Traditional social media is a noisy digital world that has been normalised in modern culture, but it doesn’t make the experience any less daunting. Traditional social media throws us all into one big digital town square and then uses algorithms to get us to engage with content and slip in a few ads for good measure and revenue generation.
What started out as a cool new way to chat to friends from far and wide has evolved over the years; while you might want to engage with family, friends, and minded people along with finding interesting content or catching up on the latest news, you also have to deal with angry keyboard warriors, grammar nazis, social media influencers, trolls, scammers and bots.
As social media apps matured, monetisation became the core focus, and to do that, their algorithms zero in on content that will keep us on their sites for longer periods, along with censoring any content that might hurt advertisers such as brands or political parties.
Traditional social media gives you a passive experience where you simply consume content recommended to you by machine learning.
But what is the alternative?
Leaving altogether, going digital cold turkey, or finding a space where you can shape your own experience?
Decentralised social media has a learning curve.
If you’ve gone down the alternative social media rabbit hole recently, you might have spotted a few social posts about Nostr, searched online and read a few articles, but you’re still trying to make heads or tails of it.
Well, you’re one of many who will be left scratching their heads, especially if you’re expecting the traditional social media experience. Nostr is not one specific social media website, brand and application, but a protocol that social media applications can build on and users can interact with via these applications known as clients.
Today’s traditional social media has already passed the “grandma-fiction” stage, where just about anyone with a smartphone or laptop and not much help can find a website, download an app and set up a social account for themselves.
With over 3.5 billion users, it’s proof that a social media account is pretty easy to set up, no matter if you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro. Nostr, however, won’t be that simple for the average user and will take some getting used to if you’re not the super curious techy type.
Need a helping hand with Nost?
If you are interested in getting started with Nostr but feeling overwhelmed by all the options, you’re not alone.
This brand new way of interacting with users online, storing your data and broadcasting to the wider network has its nuances and will take some getting used to during your first foray into the domain that is “web5”.
We’ll provide a step-by-step guide on how to get started with Nostr and how to set up your account so you can start posting, curating your feeds and engaging with your other Nostr users. By the end, you’ll have the confidence and skills to create content that will make a lasting impression online.
Keep in mind that Nostr clients and the protocol are actively being built out, and you’re venturing into a space that might have a foundation, but the walls, windows and roof are still a work in progress. So be patient, and accept that your experience won’t be as polished as traditional social media.
Since you’re not relying on a centralised company to do all your dirty work, you’ll have to take it upon yourself to manage things that have been abstracted from you in the traditional social media space and might not make a lot of sense at first, but as you get used to it, you’ll find that having more control of your social media account is a pretty sweet deal despite the extra effort.
With that out of the way, it’s time to get set up.
As Edison said, “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”
So let’s get into it!
Generate a set of Nostr keys.
In traditional social media, our accounts are tied to an email and perhaps a phone number and managed by a central entity. We can contact an entity like Facebook to reset our password or restore access to our account because we don’t own our accounts. We simply have permissioned access to them.
When dealing with the Nostr protocol, you will need to create a set of private keys, which will be the secret key that only you hold and can unlock your account.
Your key creation will be your first point of contact with Nostr, and to generate a set of private keys; you can either use a key creation tool or a Nostr client.
I would encourage you to really take your time, go slow and don’t simply click to get done like you would when signing up for any traditional social media service.
If you bugger it up and forget to save or lose your private key (nsec key), that account is gone for good. You will have to start over and generate a new key, and this time, store it in a safe place and do not lose it; it’s the only tie to your account.
There is no account recovery service or second chances; remember, note your keys, not your notes.
Once you have your private key, you can use it to generate your HEX key and your public key.
- Private key – Keep this secret and in a safe place, it will start with nesec******
- Public key – This key is the one you will share with others so they can find your account in their preferred client, it will start with npub**********
- Hex key – An old format; you will need it to be NIP verified.
Protip: Your private key is the method of recovering your account; there are no email addresses and no one to speak to if you lose your account. If you lose your private key or hand it over to someone else, you can say goodbye to your account. Once you have a private key, you should not be pasting it into any and every site that supports the Nostr protocol because you don’t know if that key can be intercepted via that site.
Instead, you should use a Nostr key management tool to hold your private key for you and sign from it when needed. Key management tools are only applicable if you’re using a browser-based Nostr client; if you’re using a desktop or mobile app, the keys are held locally by the device, and the app will request to sign when needed.
Select a client.
Now that you have your set of keys and it’s stored safely, you can choose the type of client you wish to use, depending on the device you have handy.
A client is an interface you would use to engage with the Nostr ecosystem. In traditional social media, the network you’re using typically has four interfaces.
- A desktop website
- A mobile website
- An iOS app
- An Android app
They are all managed by the same company; with Nostr, there are different developers all working on different clients, for mobile, app or the web, and you, as the user, get the luxury to try them out for yourself and pick the one you like most. You are not tied to any client if you don’t like one; simply logout of it and move to the next one; your account will be there, with followers, posts, and all waiting and ready to go.
If you’re tired of the vanilla flavour that is traditional social media and you’re looking for 31 flavours, then Nostr is your Baskin and Robbins.
Nostr clients typically come in three main categories:
- Website clients.
- Mobile clients.
- Desktop clients.
You can find a list of Nostr clients here.
Note on switching clients: If you do switch from one client to another, one set of data that might not be migrated over is your list of relays, and you might have to add the missing relays to your new client manually.
Set up your profile.
Your next step will feel a lot more familiar, and you can draw from your days using traditional social media and start to customise your profile. Most clients will provide you with the following fields.
- Name – This is your @handle
- About – A 150-character limited field to describe your profile
- Picture URL/Avatar
- Banner image – Certain clients only
- NIP05 Identification handle (We will handle this later in the post)
- Lightning Address or LUD-06 Identifier
- Website – Certain clients only
Note on profile images:
Certain clients might not offer the ability to upload an image for your avatar or banner and only allow for an image file reference. In cases like this, you will need to upload your image onto another site, such as your traditional social media account, file upload site, cloud storage account, or your own website.
Once you have the image uploaded, grab the image link, which should end in the file name.
- jpeg
- png
- gif
- webp
Copy that link and paste it into the field, and your avatar or banner should render.
Note on lightning addresses:
A Lightning address is a human-readable address that specific lightning wallets provide to allow users to receive payments. You will need to create a Lightning wallet first and generate a Lightning Address for your wallet.
Once you have that address, you can add it to Your Nostr profile which will automatically enable you to receive tips on your Nostr profile or posts on any client.
Select your relays.
When you sign up to a Nostr client, it may already have specific relays that it broadcasts to by default; these are likely public relays so that you, as a new user, can start following users, broadcast posts immediately or source posts from public relays for your global feed.
While public relays have their place in the Nostr ecosystem, they also bring with them a lot of spam due to the fact that anyone can post to them. If you’re only running on public relays, you might find that your global feed is completely unusable and filled with spam posts, affiliate links, Lightning Invoices begging for tips and, of course, good old-fashioned porn.
Using public relays also limits your reach since many serious Nostr users don’t pull their feeds form public relays and prefer to have a cleaner filtered approach via paid relays. Users can find your content if they follow you, of course, but if you’re posting to public relays without many followers hoping to get some attention, you’re screaming into the cold dead soundless vacuum of space.
Your best bet would be to source at least one paid relay, so your posts circulate to feeds that people are happy to source content from, even if they don’t follow that user.
To add a relay, all you need to do is head over to the settings page of your Nostr client, select the relay option and paste the URL, which will look something like this:
- wss://nostr.relay.example
Once you’ve pasted in the URL, in some cases, you will need to select the function such as:
- Read
- Write
For most of us, that would be both, so make sure they’re both togged to on, and then save. Congratulations, you’ve added your first relay.
Relays tend to vary in quality, such as uptime and their management of spam and pruning content, so don’t be shy to do a relay audit once in a while; you don’t need to have a million relays, rather select the ones that give you the best experience and clear out ones clogging your feed.
Fill your feed.
Unlike traditional social media sites, your Nostr feed isn’t filled by algorithmic curation and suggested posts but by the content created by users you follow. If you don’t follow any users, you won’t have any content in your feed, and if you don’t follow active users, your account feed will become rather stale.
Posts are displayed chronologically, so you’ll never miss a post as long as you keep scrolling. You have complete control over who gets to take up time in your feed, and you can unfollow users and customise your feed as you trek along.
Clients offering custom feeds and discoverability feeds
Some clients have begun to provide additional feeds such as “friends and followers”, which will compromise of posts that your friends engage with or posts that are popular with several of your followers.
While other clients may curate “popular posts” in a separate feed which comprises of posts that receive the most engagement, such as likes, re-notes, zaps and comments.
Some clients also offer users the ability to filter their global feed by relays so users can catch up on posts sent to a specific relay. This could be filtering by paid relays you’ve purchased or a specific private relay you like to follow or even find a public relay that is well run and often spam free.
Customise your Nostr account.
Now that you’re all set up with your Nostr profile, your efforts don’t have to stop there, and you can add a few extra bells and whistles that might improve your account’s reputation and discoverability by other users.
Get NIP verified.
A NIP 05 verification is a unique handle that you can assign to your Nostr account using a registered website/domain. You can choose to use a domain that you control or take advantage of websites that offer NIP verification services.
Once you’ve registered a NIP, head back to your Nostr profile in any client and add your NIP handle to your account.
As an example, we’ve registered a NIP ID with the web wallet Alby and claimed a handle under their domain.
Example: thebtcmanual@getalby.com
Once assigned to our Nostr key, we could add it to our account, and it would now be visible on our profile, and users can tag us in posts using the NIP handle.
If you would like a detailed guide on how to get your account NIP verified, check out our tutorial here.
Link other online accounts.
To link your traditional social media accounts to your Nostr account, you can check out a service like:
This allows you to link your Nostr account with several third-party social media sites, namely:
- Telegram
- Mastodon
- GitHub
You will need to follow the instructions on-site, which involve posting a specific message on a specific platform.
For example, if you wish to link your Twitter, you would need to tweet out a specific text string, which can then be validated and used to connect the Twitter account with your Nostr account.
Once connected, your Nostr directory profile will reflect the connected accounts, and users can look up your Nostr account and check if it’s been linked with accounts on other platforms.
Do your own research.
If you’d like to try out Nostr or want to learn more about it, we recommend checking out the following resources to kickstart your research.
Are you on Nostr?
If you are a Nostr user and want to hang out and chat with us or follow our content on your preferred Nostr front end, feel free to add us using our PubKey below.
7ecd3fe6353ec4c53672793e81445c2a319ccf0a298a91d77adcfa386b52f30d
The Bitcoin Manual’s Nostr Pubkey
Please give us your notes.
If you have used Nostr, which client do you prefer and why? Are there any clients that you think deserve mention? Let us know in the comments down below.
