[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":167},["ShallowReactive",2],{"post-your-account-is-not-your-identity":3,"series-undefined":166},{"_path":4,"_dir":5,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":8,"description":9,"slug":10,"date":11,"readTime":12,"location":13,"draft":6,"body":14,"_type":160,"_id":161,"_source":162,"_file":163,"_stem":164,"_extension":165},"\u002Fposts\u002Fyour-account-is-not-your-identity","posts",false,"","Your account is not your identity.","On Nostr, digital sovereignty, and what a week at Oslo Freedom Forum clarified about who actually owns your online identity.","your-account-is-not-your-identity","2026-06-06","6 min read","PAR",{"type":15,"children":16,"toc":154},"root",[17,25,30,35,40,45,50,55,59,66,71,76,81,86,91,96,99,105,110,115,120,125,130,133,139,144,149],{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":20,"children":21},"element","p",{},[22],{"type":23,"value":24},"text","I first heard about Nostr a while back, the way most people in the Bitcoin space do: someone in a group chat drops a link, you skim it, you think \"interesting,\" and then you go back to whatever you were actually building. It sat in that mental folder for a while.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":26,"children":27},{},[28],{"type":23,"value":29},"Then I went to Oslo Freedom Forum this year.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":31,"children":32},{},[33],{"type":23,"value":34},"OFF is a strange and clarifying event. You're in a room with dissidents, activists, journalists, and technologists from places where the stakes of digital infrastructure are not abstract. At one point I found myself talking to Rose Tunguru, an activist from Kenya who has spent years translating legislation into language ordinary people can actually use. Not protest language. Practical language. How to file, how to challenge, how to organise without putting yourself in a room that can be shut down or a street that can be cleared. She talked about the protests in Kenya, how many people had died, how the calculus of showing up physically had changed for a generation. I thought about EndSARS in Nigeria, about what it cost people to be visible in that way, and I understood exactly what she meant.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":36,"children":37},{},[38],{"type":23,"value":39},"Later I spoke to Samuel Baker, a journalist who had navigated repeated shutdowns of the platforms he published on. Different country, same structural problem: the layer where your voice lives is owned by someone else, and that someone else can be pressured, legislated, or simply persuaded to turn it off.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":41,"children":42},{},[43],{"type":23,"value":44},"Both of them, in different ways, were describing the same gap.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":46,"children":47},{},[48],{"type":23,"value":49},"It wasn't one conversation that connected the dots. There was a full panel dedicated to it, \"Deep Dive: Where Is Nostr Today?\", with developers who had been building on the protocol for years. It came up in the hallways. It came up when I was talking to Ope and Femi. By the end of the three days it was clear this wasn't a fringe topic being carried by enthusiasts. It was being discussed as serious infrastructure by people with serious problems to solve.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":51,"children":52},{},[53],{"type":23,"value":54},"I came home and started writing.",{"type":18,"tag":56,"props":57,"children":58},"hr",{},[],{"type":18,"tag":60,"props":61,"children":63},"h2",{"id":62},"what-nostr-actually-is",[64],{"type":23,"value":65},"What Nostr actually is",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":67,"children":68},{},[69],{"type":23,"value":70},"Nostr stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. The name is a bit ungainly but the idea is clean: it's an open protocol for publishing and receiving messages on the internet without relying on a company to sit in the middle.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":72,"children":73},{},[74],{"type":23,"value":75},"The best way I've found to explain it is through what it replaces.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":77,"children":78},{},[79],{"type":23,"value":80},"When you sign up for Twitter, you create an account. That account lives on Twitter's servers. Your username, your followers, your history, your direct messages. All of it belongs to the platform. If they ban you, suspend you, or simply shut down, it's gone. You have no copy. You have no recourse. You are your account, and your account is their property.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":82,"children":83},{},[84],{"type":23,"value":85},"Nostr works differently. Instead of creating an account on a platform, you generate a cryptographic keypair. A public key and a private key. Your public key is your identity, something like a username the whole network can see. Your private key is what you use to sign everything you publish, proving it came from you. Nobody issues it. Nobody can revoke it. It's just mathematics.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":87,"children":88},{},[89],{"type":23,"value":90},"Your messages, what Nostr calls events, get published to servers called relays. A relay is essentially a database with a WebSocket door on it. It stores your events and serves them to anyone who asks. The critical difference from Twitter is that relays don't own your identity. If one relay goes down or decides to remove your content, you point your client at a different relay. Your keypair goes with you. Your signed history is still cryptographically verifiable. Nobody took anything from you.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":92,"children":93},{},[94],{"type":23,"value":95},"This is the thing that keeps getting lost in how people describe Nostr. The decentralisation isn't primarily about where the data lives. It's about where the identity lives. And for the first time, the answer is: with you.",{"type":18,"tag":56,"props":97,"children":98},{},[],{"type":18,"tag":60,"props":100,"children":102},{"id":101},"what-it-is-and-isnt",[103],{"type":23,"value":104},"What it is and isn't",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":106,"children":107},{},[108],{"type":23,"value":109},"I want to be precise here because there's a lot of breathless writing about Nostr that oversells it.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":111,"children":112},{},[113],{"type":23,"value":114},"Nostr is a protocol, like email's SMTP. It's not an app. There are many apps built on top of it, clients like Damus, Primal, and Amethyst, in the same way Gmail and Outlook are both built on email.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":116,"children":117},{},[118],{"type":23,"value":119},"Nostr is also not magic decentralisation. If you only publish your events to one relay and that relay is yours, you're essentially running a server with a WebSocket API. The decentralisation lives in the identity layer, not the storage layer. What's genuinely different is that no single entity can take your identity. The data redundancy comes from publishing to multiple relays, which is simple and cheap to do.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":121,"children":122},{},[123],{"type":23,"value":124},"And Nostr is not just for social media. Because any event is just signed JSON, you can build almost anything on top of the protocol: marketplaces, long-form publishing, direct messages, payment receipts, agent-to-agent coordination. The protocol grows through a community process called NIPs, Nostr Implementation Possibilities. Anyone can propose one. That openness is either its greatest strength or its greatest liability depending on who you ask.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":126,"children":127},{},[128],{"type":23,"value":129},"The honest version of the pitch is narrower than its advocates often make it: Nostr is very good at giving people sovereign digital identity and censorship-resistant communication. That's a smaller claim than \"it replaces the entire internet stack.\" It's also, in the right contexts, a much more important one.",{"type":18,"tag":56,"props":131,"children":132},{},[],{"type":18,"tag":60,"props":134,"children":136},{"id":135},"where-its-going",[137],{"type":23,"value":138},"Where it's going",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":140,"children":141},{},[142],{"type":23,"value":143},"Nostr is still early. The tooling is rough in places, the client experience varies enormously, and the relay ecosystem is dominated by enthusiasts running infrastructure on goodwill rather than sustainable business models. Some of that will get better. Some of it will stay messy because open protocols tend to be messier than walled gardens by design, and that messiness is often the point.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":145,"children":146},{},[147],{"type":23,"value":148},"What I took from Oslo was something more specific than optimism. The people who need this most aren't waiting for it to be polished. Rose isn't holding out for a better onboarding flow. Samuel isn't waiting for a smoother client experience. They're using what works now because the cost of the alternative has already been paid. That's a different kind of pressure than the one that usually drives technology adoption, and it tends to produce infrastructure that actually lasts.",{"type":18,"tag":19,"props":150,"children":151},{},[152],{"type":23,"value":153},"I'll be writing more about the technical side of building on Nostr, how relays work, how identity flows through the protocol, and where the interesting edge cases live. If you're building in this space or trying to understand it properly, I'd genuinely like to compare notes.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":155,"depth":155,"links":156},2,[157,158,159],{"id":62,"depth":155,"text":65},{"id":101,"depth":155,"text":104},{"id":135,"depth":155,"text":138},"markdown","content:posts:your-account-is-not-your-identity.md","content","posts\u002Fyour-account-is-not-your-identity.md","posts\u002Fyour-account-is-not-your-identity","md",[],1784881962733]