The Apple App Store now lists Damus, a so-called “Twitter killer” built on a decentralized network.
The app bills itself as the “social network you control,” and it is a messaging service built on Nostr, a decentralized network that, among other things, enables encrypted end-to-end private communications.
Jack Dorsey announces approval of decentralized Damus
On Jan. 31, the Damus team confirmed the approval, reporting at least three denials from Apple.
Twitter co-founder and Nostr contributor Jack Dorsey announced the approval to his 6.5 million followers, calling it a “milestone” moment for open-source protocols.
According to the team’s GitHub page, the code for the Damus web app has been contributed to by 44 different software developers.
The Lightning Network and Bitcoin are other strategies that Nostr developers are focused on employing to protect the Damus app from distributed denial-of-service spam attacks.
Uncensored social media
Damus intends to develop into an unfiltered social media network. According to a post from Protos on Jan. 27, it also supports built-in payments over the layer-2 Lightning Network for Bitcoin (BTC).
The network is not run by any servers. Instead, Nostr distributes communications through decentralized relays.
While the specific nature of Dorsey’s collaboration with Nostr is unknown, the billionaire entrepreneur sent over 14 BTC — roughly $250,000 at the time — to the Nostr developer team in mid-December.