Yesterday, Nostr users from across the United States gathered at New York’s first Bitcoin bar Pub Key for Nostr Village, a mini-conference focused on the open protocol that enables global, censorship-resistant social media and much more.
Who comes to #NostrVillage tomorrow?
It’s a censorship-resistant day for valuable creative expression and zaps, and it’s all happening on PubKey starting at 2 p.m.
Meet your favorite nostriches and ask anything!
Can’t attend the whole event? Meet at 6 p.m. for… pic.twitter.com/SkCecbzJdR
— PUBKEY (@PubKey_NYC) May 30, 2024
The conference name included a nod to the neighborhood PubKey is located in, New York’s historic Greenwich Village. It was also a play on Nostrville, the name of a Nostr 2023 conference that took place in Nashville, Tennessee, which Daniel Modell, head of marketing at PubKey and organizer of Nostr Village, attended.
“Nostr is something I was involved in before becoming part of PubKey, and I wanted to bring it to more people,” Modell told Bitcoin Magazine at the event.
“We are still very early in the Nostr adoption curve and so we need to be the ones to get the word out, just like with Bitcoin in the beginning,” he added.
The atmosphere at Nostr Village was much like the one I imagined at a small Bitcoin conference during Bitcoin’s fourth year of existence (Nostr went live in November 2020) – exciting and enlightening but a bit awkward, because Nostr is still a very nascent technology and no one yet knows exactly what it will become.
However, with so many active Nostr users present at the event, people didn’t fail to share what they understand about Nostr in an effort to educate other attendees.
At panels like “Design and Code: User Experience is Everything” and “Value for Value and Community: Nostr is for Creators,” everyone from developers to creatives helped expand the knowledge base of participants.
Avi Burra, author of the fiction book Bitcoin 24 and host of Radio Plebchain podcast, participated in two of the panels – “Can’t Cancel This: Censorship Resistance On Nostr” and “Nostr for Noobs” – and highlighted that Nostr is much more than just a decentralized social media outlet.
“The biggest misperception of Nostr is that it’s just a social media app,” Burra told Bitcoin Magazine at the event.
“I hope that Nostr’s design at the protocol level can enable a truly censorship-resistant communications platform, but also other things that can be built on top of it – YouTube replacements, Spotify replacements,” he added.
(Editor’s note: Sam Means, co-founder of Wavlake Lakea music streaming platform built on Nostr that allows fans to stream sat to their favorite musicians – an alternative to the Spotify model – were present at the event.)
Burra also noted how successful the event was simply because it gave “Nostrches” — a slang term for avid Nostr users — the opportunity to connect in real life.
But not everyone at the event was a Nostr pro. Some attendees were there to learn more about what exactly Nostr is and how to use Nostr clients like Primitive, Herd Street And Coracle.
Parker Worthington, director of My trust in you is brokena documentary about BTC paid serveralso attended the event and commented on the importance of events like this for those new to the Nostr space.
“One of my favorite things about small Bitcoin or Nostr meetups is that there are always (some) people who have never heard of Bitcoin or who have never heard of Nostr in the room” , Worthington told Bitcoin Magazine during the event.
“It rubs off on them so quickly that they can now turn to this group,” he added.
Even though the event wasn’t technically a meet, it felt like a bigger version of one, and that was part of Modell’s intention.
“What we do at PubKey is different from traditional Bitcoin conferences, because we almost consider ourselves an anti-conference space,” Modell explained.
“We have these little events, (but) people who weren’t even there watching live – on zap.stream – posted things like ‘This is a real conference,'” he added.
This was a real conference and, according to Modell, will likely be the first of many to come.
“I would like to be able to create a Nostr village every year and see how we grow from year to year and what technologies develop on Nostr,” Modell concluded. “We have only been doing this (i.e. mutual teaching on Nostr) for a short time, and so there is much more to do.”
