[jonstaab]

Nostr is essentially a compromise between p2p and traditional web architectures. It cuts with the grain of the internet by using web servers, while reducing the dependence users have on servers by using keys for identity and digital signatures for authenticating data.

The effect is that users have "credible exit" (among other things), which has been discussed for years. This doesn't really create any new "use cases", which is why the use case is often described as "whatever, it's the new internet".

What it does do is introduce a very different set of trade-offs which favor user control over platform control (with the attendant UX trade-offs (or at least a different set of UX idioms)).

The reason the focus is on social is because that represents the majority of applications that do exist, the original motivation for building the protocol, and a value proposition (censorship resistance) that lots of people can relate to.

[Wilduck]

I don't want to be mean, but this post has exactly the problem the person you're replying to was complaining about. The person you're replying to, I think, would like an explanation that reads more like "It's like Twitter, but not tied to a mega-corp, just for you and your pals". I don't know if that description actually fits Nostr though because, like the person you're replying to, I have a pretty hard time understanding what Nostr actually _is_.

[jonstaab]

My point is that question is sort of a category error. It's like asking what type of business the internet is for, or what the use case of smart phones is.

Here are a few things built on nostr, with specific use cases:

primal.net is a twitter-like client with bitcoin micropayments and long-form articles (also see coracle.social, nosotros.app, jumble.social, Amethyst, Damus, yakihonne.com and many others); zap.stream is a twitch-like client for live streaming; flotilla.social and chachi.chat are group chat clients; dtan.xyz is a client for torrenting on nostr; satlantis.io is sort of a travel ratings thing; zap.cooking is a recipe website; yakbak.app is for voice messages; nutstash.app is a cashu wallet built on nostr; cashumints.space lists cashu mints that advertise themselves on nostr.

What's neat is that all these clients can do things the way they want to, but remain interoperable, which means that new developers can create an app and immediately have access to all existing nostr users and their social graph.