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 targeted on the open protocol that permits 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 occurring 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) Might 30, 2024
The title of the convention included a nod to the neighborhood wherein PubKey is positioned, New York’s historic Greenwich Village. It was additionally a play on Nostrville, the title of a 2023 Nostr convention that came about in Nashville, TN, which Daniel Modell, Head of Advertising 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 wished 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 we now have to be those to unfold the phrase, similar 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 grow to be.
Nevertheless, 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 resembling “Design and Code: Person Expertise Is Every little thing” and “Worth For Worth and Group: 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 pressured that Nostr is way more than simply decentralized social media.
“The largest 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 stage can allow a really 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 possibility to attach in actual life.
However not everybody on the occasion was a Nostr professional. Some attendees have been there to study extra about what precisely Nostr is and the way 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 necessary occasions like this are to those that are new to the Nostr house.
“One among 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 have been watching on the livestream — on zap.stream — posted issues like ‘It is a actual convention,’” he added.
An actual convention it was, and, based on Modell, it’ll possible 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.”
