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When S3X_Social was first conceptualized it was intended to be something like Twitter or Tumblr for gay and trans men - only completely porn and sex friendly. But then came Nostr, and all the plans changed…
In the coming weeks we'll deploy the initial version of s3x_social. It will be based on open-source software and anyone who is sex-positive and porn-friendly is welcome to use it. However, over time, we will build in enhancements for users of our other sites (which cater to gay and trans men).
Imagine that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, were all just different interfaces on the same feed. And that no corporation controlled what could go on the feed. And it was all done with proper encryption. That's pretty much the goal of Nostr.
Nostr is a protocol (a set of standards) that developers can use to build social media and messaging services. It is based on "relays" that are the servers that transmit and store the events in the feed.
While Nostr was envisioned as a censorship-free social media platform there's a lot of discussion (and work being done) to censor certain types of content - mostly spam, but also porn.
Needless to say censoring porn is a problem if you like porn or you're in the porn industry. So we'll be launching relay.s3x.social which will always welcome legal porn (e.g. no child porn, no obscene content, and no pirated content).
Eventually relay.s3x.social will be a paid relay, but we'll have various ways to use it for free until Nostr has critical mass for users looking for porn and other sexual content.
Since Nostr doesn't have some single server keeping track of accounts, identity validation is a bit more complicated than it is with the social media sites you may be used to. Furthermore,Nostr users are identified by long cryptic strings called "pub keys". The human-readable identifier is called a "NIP5 identifier". It looks like an email address - but isn't an email addresses. As a result, there may be many users called "CoolDude" on Nostr, but (like email) there can only be one "CoolDude@SomeCoolSite.com".
We'll offer free NIP5 verification for users of our sites (including s3x.social). The only caveat is that no one else can be using the same handle on any of our other sites.
One thing the current social media sites do is hold onto your data. But that's not the case with Nostr. The relays are not required to hold onto the notes you send which means over time those notes may disappear as relays purge old notes to save space. We will be archiving certain feeds and will be able to offer feed preservation as a service to our users (possibly at a nominal cost).
As part of feed preservation you'll also be able to download a zip file of all your posts (that have been written to our relay.
Right now most of the users of Nostr are straight "crypto bros" with slight "incel" overtones. Crypto bros are the early users because many of the developers came from the crypto industry and Nostr has built-in support for Bitcoin Lightning payments - which they like since it gives them something they can do with their Bitcoin wallets.
Getting that crowd to be polite to the porn industry (especially gay & trans porn) will be "interesting". But hey - they wanted zero censorship, right? Well, we'll be showing them what zero censorship looks like…
That said, we're actively engaging to beef up how Nostr handles "sensitive content". We firmly believe that porn should only be seen when the user is 1) of legal age, and 2) wants to see it.
Nostr doesn't natively support images and videos. In fact many/most of the relays reject events that are over 4K in size. That's a problem if you're posting or wanting to view porn.
The way you work around that is to include a URL, and then the client you use (a website or app) will display the contents of the URL in the feed just under the textual part of the note.
But that's a privacy problem since your IP address will leak to whatever website is hosting the image/video.
To tackle those issues: