Yesterday, Nostr customers from throughout the US gathered at PubKey, New York Metropolis’s premier Nostr Village Bitcoin bar, for a small convention targeted on the open protocol that powers international, censorship-resistant social media and extra.
who comes #NostrVillage tomorrow?
It is a day of censorship-resistant worth for inventive expression and Zap, and all of it begins at 2pm on PubKey.
Meet your favourite nosebird and ask any questions!
Cannot attend all the occasion? Come be a part of us at 6pm… pic.twitter.com/SkCecbzJdR
— PUBKEY (@PubKey_NYC) May 30, 2024
The convention’s identify features a nod to the group the place PubKey is positioned, New York’s historic Greenwich Village. It is also a sport for Nostrville, the identify of the 2023 Nostr convention in Nashville, Tennessee, attended by Daniel Modell, head of promoting at PubKey and organizer of Nostr Village.
“Nostr is one thing I used to be concerned in earlier than becoming a member of PubKey, and I need to carry it to extra folks,” Modell informed Bitcoin Journal on the occasion.
“We’re nonetheless within the early levels of the Nostr adoption curve, so we have now to be those spreading the phrase, similar to Bitcoin was within the early days,” he added.
The environment at Nostr Village was very a lot what I think about a small Bitcoin convention can be like within the fourth 12 months of Bitcoin’s existence (Nostr went stay in November 2020) – thrilling and enlightening, however just a little awkward, As a result of Nostr remains to be a really rising expertise, nobody but is aware of what it is going to change into.
Nonetheless, with so many lively Nostr customers attending the occasion, there was no scarcity of individuals sharing what they knew about Nostr in an effort to coach different attendees.
In panels like “Design and Code: Person Expertise is Every part” and “Worth and Neighborhood: Nostr Is For Creators,” everybody from builders to creatives contributed to increasing attendees’ information base. contributed.
Avi Burra, writer of the Bitcoin novel “24” and host of the Plebchain Radio podcast, participated in two of the panels – “Cannot Cancel This: Censorship Relaxation on Nostr” and “Nostr for Noobs” – and emphasised that Nostr isn’t solely Simply decentralized social media.
“The most important false impression about Nostr is that it’s only a social media app,” Burra informed Bitcoin Journal on the occasion.
“I hope that Nostr’s design on the protocol stage permits a really censorship-resistant communications platform, but in addition permits different issues to be constructed on high of it – a YouTube various, a Spotify various,” 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.]
Bulla additionally factors out that the occasion was so profitable just because it gave “Nostriches” – slang for avid Nostr customers – an opportunity to community in actual life.
However not everybody on the occasion is a Nostr skilled. Some attendees got here to study extra about what Nostr is and methods to use Nostr shoppers comparable to Primal, Flockstr, and Coracle.
Parker Worthington, director of the BTC Pay Server documentary My Belief in You Was Damaged, additionally attended the occasion and commented on how necessary this sort of occasion is for newcomers to the Nostr area.
“Considered one of my favourite issues about small Bitcoin or Nostr meetups is that there are all the time [some] Individuals have both by no means heard of Bitcoin or they’ve by no means heard of Nostr within the room,” Worthington informed Bitcoin Journal on the occasion.
“This impacts them so rapidly that they will now be a part of the group,” he added.
Whereas the occasion wasn’t technically a celebration, it did really feel like a bigger model of 1, which was a part of Mannequin’s intention.
“What we do at PubKey is completely different from conventional Bitcoin conferences as a result of we think about ourselves virtually an anti-conference house,” Modell defined.
“We maintain these small occasions; [but] Individuals who weren’t even there however have been watching on zap.stream posted issues like, ‘It is a actual assembly,’” he added.
It is a actual assembly, and in line with Mannequin, it’s more likely to be the primary of many to come back.
“I hope to have the ability to maintain a Nostr Village yearly to see how we develop 12 months by 12 months and what applied sciences are developed on Nostr,” Modell concluded. “We have solely been doing this (referring to educating one another about Nost) for a brief time frame, so there’s nonetheless so much to do.”
