I was messing around with Nostr in 2020-2021, when it was still @fiatjaf 's weird little protocol experiment and most of the world had never heard of it. I wasn't just watching from the sidelines - I ran my own Nostr relay.
Back then, Nostr was primitive compared with what exists today. There wasn't a massive ecosystem of polished clients, millions of users, ubiquitous Lightning zaps, or the social network effects that eventually made Nostr interesting to a much larger audience. But the underlying idea was already there. Your identity could belong to you. Your posts didn't have to live inside one company's database. Relays could be independent. Clients could compete. And, most importantly, there wasn't supposed to be one central authority that could simply decide whether you were allowed to exist.
At the time, I didn't know how important that idea would become to me.
Then the world changed.
The COVID-era lockdowns and everything surrounding them knocked my life completely sideways. I was declared a nonessential worker, lost my livelihood, and eventually ended up homeless.
While centralized systems were deciding who was "essential," who could work, what platforms people could use, and what information could be distributed, I had already spent time playing with a protocol built around the opposite philosophy - no central gatekeeper.
But life doesn't care how good your technical philosophy is when you're trying to survive.
I was away from Nostr for years. The project kept moving without me.
Then came @jack and the huge influx of attention, the rise of Damus and other clients, Lightning zaps, NIP-05 identities, NIP-65 relay lists, NWC, and an entire ecosystem that would have seemed almost absurdly mature compared with those early days.
And eventually, I came back.
That's probably the strangest part of the whole story. The protocol I had experimented with years earlier was still here. The technology had evolved enormously. The community had changed. The tooling had changed. The scale had changed.
But the fundamental idea hadn't.
Your identity is yours. Relays are replaceable. Clients are replaceable. You don't need permission from a centralized platform to participate.
Looking back, it's honestly amazing that I survived that entire period. I lost work. I lost stability. I lost years. But I didn't lose the underlying conviction that decentralized systems mattered.
And now I'm back on Nostr, building again.
Not because decentralization is fashionable. Not because somebody famous made it popular in 2022. I was already here when it was obscure. I was already running a relay when almost nobody knew what Nostr was.
I left because life forced me away - not because I stopped believing in the idea.
And now I'm watching the thing I once experimented with as a strange little protocol become an actual global communications network.
That's one hell of a thing to come back to.
So yeah, I'm an #OldCrow.
Not necessarily because I have the longest résumé in Nostr, but because I remember what it looked like before it became what it is today.