 The initial sort of like a web 2 web 3 kind of thing was all essentially VC scams And you know it was essentially a 16 Zed and company trying to own the next version of the web So it was not really decentralized. It just had new owners and You know Bitcoin happened, right about over a decade ago now and Bitcoin is freedom money, right? And you can't really do anything without freedom money You can't even build a decentralized like internet or communication without freedom money because otherwise You can't really do anything Even pay for the servers so What what what Nostra wheel and Fiat Jaff did? That you know what was about two years ago now will When he came out is they created this incredibly simple protocol that that that is very good at relaying information and And being sort of like is like distributed decentralized and it can also be private It lives in all spaces It's incredibly hard to kill It's sort of like resolves this problem. So you can have Decentralized money and decentralized communication so that humans can sort of trade in peace, right? There is no owners. There's no company Same for Bitcoin same for Nostra This this this two sort of this at least how I see it the combination of the two Really sort of like came Had the stars aligned For us to build a more free future for everybody So will you along with Fiat Jeff as NVK mentioned there are one of the protocol developers What was your motivation for doing this and then we can discuss a little further exactly what it is We're talking about but first I just want to know, you know, what is what is the vision here? Yeah, I've always been interested in like, you know new and interesting protocols, you know Bitcoin really caught my eye early on and you know I've always been looking out and trying to think of the ways of getting back to like the early days of the internet when Everyone just it wasn't like owned by corporations and people just hung out and had fun And you know, it was much more decentralized back then because there's it was much more a focus on protocols So I've always been interested in like, how do you apply, you know protocols like to improve freedom on the internet? So, you know, the first one that I tried was Mastodon and Mastodon was like this really cool idea where you could You know spin up an instance and then join it and then hang out with your friends But we we started to see that that Started to have there's a lot of cracks in that design in the sense that any one of those instance admins becomes like their own little Like they can just ban you and then you have to start over So as I was always looking out for a way to like make this kind of solve that issue where Like that we have on Mastodon and then eventually phone Nasra and it got me really intrigued It was really simple and I just kind of dived in and you know, and it's been amazing since then so there was you know a And a kind of exodus after Elon took over that that seemed to be the big alternative and Some recent articles have shown a bit of a drop-off in recent months I would like to hear from from you will and maybe NVK, you know, what it is That is the differentiates Nostra from something like Mastodon I mean, there's there's a huge flaw in the sense that you join an instance So I think NVK ran Bitcoin hackers And it was like the only instance that I was able to get on and without Because I signed up to like multiple different instances and I would just say the word Bitcoin And there's just so many communists on that these platforms I just got instantly get kicked off and I get banned so I have to start over and build my follower list again So like I found a home at Bitcoin hackers, but then the issue was you know, every other instance just banned Bitcoin hackers It was really just you know, we only had our small community We open Bitcoin hackers.org just to in case Twitter sort of started kicking off kicking out Bitcoiners This was why I'll back. I can't remember. Well was the reason but there was something that was going on I think a lot of Bitcoiners were getting shadow ban on Twitter because Twitter was being run by commies, right and So we all started like, you know joining master and I'm like, okay Maybe maybe this instance is like how we finally sort of like get enough people a critical mass outside of Twitter as as the least a backup and You know, my my instance had no more no moderation, right? I'm like, listen, you guys are all adults Please don't do criminal things. You know, talk about whatever you want And that caused the whole master on universe to just block my instance Like it's essentially every single master on server out there blocked it And we had no communication outside bediverse fake And then I realized like, oh wait, there's also people joining my instance who I actually really dislike and I don't want to host their data So I went and I deleted one of them and I was like, okay, great I don't want to be benevolent to the theater either, right? Like this is not a row of want I don't want to host your data So When I learned about Nostra, it was like a little bit too early and and you know, these guys were playing that I was too busy Bitcoin and then I think it came back a few months ago I was like, okay, holy crap. Like this thing is really sort of like now the clients work wheels diamonds was like, this is great I was pulling up this This Snowden tweet Snowden is I would say probably one of if not the highest profile user of Nostra at this point You know, maybe Jack Dorsey But he describes this difference between a platform and a protocol and everyone involved with Nostra is very You know insistent that this is a protocol not a platform He says a plat if a platform is a silo a protocol is a river No one owns it and everyone is free to swim. Is that an accurate characterization? Yeah, I think I think he really hits the nail in the head in that sense It's like, you know platforms they control the data They they define who's allowed to access the data at what time and and if you get kicked out then you can't you know It's it's a silo. It's and you can't get to it But you know in this case, it's more of like a river where anyone kind of jump in the river swim down Everyone can kind of be involved. So I really like that analogy But yeah, it's definitely more of a protocol than any than a platform Can I ask real quick just to follow up with the metaphor of the river and I'm thinking now of like, you know The lazy river at at an amusement park everybody's kind of floating along in their inner tubes How does Nostra work? As a protocol to make sure that like things, you know, there aren't too many people You know clogging everything up Etc And yeah, so this is actually a big issue Because you know, I run probably one of the biggest relays on the damas relay and it's wide open to the public And it's just getting spammed to hell So it's like that's just that's the analogy. There's like everyone's kind of clogged and crammed in and you look at the global feed It's just like spam spam Um, so that's a big issue and one way one way you can get around this is a paid relays So there's a bunch of paid relays where you just have 10 000 Satoshi Entry fee and it just you know, and that kind of weight And only people with those keys can actually post on the relay So that's one way to kind of clear up the congestion The web is a great exact is a great platform and I don't know we're kind of you know abusing terms here But you know, it's a great platform and people started to build silos on top of this like landscape Which is the web so the web is is decentralized you anyone can spin up a server But the kind of the main issue is that You know, how do these like silos talk to each other, right? So if you set up like gmail or youtube or All these different platforms that you know, they're all independent So yeah in theory like the underlying substrates decentralized But the things we're building in this landscape are not and they don't talk to each other So when I think of decentralization or at least like the re decentralization of the web I see like how do we connect these silos together and how do we make all these apps that we're building interoperable? So I think master is like one of the That one of these protocols that can actually link these you know disparate silos together, which is pretty fascinating I mean the client is kind of like outlook used to be or something like it It's a it allows you to pull your email into Like some form that you can organize, etc It's more than that. I do like email analogy though in that because yeah because email is a protocol, right? Yeah, so the email is a protocol So the main difference is so it's a really good analogy because you can have multiple different clients So there's a gmail client. There's a client things like that. So domicil be one client But the difference between email and nostra is that you know in some sense the the information is siloed within It's kind of hard to like, you know, you know pull down your data and push it to another email server So, um, that's kind of the main difference is that the data is much more flexible can flow much better But it's very similar analogy. I think part of voluntary association is that people can shut down Like they can choose not to associate with certain people. Yeah, I mean just Yeah, yeah, just just get off the relay or or you know, don't Like block people on your own personal client. You just can't prevent them from talking Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our conversation with nvk and will kasarin about nostra and the future of the decentralized web Check out the full interview in the description below and tune in every thursday at 1 pm eastern to catch these conversations live And subscribe to recent tv and hit the notifications bell to find out anytime our videos go live