Newly Launched Decentralized Twitter Rival ‘Damus’ Banned in China

• Damus reported on Thursday that the app has been taken down in China by the CAC.
• Apple cooperated promptly after being asked to by the authorities.

For 2 days, Damus, a Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized, Twitter rival, was available in China’s Apple App Store. Damus reported on Thursday that the app has been taken down in China. By the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) for violating national speech rules. Moreover, Apple cooperated promptly after being asked to.

Dorsey is a fan of Nostr, a distributed social media protocol on which various new initiatives are being developed. Damus is one of these initiatives. The development of Nostr was funded by a donation of 14 BTC (about $327,000 at the time of writing) from the Twitter co-founder a year ago. The Bitcoin Lightning Network, which is used for online transactions, is also included in the app.

Censorship Resistant Platform

Furthermore, the goal of the open-source Nostr protocol is to provide the groundwork for a decentralized, censorship-resistant social network that can be accessed anywhere in the world thanks to the use of cryptographic key pairs. Because all clients are operated by users. It is impossible to prohibit users or censor content on applications built on top of Nostr.

Moreover, as an example of Nostr’s potential, its creators created Damus, a Twitter alternative that works on Apple devices. Moreover, an alternative to Telegram called Anigma and a chess software called Jester are both developed on top of the protocol.

Dorsey has been an outspoken supporter of the need for more censorship-proof social media channels. In 2019, Dorsey was CEO of Twitter and he allocated funds to a small team to develop a decentralized social media system. According to documents released in September. Dorsey pleaded with Elon Musk after Musk’s takeover of Twitter for the service to be moved to an “open source protocol, funded by a foundation.”