yesterday, our Users from all over the United States came together at the first Bitcoin bar in New York City PubKey For Nostr Village, a small conference focusing on the open protocol that enables censorship-resistant global social media and more.
who is coming #NostrVillage tomorrow?
It's a censorship-proof day of valuable creative expression and breakthroughs, all happening at PubKey starting at 2 p.m.
Meet your favorite nose and ask anything!
Can't make out the entire event? Attendance at 6pm… pic.twitter.com/SkCecbzJdR
– PubKey (@PubKey_NYC) May 30, 2024
The name of the conference included a reference to the neighborhood in which PubKey is located, which is historic Greenwich Village in New York. It was also a play on Nostrville, the name of the 2023 Nostr conference in Nashville, Tennessee, attended by Daniel Modell, head of marketing at PubKey and organizer of Nostr Village.
“Nostr is something I was involved in before I became part of PubKey, and I wanted to introduce it to more people,” Modell told Bitcoin Magazine at the event.
“We're still very early in Nostr's adoption curve, so we have to be the ones to spread the word, just like with Bitcoin in the earlier days,” he added.
The atmosphere at Nostr Village was very similar to what I would have imagined the atmosphere at a smaller Bitcoin conference would be like in Bitcoin's fourth year of existence (Nostr launched in November 2020) – exciting and illuminating but a bit awkward, as Nostr is still a very nascent technology. No one knows yet what it will become.
However, with so many active Nostr users in attendance at the event, there was no shortage of people sharing what they understand about Nostr in efforts to educate other attendees.
In panels like “Design and Code: UX is Everything” and “Value for Value and Community: Nostr for Creators,” everyone from developers to creators contributed to expanding the knowledge base of attendees.
Avi Bora, author of Bitcoin fiction 24 And the host of Radio Blebchen Podcast, he participated in two of the panels — “Can't Cancel This: Resisting Nostr's Censorship” and “Nostr for Noobs” — and emphasized that Nostr is much more than just decentralized social media.
“The biggest misunderstanding of Nostr is that it is just a social networking app,” Bora 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 to build on — YouTube alternatives, Spotify alternatives,” he added.
(Editor's note: Sam Means, co-founder of Wag Lakea music streaming platform built on Nostr that allows fans to stream music by their favorite musicians — an alternative to the Spotify model — was present at the event.)
Bora also pointed out how successful the event was simply because it gave “Nostriches” — a slang term for passionate Nostr users — a chance to network in real life.
But not everyone who attended the event was a Nostr supporter. Some attendees were there to learn more about exactly what Nostr is and how to use Nostr clients Primitive, Flockstr And coracle.
Parker Worthington, Director My trust in you is brokena documentary about BTC payment serveralso attended the event and commented on how important events like this are for those new to the Nostr field.
“One of my favorite things about small Bitcoin or Nostr meetings is that there are always (some) people in the room who have never heard of Bitcoin or who have never heard of Nostr,” Worthington told Bitcoin Magazine at the event.
“It bounced back on them so quickly that they now have this group to go to,” he added.
Although the event wasn't technically a meet, it felt like a larger version of the event, and that was part of Modell's intention.
“What we do at PubKey is different from traditional Bitcoin conferences, because we consider ourselves almost an anti-conference space,” Modell explained.
“We do these little events, (but) the people who weren't here and who were watching the live stream — they keep going zap.stream – Posting things like “This is a real conference.”
It was a real conference, and according to Modell, it would 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 year after year and what technologies are being developed at Nostr,” concluded Modell. “We've only been doing this (referring to teaching each other about Nostr) for a short time, so there's still a lot to do.”