Yesterday, Nostr customers from across the US got here collectively at New York Metropolis’s premiere Bitcoin bar PubKey for Nostr Village, a mini-conference centered on the open protocol that allows international, censorship-resistant social media and extra.
Who’s coming to #NostrVillage tomorrow?It’s a day of censorship resistant worth for worth artistic expression and zaps, and it’s all taking place at PubKey beginning at 2 PM.Meet your favourite nostriches, and ask something!Can’t make it for the entire occasion? Come by at 6 PM for… pic.twitter.com/SkCecbzJdR
— PUBKEY (@PubKey_NYC) Could 30, 2024
The identify of the convention included a nod to the neighborhood during which PubKey is situated, New York’s historic Greenwich Village. It was additionally a play on Nostrville, the identify of a 2023 Nostr convention that passed off in Nashville, TN, which Daniel Modell, Head of Advertising and marketing at PubKey and organizer for Nostr Village, attended.
“Nostr is one thing that I used to be concerned with previous to being a part of PubKey, and I needed to carry it to extra folks,” Modell instructed Bitcoin Journal on the occasion.
“We’re nonetheless very early within the Nostr adoption curve and so now we have to be those to unfold the phrase, identical to with Bitcoin within the earlier days,” he added.
The vibe at Nostr Village felt very very similar to what I’d think about the vibe at a smaller Bitcoin convention was like in Bitcoin’s fourth 12 months of existence (Nostr went reside November 2020) — thrilling and illuminating but a bit awkward, as Nostr remains to be a really nascent know-how and nobody but is aware of fairly what it’ll change into.
Nonetheless, with so many lively Nostr customers in attendance on the occasion, there was no scarcity of individuals sharing what they do perceive about Nostr in efforts to coach the opposite attendees.
On panels akin to “Design and Code: Consumer Expertise Is Every thing” and “Worth For Worth and Neighborhood: Nostr Is For Creators”, everybody from builders to creatives contributed to increasing the information base of these in attendance.
Avi Burra, writer of the Bitcoin fiction e book 24 and host of the Plebchain Radio podcast, took half in two of the panels — “Can’t Cancel This: Censorship Resistance On Nostr” and “Nostr for Noobs” — and careworn that Nostr is way more than simply decentralized social media.
“The most important misperception of Nostr is that it’s only a social media app,” Burra instructed Bitcoin Journal on the occasion.
“I’m hopeful that Nostr’s design on the protocol degree can allow a very censorship resistant communications platform but additionally that different stuff that may be constructed on it — YouTube replacements, Spotify replacements,” he added.
[Editor’s note: Sam Means, co-founder of Wavlake, a music streaming platform built on Nostr that let’s fans stream sats to their favorite musicians — an alternative to Spotify’s model — was in attendance at the event.]
Burra additionally famous how a lot of a hit the occasion was just because it gave “Nostriches” — a slang time period for avid Nostr customers — a chance to attach in actual life.
However not everybody on the occasion was a Nostr professional. Some attendees had been there to study extra about what precisely Nostr is and find out how to use Nostr purchasers like Primal, Flockstr and Coracle.
Parker Worthington, director of My Belief In You Is Damaged, a documentary on BTC Pay Server, additionally attended the occasion and commented on how vital occasions like this are to those that are new to the Nostr house.
“One in every of my favourite issues about smaller Bitcoin or Nostr meetups is that there’s all the time [some] those that have both by no means heard of Bitcoin or by no means heard of Nostr within the room,” Worthington instructed Bitcoin Journal on the occasion.
“It rubs off on them so shortly that they now have this group to go to,” he added.
Whereas the occasion wasn’t technically a meetup, it did have the sensation of an even bigger model of 1, and this was a part of Modell’s intention.
“What we do at PubKey is totally different than conventional Bitcoin conferences, as a result of we consider ourselves as virtually an anti-conference house,” defined Modell.
“We do these smaller occasions, [but] individuals who weren’t even right here who had been watching on the livestream — on zap.stream — posted issues like ‘This can be a actual convention,’” he added.
An actual convention it was, and, in response to Modell, it’ll seemingly be the primary of many to return.
“I’d love to have the ability to do a Nostr Village yearly and see how 12 months over 12 months we develop and what applied sciences develop on Nostr,” concluded Modell. “We’ve solely been doing this (referring to educating each other about Nostr) for a short while, and so there’s much more to do.”
