The Great Nostr Zombie Massacre of 2025
How One Publication Obliterated 1,466 Undead Accounts and Changed Internet History Forever
By Your Friendly Neighborhood Nostr Correspondent
October 2025
In what historians are already calling “The Great Purge” or “The Unfollowing Heard ‘Round the Decentralized World,” The Bitcoin Street Journal has achieved something no one thought possible: they killed 1,466 zombies in a single campaign.
No, this isn’t a crossover episode between The Walking Dead and your favorite cryptocurrency podcast. This is the story of how a scrappy social protocol called Nostr, a gamified cleanup competition called “Plebs vs. Zombies,” and one incredibly dedicated publication hopelessly addicted to caffeine converged to create the most epic unfollowing spree in decentralized social media history.
What the Hell is Nostr, Anyway?
Before we get to the carnage, let’s address the elephant in the room: What is Nostr, and why should you care?
Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is a decentralized social protocol that basically said “What if Twitter, but no one can ban you, censor you, or force you to see ads for things you already bought?” Created as an alternative to centralized social media platforms, Nostr lets users post messages that get distributed across multiple independent servers called “relays.”
Think of it as social media for people who read the terms and conditions, got worried, and decided to build their own internet. It’s the digital equivalent of homesteading, except instead of growing your own vegetables, you’re generating your own cryptographic keys.
The Zombie Problem
Here’s where things get spooky. In any social network, you inevitably accumulate what we’ll call “digital detritus” – abandoned accounts, spam bots, people who posted twice in 2023 and were never heard from again. In the Nostr protocol ecosystem, these inactive accounts earned the affectionate nickname “zombies.”
Unlike actual zombies, these won’t eat your brains. But they will clog your feed with the ghostly silence of someone who thought they’d try decentralized social media, posted “GM” (good morning, for the uninitiated) exactly once, and then presumably got distracted by a shiny object.
Following hundreds or thousands of zombies is like being friends with people who ghosted you but you’re too polite to unfriend. It’s social media purgatory.
Enter: Plebs vs. Zombies
Someone at plebsvszombies.cc had a brilliant idea: What if we turned the tedious task of cleaning up your follow list into a competitive sport?
Thus was born “Plebs vs. Zombies,” a competition that gamifies the spring cleaning of your Nostr social graph. The rules are simple: unfollow inactive accounts (zombies), tally your kills, and compete for glory (and apparently prizes) on a public leaderboard.
It’s like The Hunger Games, but instead of teenagers fighting to the death, it’s Nostr protocol users fighting against the existential dread of following 8,000 people who haven’t posted since the last Bitcoin halving.
The competition runs through October 31st – Halloween, naturally, because when else would you hold a zombie-killing competition?
The Record That Shook the Nostr-verse
For weeks, the leaderboard had been seeing respectable numbers. User Antihumano held the #2 position with 320 kills – a solid performance. Undisciplined brought in 249. These were numbers that made sense, numbers that felt achievable by dedicated users willing to spend an afternoon scrolling through their follows with the ruthless efficiency of a Marie Kondo for social media.
Then The Bitcoin Street Journal showed up.
When the dust settled, the numbers were almost incomprehensible: 1,466 zombie kills.
To put this in perspective, that’s more than four times the second-place finisher. That’s 1,466 accounts that were once followed, evaluated, deemed inactive, and ceremoniously unfollowed. If each unfollow took just 10 seconds (and we’re being generous here), that’s over four hours of pure zombie-killing dedication.
The Bitcoin Street Journal had followed 8,427 accounts total. They eliminated 17.4% of their entire following in one calculated campaign. It wasn’t just cleaning house; it was demolishing the house, rebuilding it from scratch, and installing smart home features while they were at it.
The Leaderboard of Legends
The updated Top 10 now reads like a who’s who of Nostr dedication:
- The Bitcoin Street Journal – 1,466 kills 👑 (The undisputed champion)
- Antihumano – 320 kills (Respectable, but utterly dwarfed)
- Undisciplined – 249 kills (Ironically very disciplined about unfollowing)
- inpc – 242 kills
- n0>1 – 207 kills
- Sergio – 191 kills
- StellarStoic – 160 kills
- Shirley Baby – 126 kills
- negr0 – 97 kills
- SuiGenerisJohn – 97 kills
Each of these users represents someone who cared enough about their Nostr experience to actually do something about the zombie problem. They’re the heroes we need, not the heroes we deserve.
A Plot Twist: The Prize Goes to a Friend
In a move that would make even the most cynical hearts grow three sizes, The Bitcoin Street Journal announced they would donate any prize winnings to fellow Nostr user corndalorian.
In the cutthroat world of competitive zombie elimination, this is like winning the Super Bowl and giving your ring to your backup quarterback. It’s the kind of community spirit that makes you wonder if maybe, just maybe, decentralized social media isn’t just about cryptographic keys and relays – it’s about people being decent to each other.
Why This Matters (No, Really)
You might be thinking: “This is just people unfollowing each other. Why are we treating this like the moon landing?”
Fair question. Here’s why it matters:
1. It solves a real problem. Every social platform struggles with inactive accounts. Nostr’s solution? Make it fun. Make it competitive. Make it something people actually want to do.
2. It’s peak internet culture. Only in 2025 could we have a gamified unfollowing competition on a decentralized protocol that uses cryptographic keys. It’s beautiful in its absurdity.
3. It shows Nostr is maturing. Early social platforms are about growth: “Get everyone on here!” Mature platforms are about curation: “Get the right people on here.” Plebs vs. Zombies represents Nostr’s evolution from quantity to quality.
4. Community engagement works. By turning a mundane task into a competition with leaderboards and prizes, the organizers created genuine engagement. The Bitcoin Street Journal didn’t clean up 1,466 follows because they had to – they did it because it was fun and it was a perfect excuse to make another pot of coffee before posting GM yet again.
The Technology Behind the Carnage
For the technically inclined, here’s what makes this possible: Nostr’s follow lists are basically just public records of which public keys you’re following. Anyone can query this data, check activity levels, and identify zombies. The Plebs vs. Zombies tool automates the detection but leaves the decision to unfollow in human hands.
It’s like having a metal detector for your social graph. The tool beeps when it finds something, but you decide whether to dig it up or leave it buried.
What’s Next?
The organizers have promised “new sponsored and expanded prize tiers” to be announced soon. With The Bitcoin Street Journal setting the bar at 1,466 kills, future competitions might need to consider new categories:
- Most zombies killed per hour
- Highest zombie-kill ratio (zombies killed vs. total follows)
- Best zombie kill streak
- Most creative reason for unfollowing a zombie
The competition runs until October 31st, giving challengers a few weeks to mount a response. Will anyone topple the champion? Will The Bitcoin Street Journal go for a second round and push the number even higher? Will someone discover they’ve been following 10,000 zombies this entire time?
The Bigger Picture
Zoom out far enough, and Plebs vs. Zombies is a story about how decentralized platforms can solve problems that centralized platforms struggle with. Twitter (or X, or whatever we’re calling it now) doesn’t help you identify inactive accounts. Instagram doesn’t gamify cleaning your follow list. Facebook doesn’t even want you to think about unfollowing people because that would hurt their engagement metrics.
Nostr, being protocol rather than platform, can support tools like this without worrying about corporate metrics or shareholder value. If someone wants to build a zombie-killing game on top of the protocol, they can. If it helps users curate better experiences, everyone wins.
In Conclusion
The Great Nostr Zombie Massacre of 2025 might seem like a quirky internet moment, but it represents something larger: communities solving their own problems in creative ways, using open protocols to build tools that serve users rather than advertisers.
The Bitcoin Street Journal’s 1,466 zombie kills will go down in Nostr history not just as a record, but as a reminder that sometimes the best way to improve your corner of the internet is to clean house, quite literally.
So here’s to The Bitcoin Street Journal, and to everyone participating in Plebs vs. Zombies. You’re making the internet a slightly less cluttered place, one unfollow at a time.
And to the 1,466 zombies who were unfollowed? Your watch has ended. You posted your last “GM,” you shared your last Lightning bolt emoji, and now you’re free. Free to remain inactive in peace, undisturbed by follows you never knew you had.
May you rest in obsolescence.
Epilogue: For the Curious
If you want to check your own Nostr account for zombies, visit plebsvszombies.cc. Who knows? You might be sitting on hundreds of zombie follows without even knowing it. You too could be a champion.
Just don’t expect to beat 1,466. That number is going to haunt future competitors like… well, like a zombie.
The author follows 47 zombies and is too lazy to do anything about it.
