I keep getting a strange feeling using Nostr.
I’ve been here before.
Not literally. ICQ didn’t have relays, public keys, Lightning payments, or people casually posting 64-character cryptographic identifiers as though this is normal human behavior.
But culturally?
Yeah.
I know this neighborhood.
ICQ: Somebody Is Online
ICQ had one killer feature.
Somebody was there.
That sounds stupid now because every modern platform contains several billion people, seventeen recommendation systems, video autoplay, behavioral tracking, corporate accounts pretending to be funny, and an algorithm desperately trying to determine whether a video of a forklift falling into a lake will keep you alive for nine more seconds.
ICQ was simpler.
You had a number.
Other people had numbers.
Then:
Uh-oh. 🌼
Somebody messaged you.
That was basically the product.
And somehow it felt enormous.
You didn’t have followers.
You had people.
Sometimes extremely questionable people.
You’d meet somebody in a game, a forum, IRC, or some bizarre website about overclocking a Celeron and suddenly you had another ICQ number sitting in your contact list.
No blue checkmark.
No engagement strategy.
No “creator economy.”
Just some dude named -=DarkWolf=- who apparently lived in Finland and knew an unreasonable amount about Voodoo3 drivers.
Perfect.
Nostr Has the Same Weird Electricity
Nostr feels different from ICQ technically, but similar socially.
The place still feels small enough that humans are visible.
You post something and occasionally the person responding isn’t a brand, a bot farm, an engagement account, or somebody trying to become an engagement account.
It’s just a person.
Possibly a very weird person.
Good.
The old internet ran on weird people.
Nostr has npubs instead of ICQ numbers.
Relays instead of one centralized service.
Cryptographic signatures instead of “trust me bro.”
And instead of sending someone an animated flower GIF, you can throw 21 sats at them because their joke about central banking made you snort coffee through your nose.
Progress.
But ICQ Culture Was Different
ICQ assumed communication was private unless you deliberately wandered somewhere public.
Nostr basically starts by handing you a megaphone.
ICQ:
Hey. You there?
Nostr:
Here’s my opinion about monetary policy, Linux distributions, meat, freedom, protocol design, Austrian economics, and why somebody’s relay implementation is garbage.
Posted publicly.
Signed cryptographically.
Permanent-ish.
Good morning.
#gm
The ICQ social graph was mostly accumulated through actual interaction.
The Nostr social graph sometimes looks like somebody dropped a Bitcoin conference into /dev/random.
There are developers.
Bitcoiners.
Protocol nerds.
Artists.
People running servers in closets.
People apparently living entirely on beef.
Several guys who would probably maintain their own electrical grid if Home Depot sold uranium.
And one person posting a frog.
Again:
Perfect.
Nostr Is More Hostile to Normal People
This may also be one of its strengths.
ICQ gave you a number because explaining usernames was apparently too convenient.
Nostr looked at that design decision and said:
Hold my beer.
Here’s your public key:
npub1...
Here’s your private key:
DO NOT LOSE THIS OR YOUR IDENTITY CEASES TO EXIST.
Here’s a relay.
What’s a relay?
Excellent question.
Here’s twelve more.
Also here’s Lightning.
What’s Lightning?
Sit down.
We’re going to need another hour.
This is terrible onboarding.
I love it.
The friction selects for people who actually want to be there.
For now, anyway.
Eventually somebody will make all of this invisible and then we’ll have people asking how to recover their account after deleting their keys because “the app should remember me.”
Nature heals.
And Then There’s AI
AI reminds me of Diablo.
Not because AI is evil.
Relax.
I mean the original loop.
Diablo was basically:
Go into hole.
Kill thing.
Thing drops object.
Inspect object.
Maybe object is good.
Go deeper into hole.
Repeat until sunrise.
AI has the exact same psychological machinery.
You start with:
Explain SQLite indexing.
Twenty minutes later:
Could consciousness emerge from distributed agents communicating using invented symbolic languages?
Two hours later:
Design a medieval tax system for intelligent raccoons operating a Lightning node.
You have entered Dungeon Level 14.
There is no map back.
Every Prompt Is a Chest
This is the dangerous part.
AI has variable rewards.
Most answers are useful.
Some are boring.
Some are wrong.
Some suddenly connect two ideas in a way that makes your brain go:
Wait.
That’s the legendary drop.
Diablo players know this feeling.
You kill 400 goat men and eventually something hits the floor making the correct noise.
Suddenly you’re awake again.
AI does that with ideas.
Most prompts:
+3% productivity
Then randomly:
RARE CONCEPT
+18 curiosity
+12 project scope
+40 unnecessary Linux containers
-75 sleep
Requirements: INT 38
You equip it immediately.
Diablo Had a Dungeon Limit
This is where AI becomes more dangerous.
Diablo eventually ran out of dungeon.
AI doesn’t.
There is always another question.
Every answer produces three tunnels.
You ask about radio.
Now you’re reading antenna theory.
Antenna theory leads to signal processing.
Signal processing leads to information theory.
Information theory leads to compression.
Compression reminds you about old archive formats.
Now it’s 3:17 AM and you’re trying to determine whether somebody preserved documentation for a forgotten 1989 compression utility on an FTP mirror in Finland.
This is apparently your life now.
The butcher would be easier.
Nostr + AI Is Where Things Get Strange
Now combine them.
Nostr gives people a mostly permissionless publishing network.
AI gives one person the research and production capacity that used to require several mildly organized humans.
Bitcoin gives the network money.
This combination is strange enough that I don’t think we’ve worked out what it actually is yet.
That’s the interesting part.
The modern web mostly feels finished.
You already know what Facebook is.
You know what Instagram is.
You know what YouTube is.
You know what Google wants.
Nostr still occasionally feels like somebody dumped protocol pieces on a garage floor and said:
Build something.
That feeling used to be normal online.
ICQ had it.
IRC had it.
Early web forums had it.
Personal sites absolutely had it.
Nobody knew which pieces were going to matter twenty years later.
Most of them didn’t.
That’s fine.
ICQ Eventually Became History
ICQ once had hundreds of millions of users.
Then the internet reorganized itself.
Centralized social platforms won.
Phone numbers became identity.
Apps became platforms.
Platforms became ecosystems.
Ecosystems became places where the button for “show me things I explicitly asked to see” is apparently considered advanced functionality.
ICQ finally shut down in 2024.
A ridiculous lifespan for software whose primary cultural contribution was yelling UH-OH! through computer speakers.
Respect.
Nostr is solving a different problem.
It’s asking what happens if identity isn’t owned by the service carrying your messages.
That is a much bigger idea than ICQ ever attempted.
But the cultural resemblance is still there.
Numbers.
Handles.
Odd technical rituals.
People finding each other outside the normal systems.
Small communities.
A slight feeling that the adults haven’t arrived yet.
That’s Probably What I Like About It
ICQ felt like software.
Modern social media feels like infrastructure owned by somebody else.
Nostr feels like parts.
You can see the joints.
You can run one.
Break one.
Replace one.
Ignore one.
Write your own.
That makes it less polished.
It also makes it interesting.
AI has the same unfinished feeling right now.
We’re still figuring out what people actually do with infinite intellectual dungeon generation.
Some people are building companies.
Some are doing science.
Some are generating pictures of cats wearing tactical equipment.
Civilization contains multitudes.
So yeah.
Nostr reminds me of ICQ.
AI reminds me of Diablo.
And somewhere between the two I’m apparently back on the old internet again.
Except now the strangers have cryptographic identities, the gold is real money, and the dungeon never ends.
Could be worse.
