Yesterday, Nostr users from across the United States gathered at New York City’s premier Bitcoin bar PubKey for Nostr Village, a mini-conference focused on the open protocols that enable censorship-resistant global social media and more.
Who is coming? #Nostre Village tomorrow?
It’s Censorship Resistance Day for Creative Expression and Nimble Values, and it’s all happening on PubKey starting at 2 p.m.
Meet your favorite nostrils and ask them anything!
Can’t attend the full event? Come at 6pm… pic.twitter.com/SkCecbzJdR
— PUBKEY (@PubKey_NYC) May 30, 2024
The conference name included a nod to New York’s historic Greenwich Village, where PubKey is located. It was also a play on Nostrville, the name of the 2023 Nostr conference held in Nashville, Tennessee, attended by Daniel Modell, head of marketing at PubKey and organizer of Nostr Village.
“Nostr is something I was involved with before I was involved with PubKey, and I wanted to expose it to more people,” Modell told Bitcoin Magazine at the event.
“We are still in the early stages of the Nostr adoption curve, so we need to be the ones to spread the word, just like we were with early Bitcoin,” he added.
The atmosphere at Nostr Village was very similar to that of smaller Bitcoin conferences, such as Bitcoin’s 4th Anniversary (Nostr launched in November 2020). Interesting and bright, but a little awkward. It’s a very early stage technology and no one knows yet what it will become.
However, with so many active Nostr users attending the event, there was no shortage of people sharing their understanding of Nostr in an effort to educate other attendees.
Panels such as “Design and Code: User Experience is Everything” and “Value for Value and Community: Nostr is for Creators” saw everyone from developers to creators contribute to expanding the knowledge base of attendees.
Avi Burra, author of the Bitcoin fiction book 24 and host of the Plebchain Radio podcast, participated in two panels, “Can’t Cancel This: Censorship Resistance On Nostr” and “Nostr for Noobs,” where Nostr highlighted: . It’s more than just decentralized social media.
“The biggest misconception about Nostr is that it’s just a social media app,” Burra told Bitcoin Magazine at the event.
“We hope that Nostr’s design at the protocol level will enable a truly censorship-resistant communications platform, as well as other features that can be built on top of it, such as a YouTube replacement, a Spotify replacement, etc.,” he added.
(Editor’s note: Sam Means, co-founder of Wavlake, a Nostr-based music streaming platform that allows fans to stream content from their favorite musicians, an alternative to the Spotify model, attended the event.)
Burra also noted how the event was a huge success because it gave “Nostriches,” slang for avid Nostr users, an opportunity to make real-life connections.
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 such as Primal, Flockstr, and Coracle.
Parker Worthington, director of the BTC Pay Server documentary My Trust In You Is Broken, also attended the event and noted how important events like this are 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 even heard of Nostr,” Worthington told Bitcoin Magazine at the event.
“It affects them so quickly that now they can go to this group,” he added.
Although this event was not technically a gathering, it had the feel of a larger version of one, which was part of Modell’s intention.
“What we do at PubKey is different from a traditional Bitcoin conference because we think of ourselves almost as an anti-conference space,” Modell explained.
“We do these smaller events, and people who weren’t even here but were watching the live stream on zap.stream were posting things like, ‘This is a real conference,'” he added.
This was a real conference, and according to Modell, it will likely be the first of many to come.
“We hope to open Nostr Village every year and see how we grow from year to year and what technologies are developed at Nostr,” concludes Modell. “We’ve only been doing this (meaning teaching each other about Nostr) for a short time, so there’s a lot more to do.”