ADAM & Nostr

Nostr is a simple protocol for sharing small amounts of data (plain text) and was created with the intention to be a decentralized alternative to Twitter. Nostr's architecture operates on two main principles: clients and relays. Relays are servers where users decide to publish and host their data. These can be servers they decide to run themselves or servers run by other people, which is largely done for free right now. Clients are the tools (or apps) people use to publish information. Users are represented as public keys.

Challenges:

• Scalability: Nostr currently relies on the goodwill of people running servers that other users can use for free. At scale, this will become far more expensive and could lead to even more centralization of relays.

• Inconsistent data and long-term availability: Difficulty in ensuring you’re seeing 100% of available data, as it’s dispersed across many relays. Relays can also decide to stop serving data

• Accessibility: Currently cannot communicate with other users that do not share the same relays (servers) as you. This also makes it difficult for global search, as that would require searching every relay in existence.

• Financial sustainability: Unclear what the revenue model is. Right now, Nostr allows people to tip each other in BTC, but solely relies on donations to support development

Key distinctions from ADAM:

• Nostr has no uniform methodology of writing apps that allows for interoperability and reusability. Whereas, all ADAM apps are written using the same ontology and are therefore immediately interoperable, reusable, and composable. Any ADAM app or feature can be plugged into other apps and customized with their own UI, contributing to less development repetitiveness.

• Nostr still relies on centralized servers and is not truly decentralized or peer-to-peer

• Nostr largely supports applications with plain text, whereas ADAM supports the implementation of any type of applications with flexibility in choosing underlying technology. ADAM also allows for the integration of other existing services.

• ADAM has web3’s first fully p2p messaging app (Flux) built

The Nostr protocol could be wrapped as an ADAM “Language” and integrated as one of many communication methods people could choose to use in the ADAM ecosystem. In this light, ADAM is not directly competitive with Nostr, or other protocols, and instead seeks to unify independent efforts.