Forget Mastodon: Damus is the Twitter alternative

Nostr’s Damus app is available in the App Store. Nostr is a social network from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. But is it therefore also a good alternative to Twitter? iPhoned show you what you can do with Damus.

What is Nost?

The goal of Nostr is to give everyone the opportunity to create their own social network for a select number of people. Nostr has been around for some time and was already accessible to everyone, but with the arrival of Damus you can use it on your iPhone or iPad, simply via an app from the App Store.

Damus is therefore very suitable for creating and managing your own social network, for example for your friends or for your company. You can see it as a kind of Twitter for a group of people that you select yourself. In that respect it is also a bit like Mastodon, where you choose your own server for a kind of individualized network with topics that interest you.

The functioning of Damus

You don’t need a server or technical knowledge to use the app, and you don’t even need a Nostr account. Nostr is therefore not a platform, but a protocol. There is no company, there are just developers contributing to the protocol. However, it is a lot more accessible than Mastodon, where you already need an explanation to get started. Only your Nostr always remains fairly private, with only people you really know. That mainly depends on the way you add people.

All you need is a Public Key, which identifies you. You do not have to provide a telephone number, name or e-mail address. Moreover, messages on Damus are not censored. Logical too, because it always remains in a fairly closed group. Of course, all messages are encrypted with end-to-end encryption.

Damus for iPhone and iPad

Damus could have been in the App Store a few weeks earlier, but Apple rejected the app from its App Store several times. Damus then adjusted some things, including the description and category in which the app should be placed in the App Store.

Whether Damus will actually catch on remains to be seen for the time being. But as major social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are increasingly controversial, Damus is at least an interesting option.