Damus Decentralized Twitter Killer Goes Live On Apple’s App Store 

Damus, a so-called “Twitter killer” built on a decentralized network, has been approved by the Apple App Store.

Iexclusivenews reports that the Damus team confirmed the approval to its 11,500 Twitter followers on Jan. 31.

Following what it claims were at least three rejections from the Big Tech player.

Soon after, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and a contributor to Nostr, informed his 6.5 million followers of the development, calling it a “milestone” moment for open-source protocols:

a milestone for open protocols…#nostr is now officially on the Apple App Store with @damusapp:https://t.co/GQmvPE5nfX

— jack (@jack) January 31, 2023

The messaging app bills itself as the “social network you control” and is based on Nostr.

A decentralized network that, among other things, allows encrypted end-to-end private messaging.

It intends to develop into an unfiltered social media platform.

What You Should Know 

According to a Protos post from January 27, it also has built-in payments via the layer-2 Lightning Network for Bitcoin BTCtickers down $22,977.

The network has no servers. Instead, Nostr disseminates messages using decentralized relays.

Nostr developers are also working to prevent distributed denial-of-service spam attacks on the Damus app by utilizing Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.

There have been 44 different software developers who have contributed to the code for the Damus web app, according to the team’s GitHub page.

Getting the App on the Apple App Store didn’t come without issues though.

The Damus Twitter page posted that it had failed in at least three attempts before finally being approved:

APPROVEDhttps://t.co/oipEFwaTcg

— Damus⚡️ (@damusapp) January 31, 2023

While the news seemed to raise awareness of the app among the Bitcoin community, other high-profile figures have also tried out the Damus app.

Among them are Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, and pro-crypto U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis.

The Damus web app was experiencing issues at the time of writing. A warning message appears on the site’s homepage:

“Damus Web is down because there is someone trying to exploit browser loopholes to steal private keys. I would not recommend using a web client at this time. Damus iOS is not affected.”