how we think about it.

§On NOSTR the signal is the only noise

A protocol without an algorithm is truly information without owners, where everyone is responsible for building their own social feed, where everyone chooses what to see and what not to see.

That’s why the baiters on X or Instagram influencers aren’t content here — they’re used to the cheap dopamine of being seen by absolute strangers; that’s how they live: as employees of the social algorithm rather than of their community, because they don’t have one. They think that by having a closed group it’s theirs. It’s not. It belongs to the algorithm.

We change the game with NOSTR.

§The money is yours, the content belongs to everyone

Tools like Substack, Medium et al., are the closest thing to the editorial decentralization people seek with various tools, though they’re not always available. With a protocol (NOSTR) and a client of your choice (Amethyst, Damus, Primal, Phoenix), that’s it. Nothing else is needed; payment barriers simply don’t exist in this ecosystem because, in a proper Bitcoin pattern, information is free — we all have the same information and the same education.

Freedom is yours, not the algorithm’s.

Here I want to emphasize that on NOSTR it doesn’t matter if you’re fluid with content every day; what matters is that you speak and know that your information doesn’t have truth-guardians close to you. Social networks push you to create so that, behind your content, they can sell more ads — it’s a giant never-ending hamster wheel whose main competitors are Bitcoin, NOSTR, and RSS.

§But Nelson, who will I show my work to if no one follows me?

This is a question I’ve been asked many times when putting the protocol itself under scrutiny. The answer is simple: you’re very used to an algorithm doing the work for you, and you have a decision to make: you can build a community with your own hands or let the algorithm put it together for you and restart the same problems Meta, TikTok and others have. It’s not wrong to use technology to search; it’s wrong to let a technology define your informational circulation.

§And well…

This rant has the single incentive of giving you one more tool to disconnect from the networks, connect with your community, and — if you don’t have a community — to build one. It’s your decision. I want to be your first fan.