I like Lyn, and her latest piece on Nostr is no exception:

"The Power of Nostr: Decentralized Social Media and More"
https://www.lynalden.com/the-power-of-nostr/

Nostr is the BTC Maxi's answer to Hive. In Lyn's piece, she breaks down Nostr's power into three sections:

1. Decentralized social media
2. A public payment directory
3. Potential "Other Stuff"

Reading the article (or listening to them on Bitcoin Audible's podcast like I did) is a surreal experience. Lyn is correct about these powers, but she's also perfectly describing Hive. In the last section, she takes shots at Hive indirectly (I'm assuming she isn't familiar with Hive).

In this article, I want to highlight the interesting points of comparison between Nostr and Hive as highlighted by Lyn.

Decentralization

Nostr and Hive both use public/private key cryptography to create a decentralized social media system. These keys are critical in a decentralized system to verify your identity and content.

The interesting comparison is the plumbing. After all, someone has to run the machines or you have nothing. Lyn describes the Nostr relay system, which are servers that host content you post and "relay" it to other servers and end users. Lyn refers to this as the "technical sweet spot," and in a sense, she is right:

On one hand, a centralized social media company like Facebook or Twitter or Tiktok, runs a central server. It’s efficient, but it’s permissioned and closed. The company that runs it decides what content-sorting algorithms to run. They decide who can create accounts, and who gets banned. They decide what kinds of content is allowed or disallowed.

But on the other hand, it would be impractical for every social media user to run their own server. That would be incredibly redundant and expensive, which is why people don’t do it.

Of course, this raises an obvious puzzle. It's clear why Facebook runs massive server farms: they make tons of money from advertising, selling your data, etc. It's also clear why we won't all run individual servers. But why would some number of people run servers?

For Nostr, the assumed answer is that users will pay server operators. This is a big, bad assumption. Facebook is spending $23 billion per quarter on operating expenses (source). Not all of that is for servers, but this is good enough to imagine the scale required to achieve a Facebook experience. Further, the last 20 years have made it clear that most people would rather be monetized themselves than pay for a service.

Hive solves the problem differently. It uses a DPoS blockchain and pays its relays ("witnesses") to produce blocks of transactions. Payment is not optional; it's written in the consensus code.

Post rewards and tokenomics

Nostr allows you to Zap posts with BTC over lightning. This is an advantage, because BTC is the largest, most liquid token. Lyn puts it like this:

Even if the creator doesn’t need the money per se, it’s a voting mechanism with proof-of-work built into it. “Likes” are free, but “zaps” cost something, even if just a little.

In Hive, you don't usually reward posts with your $HIVE. You vote on it, and then both you and the post author are rewarded. Is that magic? No. It's inflation. If you aren't actively upvoting posts, the value of your Hive (your percentage of all Hive in existence) is slowly eroding.

This has advantages and disadvantages for the Hive ecosystem, but for individuals, it's just a disadvantage. All else equal, you'd rather get your $5 reward in a currency that isn't constantly losing value.

Historical Record

From Lyn:

On the other hand, most things other than digital money do not require one true global consensus state. And by not having a global consensus state, it frees up a lot of complexity and cost. That’s why most things that people say a blockchain could help with, don’t really need a blockchain.

Imagine, for example, if all email clients in the world had to repeatedly come to a consensus regarding the exact number and full history of all emails ever sent. The one true global consensus state of all emails. That would be completely unworkable. Email is without a global consensus state, meaning that there is no one official agreement on the current state of all emails. We each only care about the emails that are important to us.

I found this section to be very thought-provoking. I respect Lyn a lot, but is she correct here? She's certainly right about emails, but those are private correspondence. People use social media to broadcast to the world. They also don't want to lose their pictures/posts/articles because they were a few years old.

No relay server stores everything on Nostr, although the big relays store a large percentage of recent content, and also store a lot of content from the past.

If you're not famous, what are the chances your posts/pictures are preserved? I think Lyn is wrong here, and that Hive's 100% consensus is preferred.

Scaling

A Hiver looks at the Nostr relay incentive structure and says it runs counter to human nature: free rider problem. A BTC Maxi looks at the Hive token and says the same thing: Gresham's Law.

I think the first question is simply whether the value of a decentralized social network is greater than the cost of maintaining it. If it isn't, then neither Nostr nor Hive will succeed. No one would be willing to pay relays the full cost of operation. The Hive token would go to 0, and no one would be willing to witness.

If the value prop is there, then the deciding factor is which can scale. Let's repeat Lyn:

No relay server stores everything on Nostr

This is both understandable and damning. If everyone is using nostr, but on different relays, how will you find them? How many relays will you have to pay for? Perhaps a front-end will abstract some of this away: "Pay us $10 per month and behind the scenes, we are paying 20 different relays." A centralization vector if I've ever seen one.

You don't have to pay a dime to see everything on the Hive chain. If you want to post, you need an account. That's either a small, one-time fee or often received for free. DPoS scales while maintaining decentralization.

Hive wins on scaling without question.

Conclusion

I enjoyed Lyn's piece and agreed with all the virtues she identified of a decentralized social media protocol. I simply think Hive is the better alternative.

Hive wins on decentralization, scaling, and historical record. This means it can be successful assuming people are willing to join the ecosystem. On the other hand, Nostr gets more unruly and complicated with each additional person.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!