Apple Threatens To Remove Top Nostr App Because It Allows Tipping

I’ve mentioned a few times that one of the decentralized social media services I’m following closely is nostr, which is an incredibly lightweight protocol, enabling lots of people to (very simply) create their own relays and clients. Unlike Mastodon or Bluesky, Nostr isn’t federated. You don’t join a server. You just get a key pair… and go (and, yes, I realize even that is too complicated for some, which may limit eventual adoption)*.

But the extremely decentralized setup, combined with the simplicity of the protocol, has resulted in a ton of third party development on nostr over just the past few months. When I first checked it out in December it was… very limited and very buggy. But every month or so, as new clients and features are added, it gets better and better. While it still has some rough edges, it’s starting to look like a truly decentralized, fully functional social media system.

Of course, given the lightweight nature of the protocol, most users’ experience is actually driven by their client choice, and different clients have different features, but they do seem to be converging on features over time.

Probably the first of the fully functional clients was Damus (get it? nostr… damus??), which is an iPhone app. It actually had been initially rejected from the app store, before being allowed in in early February.

However, in the last few months, one of the things that many nostr clients have adopted is the concept of “zaps,” sending money to other nostr users. And, yes, they’re doing so using Bitcoin (actually, the Lightning Network, which is a “second-layer” to Bitcoin to help it scale), so feel free to groan. Even if you’re a cryptocurrency skeptic (or hater), it is interesting to see how the economy around it is developing in nostr. And you don’t need to use cryptocurrency at all to use nostr.

However, it appears that Apple decided to freak out this week after realizing that users on nostr can send each other money without Apple getting its cut. And so it threatened to kick nostr out of the App Store:

This is… somewhat silly. “Zaps” and the transfer of money are not directly a Damus feature. It’s part of nostr. It’s kind of like saying that no browser could be in the App Store because someone might use it to PayPal someone without giving Apple its 30% cut.

Eventually, Apple apparently told Damus’ developer that they can continue to allow payments (“zaps”) on profiles, but not on individual posts, because that’s… “selling digital content” according to a very confused Apple person:

Except… that’s not right either. Zaps are literally just a kind of tipping.

And, again, you can think all of this is silly. Nostr, zaps, all of it. But even so, you should recognize how very problematic it is when Apple is basically saying you can’t have any app in the app store that connects you to a protocol that allows money to exchange hands… unless Apple gets its cut.

I get that Apple is looking at this (incorrectly) through the prism of a world in which every service and every app is some centralized thing run by a single company. But this isn’t that. This is a decentralized protocol that happens to have the possibility of transferring money, as tips, built in to many of the clients.

I can kind of understand Apple’s position when dealing with centralized services, even if it’s still somewhat silly. But with a decentralized protocol, this just looks completely clueless. If it were Apple enabling the payments, then, sure, take a cut. But Damus is basically just a browser of the nostr protocol.

As we see more decentralized services take off, someone at Apple is going to need to learn how they work, because this is just embarrassing.

* Also, the screenshots I posted above are all from nostr, but I find it amusing that basically every news source I’ve seen covering this story (including the crypto focused ones) is showing the comments Damus’ developer made on Twitter, not on nostr. Which seems odd. But perhaps points to the media not really using nostr much yet either, and even more to the point: on the difficulty in getting started with nostr.