After decades of platform lock-in, the first truly portable social graph standard has arrived. It's simpler than you might expect—and more important than it first appears.
The Facebook Lesson We Forgot
Facebook's original genius wasn't the blue interface or the poke button. It was recognizing that social graphs are infrastructure—and the most valuable applications are built on top of that infrastructure.
Facebook started with university email directories and social networks that already existed. They digitized and centralized those relationships, then created an ecosystem where third-party developers could build on that social foundation. The result was extraordinary: social games that generated billions in revenue, payment systems that worked because they understood relationships, targeted advertising that leveraged social context, and recommendation engines that knew who you trusted.
The entire social web economy emerged from applications built on Facebook's social graph API.
But then Facebook closed the ecosystem. The API became restricted, then neutered, then largely eliminated. The social graph that had enabled so much innovation became a proprietary asset, locked away behind corporate walls.
For the first time since Facebook's early days, we have something similar: an open social graph that scales with adoption. Except this time, no one can close it.
The Problem We've Normalized
Your Twitter followers can't follow you to LinkedIn. Your Instagram connections don't transfer to TikTok. Your professional network on one platform stays trapped there forever.
This isn't a technical limitation—it's a business model. Social platforms create value by making it costly to leave. Your social graph becomes a kind of digital mortgage, binding you to platforms long after they've stopped serving your interests.
We've accepted this as inevitable. But what if the fundamental assumption is wrong?
What Is DID-Nostr?
DID-Nostr is a W3C specification that bridges two technologies: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and the Nostr protocol. At its core, it does something deceptively simple: it makes your social connections part of your identity, not part of any platform.
Here's what a DID-Nostr identity looks like:
Identity: did:nostr:124c0fa99407182ece5a24fad9b7f6674902fc422843d3128d38a0afbee0fdd2
Profile: https://alice.com/.well-known/did/nostr/124c0fa9...
Social Graph: Built into the identity document itself
Your social connections become as portable as your email address.
Beyond Native Nostr: Why Standards Matter
Nostr users might wonder: "We already have portable identities and social graphs. What does DID-Nostr add?"
The answer lies in scale and interoperability beyond relay networks. While Nostr creates portable social relationships within its ecosystem, DID-Nostr transforms those relationships into web infrastructure that scales horizontally across every technology stack.
Beyond Relay Dependencies: DID documents can be served from traditional web servers, CDNs, IPFS, or any HTTP endpoint. Your social graph doesn't depend on relay uptime or relay discovery. It works with the same caching, load balancing, and global distribution infrastructure that serves the modern web.
Infinite Scale Through Web Infrastructure: Instead of querying multiple relays and aggregating responses, applications make single HTTP requests to cached endpoints. This transforms social graph discovery from an expensive, real-time operation into a fast, cacheable web request. The same infrastructure that serves billions of web pages can now serve billions of social relationships.
Universal Interoperability: Any application can use your social graph without running Nostr clients or managing WebSocket connections. Traditional web apps can offer social features through standard HTTP APIs. Your social graph works with anything that speaks HTTP—which is everything.
The Ecosystem That Becomes Possible
Remember what developers built on Facebook's social graph before it was locked down:
Social Games: FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and thousands of others that generated billions by leveraging friend networks for gameplay, competition, and viral growth.
Social Commerce: Applications that used trust relationships to enable peer-to-peer transactions, group buying, and social proof for purchases.
Content Discovery: Recommendation engines that surfaced content based on what your friends shared, liked, and engaged with.
Social Login: Universal authentication that worked across thousands of websites by leveraging Facebook's identity platform.
Targeted Services: Applications that could offer personalized experiences by understanding your social context and relationship patterns.
Group Coordination: Tools for organizing events, managing communities, and facilitating group decisions based on real social relationships.
Now imagine all of that—but decentralized, open, and resistent to shut down.
Decentralized Social Games: Games that use your portable social graph for multiplayer experiences, leaderboards, and viral mechanics—without depending on any single platform or risking account suspension.
Peer-to-Peer Payments: Payment systems that leverage cryptographically-verified social relationships for trust, reputation, and fraud prevention—without corporate intermediaries.
Open Social Commerce: Marketplaces and commerce applications that can bootstrap with existing social proof and trust relationships from day one.
Universal Social Login: Authentication that works across all applications and platforms, controlled by users rather than corporations.
Decentralized Content Networks: Recommendation systems that operate across multiple platforms, using your social graph to surface relevant content wherever you are.
Autonomous Social Coordination: DAOs and governance systems that can verify real social relationships and prevent Sybil attacks using portable social proof.
The Technical Innovation
DID-Nostr introduces something genuinely new: social relationships as first-class identity data. When you follow someone, that relationship becomes part of your cryptographically-signed identity document, discoverable through standard web protocols.
The specification defines three resolution methods:
-
HTTP Resolution: Standard web requests to
.well-knownendpoints - Offline Resolution: Full identity reconstruction from just a public key
- Enhanced Resolution: Rich social data from distributed networks
This isn't just another API—it's infrastructure. Any application, anywhere, can resolve social relationships using the same standard protocols that serve web pages.
The key insight: by making social graphs web-native rather than protocol-native, they can leverage decades of web scaling innovation while maintaining complete decentralization.
The Local-First Revolution
DID-Nostr aligns perfectly with the emerging local-first software movement. Your identity document can be generated entirely offline. Your social relationships can be verified cryptographically without server dependencies. Your applications can work fully disconnected, syncing only when connectivity is available and desired.
This enables entirely new categories of social applications:
Offline Social Games: Multiplayer experiences that work without internet connectivity, using cryptographically-verified friend lists for local network play.
Private Social Commerce: Peer-to-peer marketplaces that can verify trust relationships without revealing your social graph to servers.
Resilient Social Infrastructure: Applications that continue working during network outages, internet censorship, or platform shutdowns.
Local Social Computation: Social algorithms and recommendations that run entirely on-device, using cryptographically-verified relationship data.
Why Portable Social Graphs Matter
Consider the network effects. Today's social platforms grow by capturing and isolating social graphs. Tomorrow's applications could grow by making social graphs more valuable as they become more widely accessible.
For users: Your social connections follow you across applications. Build your network once, use it everywhere—not just in Nostr clients, but in games, commerce apps, content platforms, and technologies that don't exist yet.
For developers: No need to build user acquisition from scratch or integrate with specific platforms. Applications can bootstrap with existing social relationships using familiar HTTP APIs that work with any backend technology.
For the ecosystem: Social data becomes public infrastructure rather than proprietary assets—enabling the same kind of innovation explosion that Facebook's early API created, but without the risk of platform capture.
Real Applications
The implications become clear when you consider what developers can build:
Social Gaming Platforms: Games that can access your friend network from day one, creating instant multiplayer experiences and viral growth loops without platform dependencies.
Decentralized Social Commerce: Marketplaces that use your social proof and trust relationships to enable peer-to-peer transactions with built-in reputation systems.
Cross-Platform Content Networks: Applications that can recommend content, facilitate discussions, and build communities using your existing social context.
Social Coordination Tools: Governance platforms, event organizing tools, and decision-making applications that leverage real social relationships for better outcomes.
Universal Social Authentication: Login systems that work across all applications while giving users complete control over their identity and relationships.
Social Financial Services: Lending platforms, group payment systems, and financial coordination tools that use social trust rather than traditional credit scores.
The Broader Context
This fits into a larger pattern of infrastructure becoming more portable. Email separated messaging from providers. RSS separated content from platforms. OAuth separated authentication from applications.
DID-Nostr separates social graphs from platforms—and makes them accessible to any web technology, enabling the same kind of ecosystem innovation that Facebook's early API created.
But it goes further. By making social graphs web-native and cryptographically verifiable, it enables applications that Facebook never could: truly peer-to-peer social experiences that work offline and can't be shut down.
Current Limitations
The specification is early-stage infrastructure. Real adoption requires solving practical challenges:
- Developer adoption: Can the ecosystem attract the builders needed to create compelling applications?
- User experience: Making cryptographic identity as simple as existing social login
- Privacy controls: Balancing openness with selective sharing across different platforms
- Storage infrastructure: Reliable hosting for identity documents at web scale
These aren't fundamental barriers, but they require continued development and real-world testing across different technical environments.
What Changes
The most significant impact may be the most subtle: application developers can now assume that social relationship data exists independently of any particular platform, and they can build on that foundation without fear of the API being shut down.
This assumption changes what becomes worth building. When social graphs are permanent public infrastructure rather than temporary proprietary assets, different kinds of applications become viable. When that infrastructure works offline-first and scales like the web, entirely new categories of social software become possible.
We're not just talking about better social networks. We're talking about social data as public infrastructure—like DNS or email protocols—that enables an entire ecosystem of applications and services.
Looking Forward
Social portability sounds like a small technical improvement. In practice, it might enable the same kind of innovation explosion that Facebook's social graph API created in the late 2000s—except this time, no one can turn off the API.
When email became portable across providers, it enabled decades of innovation in messaging and communication. When domains became portable across hosting providers, it enabled the modern web. When Facebook opened their social graph API, it enabled social games, social commerce, and the modern social web economy.
Portable, web-native, cryptographically-verified social graphs could enable something even bigger: a truly open social economy that no single entity controls.
The tools exist now. The question is what we'll build with them.
DID-Nostr v0.0.7 is available at nostrcg.github.io/did-nostr. The specification is developed by the W3C Nostr Community Group, an open standards organization.
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