13 ms·

Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

194 points by pantalaimon 4y ago

Barrin92 4y ago
After reading the page for a bit I don't really understand the fundamental difference to other decentralized systems except for the global public key based identity. Nostr's relays are simply servers that push and receive structured data. So it's a sort of an email or http like protocol that's by default cryptographically signed? I don't really see the magic that makes it censorship resistant or particularly decentralized. The same networking and economic laws that consolidate internet traffic or mastodon servers are at work here too. Relays get popular, produce a lot of traffic, this spawns "nostr as a service" for economic reasons, and that's about it. If people want to ban you they'll just blacklist your public key across popular instances just like someone on the fediverse does, companies won't host your stuff, and so on. If anything tying everything to a single global identity makes it more trivial to blacklist anyone.
- CodexArcana 4y ago
  Right but if I'm hosting my own mode that only I post to, in conjunction with other nodes, my followers get my posts from my node of im Black listed. I think when you sub to someone you're also sent a list of nodes that a person uses. So when I'm banned you already have my node in your list, so you won't even notice.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
I'm seeing a lot of people not quite understanding what nostr is. I know it can be hard considering this is a crowd focused on products and frameworks and paradigms and what not. It's not a "twitter alternative", it's not "federated like mastodon", it's not even social networking. It's just a spec for a signed message format and a relay server, that's it. It's very, very simple, you generate a key, sign a message, send it to whichever relays you want, it serves them to requestors or not, depending on what it wants to do. That is literally all it is.
- ktpsns 4y ago
  Funny how similar this sounds to wireguard, the trending yet simple open source VPN technology. Basically the messages are IP packets there ;-)
m348e912 4y ago
I saw Snowden tweeted about this. Anyone have a TLDR on what Nostr is exactly? And how it ties into Bitcoin (if at all)? Update: It seems to be partly a twitter alternative perhaps using lightning network in some way. I set up an account on astral.ninja, created keys, username, saw that there were relays that were defined already. I couldn't see any posts in my feed, and when I tried to make a post it just hung and never posted anything. Suffice to say my initial experience started off okay, then dissapointment.
- sph 4y ago
  It does not tie into Bitcoin. It's just a very very simple protocol of clients sending and subscribing to pieces of data, and relays that dumbly (i.e. with little processing) send data across connected and subscribed clients. It's like a very minimal version of ActivityPub. It takes an hour to go through the whole spec and addenda. Then Jack Dorsey got interested, gave the project a big grant (in BTC), and a lot of crypto hype flew into it. But while it is a convenient excuse to say "crypto, therefore bad", the protocol is itself completely unrelated and IMO quite neat. There is a lot of potential for systems that anyone can comprehend in their totality in an afternoon.
  - larrysalibra 4y ago
    The relationship to bitcoin besides being created by bitcoiners is that it uses Schnorr Signatures for the secp256k1 curve - the same curve as bitcoin. https://bips.xyz/340 https://bips.xyz/340 A Nostr account is identified by a public key, you follow accounts by following public keys and the ability to post as an account is controlled by the corresponding private key.
    - louloulou 4y ago
      Does this mean I could use a bitcoin hardware wallet to store my nostr keys and sign my posts?
      - larrysalibra 4y ago
larrysalibra 4y ago
The best introduction to Nostr is on the Nostr protocol github: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-of-how-it-works-if-you-dont-plan-to-read-anything-else https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o... >Everybody runs a client. It can be a native client, a web client, etc. To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side. The FAQ on the same page also answers questions about why Nostr instead of other options like Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. There's also a recently launched podcast that talks to some developers building on the protocol: https://nostrovia.org https://nostrovia.org
nine_k 4y ago
The biggest problem I see here is forwarding someone else's unknown and unencrypted content. Imagine you're running a relay on your machine, and somebody posts some CSAM, or stolen CC data, or hate speech, etc through your relay. Unlike an email client, your relay actually makes that message available to anyone. Unlike an email relay, you are not forwarding the message to someone else like a dumb pipe; there's no final destination. Unlike a torrent / DHT node, you do not know beforehand what you are going to make available. Unlike a Tor exit node, you do not deal in encrypted fragments which you don't store locally. Unlike an IPFS node, you do not store fragments of files while not even having a full set of such fragments for a given file. Even though the message is signed, you can't reasonably prove that you do not possess the private key used to sign it, or have not possessed. So, if you are an anti-censorship activist, and your machine gets searched (which may be even easier to do in the case of a VPS), you, the runner of the relay, may have some pretty unpleasant time. Even if you manage to convince everyone that you only forward these messages and do not inspect or endorse them, and the authorities will not even fine you, it will cost you time and trouble. Worse, it becomes easy to send something incriminating from a throwaway or stolen client through your relay, and report you to the police. This can of course be done with email or any IM, but these will immediately show you what you've got, so you can e.g. immediately delete it. They do not allow perfect strangers quietly put random stuff onto your disk. Of course the point of the protocol is to resist censorship, so any content deemed criminal by someone cannot be entirely blocked. But the publishers and the receivers of such content make their choice, while those running a relay seem to remain unprotected from from consequences of that choice which they did not make.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    What is? How would this scenario be prevented?
  - nine_k 4y ago
    I'd appreciate a bit more detailed answer. If the problem that Nostr solves is, say, posting NYT headlines, pub crawl reports, or cute cat pictures, it's fine, but most centralized tools are also fine. If the problem which Nostr is trying to solve is being censorship-resistant and allow for dissemination of information which is actively being suppressed, relay safety considerations become important. Less safety means fewer relays, and a need of a personal connection / trust to be admitted.
say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
Moderation is an essential part of community management, even in darknets. Trust in what is said and what is promised as part of a transaction is what attracts and retains members of the community. Just because you can create a censorship resistant network doesn't mean you should.
- irusensei 4y ago
  Nostr is a protocol. Are there moderation functionalities in RSS, SMTP or HTTP? Do matrix and XMPP protocols have some central authority overseeing what server a talks to server b? It’s up to the relays implement their own moderation features and clients filter what they don’t want to see.
  - pornel 4y ago
    I don't think these protocols are quite comparable to a Twitter-like "town square" model, so they don't have the same problems. But where they overlap, they do some "censorship": SMTP will delete spam, XMPP servers will kick out spammers and harassers. The problem with Twitter is that unlike RSS, it shows content from people you did not subscribe to (e.g. you get replies, you see strangers' replies to your friend's posts). The content is public, so unlike e-mail, receiving abuse is not just your private problem, but a problem for the network's image and reputation. But in either case, when normal users (not righteous keyboard warriors) find some content to be horrible, they don't want to see it. If they keep being bombarded with unwanted content, they leave. For Mastodon/Twitter/Gab that may be "political" content, but the problem in general is similar to spam.
    - gkbrk 4y ago
      > SMTP will delete spam Can you point to the part on the SMTP RFC that specifies the spam deletion behaviour? > XMPP servers will kick out spammers and harassers Nothing prevents nostr servers from kicking out based on account or IP address or message content > The problem with Twitter is that unlike RSS, it shows content from people you did not subscribe to. This is not Twitter, any client can decide which content to show. And there are clients that do not show any content from people you don't explicitly follow.
lormayna 4y ago
Nostr is very interesting, for some aspects it looks like a decentralized NNTP.
zikduruqe 4y ago
I joined a Nostr relay the other night, and every time I posted a Lightning Node invoice for 100 sats, within minutes I got 2 cents in my wallet. So at least I made some money from this. :) I'm following the project/protocol, it seems interesting. Here are some NIPS https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
- dochtman 4y ago
  In NIP-04 I noticed that DMs can be encrypted using AES-CBC. IIUC, this is not a very robust mode for using AES. Seems surprising for a greenfield project.
  - snowstormsun 4y ago
    What's wrong with CBC? I think the bigger problem is the symmetric keys are not using a key derivation function and are therefore not uniformly random: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/72 https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/72
    - mprime1 4y ago
      > What's wrong with CBC? It’s not tamper proof, ie signed, unlike GCM > Some modern modes of operation combine confidentiality and authenticity in an efficient way, and are known as authenticated encryption modes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operati... I’d also add: CBC requires padding and GCM does not. Minor convenience.
      - gkbrk 4y ago
        Nostr messages are all signed though. Why would you want two signatures on a message. And if two signatures are better than one, why not 3 signatures?
        mprime1 4y ago
FreeTrade 4y ago
I'm working on software (member.cash) that bridges multiple decentralized social networks together and recently added support for Nostr. Compared to the others, Nostr is optimized for innovation - it is easy to build new features on top and we'll see a lot of growth and evolution because of that. I really like that about it. The problems I see with it right now are 1. Timestamps are easily forgeable 2. Difficult to control spam 3. Little incentive to run relays 4. Difficult to search the whole network There are ideas on how to solve all of the problems, like POW on messages, like super relays(basically a mempool), there's a NIP for timestamps. My guess is that it will evolve towards something that looks a lot like a blockchain. Decentralized Social is one of the few places where a blockchain actually makes sense. This will be interesting because the founding group is ideologically opposed to using a blockchain for anything but the holy BTC.
- digdugdirk 4y ago
  Knowing nothing about this space, can you explain a bit more how/why Nostr is easy to build upon where others aren't?
  - FreeTrade 4y ago
    Other networks can be opinionated about which transactions are valid, whereas Nostr relays will forward any transactions right now.
- monk_cactus 4y ago
  As far as I understand, a blockchain is only needed to achieve consensus on the network state. Why does social media require this?
  - leishman 4y ago
    Nostr doesn’t use a blockchain
    - legutierr 4y ago
gigatexal 4y ago
I don't understand Nostr's comments on trying to be deplatform-proof. On Mastodon, for example, if you get kicked off a node just spin up your own node. If nobody wants to hear you spewing your stuff then you'll soon be screaming into the void but what you post will still be viewable on the web and to those that subscribe to you. So I don't get what Nostr is trying to do.
- larrysalibra 4y ago
  If you get kicked off a mastodon server, you lose your followers and posts unless you're able to move your account before you're kicked off - which requires the cooperation of the server that wants to kick you off. > If nobody wants to hear you spewing your stuff then you'll soon be screaming into the void but what you post will still be viewable on the web and to those that subscribe to you. People who are de-platformed are almost always people who others WANT to hear. Think of all the famous people deplatformed from big tech social media...10s of millions of followers each. It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them. > So I don't get what Nostr is trying to do. It took me a while to get my head around it as well. The intro and faq on the github repo really helped me. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    Nah fam. Trump got kicked off of twitter and the world was better for it. Same with Nick Fuentes. The list goes on.
  - acdha 4y ago
    > It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them. More accurately, it was because they repeatedly broke the terms of service and the companies were no longer willing to use their resources to provide free amplification for them. They had legal agreements with the platform and despite many warnings and leeway which isn’t extended to most people, chose to break the contracts.
snowstormsun 4y ago
Does somebody know whether the same or something similar could be achieved by using the "Network News Transfer Protocol" (nntp), without designing a whole new protocol?
- thinkmassive 4y ago
  From the Wikipedia page: > NNTP is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (netnews) between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. nostr relays are not supposed to connect with other relays (I think to avoid the inevitable concentration of centralized hubs), which is a small but very significant difference
- fiatjaf 4y ago
  What would we gain by doing that?
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Access to the existing NNTP infrastructure. It's not worth it IMO, the state of NNTP servers is quite bad.
  - snowstormsun 4y ago
    Perhaps you could avoid some pitfalls, which only become obvious when the practical application of the protocol is scaled. I have not dived deep into either nntp or nostr, but existing standards might offer useful considerations that could be reused. For example, it seems like nntp exchanges first a list of articles and clients only download the ones they don't have already. Does nostr do something similar? Like being able to get a list of event ids with minimal metadata and clients can selectively request the whole event data afterwards. As events might contain bigger text blobs, that could be important for performance or for adding placeholders to the UI. In general, it seems to me that nostr and nostr clients might need to come up with good strategies for caching and bandwith optimizations, considering the decentralized design. But please correct me if I am wrong.
wcerfgba 4y ago
Is there a threat model? This does not seem to provide any metadata anonymity: if you ask a relay for someone's pubs, they know you're the person asking for it. Perhaps this could be layered with onion routing through relays to sole that though. At which point this feels like cryptographically-addressed NNTP, which is neato!
milansuk 4y ago
Does Nostr have a Wikipedia page? I'm wondering how old is it, the people behind it, some stories?
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
  Not that old, I believe the initial spec was put together last year? Written by a developer named fiatjaf who is also a bitcoin contributor.
leishman 4y ago
We’re building a Nostr relay in Elixir if anyone is interested: https://github.com/RiverFinancial/nostrex https://github.com/RiverFinancial/nostrex
rufusroflpunch 4y ago
I am thoroughly addicted to nostr. I've been building a browser extension for Safari for it, and I feel like I'm part of something amazing being built.

194 points by pantalaimon 4y ago

After reading the page for a bit I don't really understand the fundamental difference to other decentralized systems except for the global public key based identity. Nostr's relays are simply servers that push and receive structured data. So it's a sort of an email or http like protocol that's by default cryptographically signed? I don't really see the magic that makes it censorship resistant or particularly decentralized. The same networking and economic laws that consolidate internet traffic or mastodon servers are at work here too. Relays get popular, produce a lot of traffic, this spawns "nostr as a service" for economic reasons, and that's about it. If people want to ban you they'll just blacklist your public key across popular instances just like someone on the fediverse does, companies won't host your stuff, and so on. If anything tying everything to a single global identity makes it more trivial to blacklist anyone.

CodexArcana 4y ago
Right but if I'm hosting my own mode that only I post to, in conjunction with other nodes, my followers get my posts from my node of im Black listed. I think when you sub to someone you're also sent a list of nodes that a person uses. So when I'm banned you already have my node in your list, so you won't even notice.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

I'm seeing a lot of people not quite understanding what nostr is. I know it can be hard considering this is a crowd focused on products and frameworks and paradigms and what not. It's not a "twitter alternative", it's not "federated like mastodon", it's not even social networking. It's just a spec for a signed message format and a relay server, that's it. It's very, very simple, you generate a key, sign a message, send it to whichever relays you want, it serves them to requestors or not, depending on what it wants to do. That is literally all it is.

ktpsns 4y ago
Funny how similar this sounds to wireguard, the trending yet simple open source VPN technology. Basically the messages are IP packets there ;-)

m348e912 4y ago

I saw Snowden tweeted about this. Anyone have a TLDR on what Nostr is exactly? And how it ties into Bitcoin (if at all)? Update: It seems to be partly a twitter alternative perhaps using lightning network in some way. I set up an account on astral.ninja, created keys, username, saw that there were relays that were defined already. I couldn't see any posts in my feed, and when I tried to make a post it just hung and never posted anything. Suffice to say my initial experience started off okay, then dissapointment.

sph 4y ago
It does not tie into Bitcoin. It's just a very very simple protocol of clients sending and subscribing to pieces of data, and relays that dumbly (i.e. with little processing) send data across connected and subscribed clients. It's like a very minimal version of ActivityPub. It takes an hour to go through the whole spec and addenda. Then Jack Dorsey got interested, gave the project a big grant (in BTC), and a lot of crypto hype flew into it. But while it is a convenient excuse to say "crypto, therefore bad", the protocol is itself completely unrelated and IMO quite neat. There is a lot of potential for systems that anyone can comprehend in their totality in an afternoon.
- larrysalibra 4y ago
  The relationship to bitcoin besides being created by bitcoiners is that it uses Schnorr Signatures for the secp256k1 curve - the same curve as bitcoin. https://bips.xyz/340 https://bips.xyz/340 A Nostr account is identified by a public key, you follow accounts by following public keys and the ability to post as an account is controlled by the corresponding private key.
  - louloulou 4y ago
    Does this mean I could use a bitcoin hardware wallet to store my nostr keys and sign my posts?
    - larrysalibra 4y ago

larrysalibra 4y ago

The best introduction to Nostr is on the Nostr protocol github: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-of-how-it-works-if-you-dont-plan-to-read-anything-else https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o... >Everybody runs a client. It can be a native client, a web client, etc. To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side. The FAQ on the same page also answers questions about why Nostr instead of other options like Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. There's also a recently launched podcast that talks to some developers building on the protocol: https://nostrovia.org https://nostrovia.org

nine_k 4y ago

The biggest problem I see here is forwarding someone else's unknown and unencrypted content. Imagine you're running a relay on your machine, and somebody posts some CSAM, or stolen CC data, or hate speech, etc through your relay. Unlike an email client, your relay actually makes that message available to anyone. Unlike an email relay, you are not forwarding the message to someone else like a dumb pipe; there's no final destination. Unlike a torrent / DHT node, you do not know beforehand what you are going to make available. Unlike a Tor exit node, you do not deal in encrypted fragments which you don't store locally. Unlike an IPFS node, you do not store fragments of files while not even having a full set of such fragments for a given file. Even though the message is signed, you can't reasonably prove that you do not possess the private key used to sign it, or have not possessed. So, if you are an anti-censorship activist, and your machine gets searched (which may be even easier to do in the case of a VPS), you, the runner of the relay, may have some pretty unpleasant time. Even if you manage to convince everyone that you only forward these messages and do not inspect or endorse them, and the authorities will not even fine you, it will cost you time and trouble. Worse, it becomes easy to send something incriminating from a throwaway or stolen client through your relay, and report you to the police. This can of course be done with email or any IM, but these will immediately show you what you've got, so you can e.g. immediately delete it. They do not allow perfect strangers quietly put random stuff onto your disk. Of course the point of the protocol is to resist censorship, so any content deemed criminal by someone cannot be entirely blocked. But the publishers and the receivers of such content make their choice, while those running a relay seem to remain unprotected from from consequences of that choice which they did not make.

drexlspivey 4y ago
[flagged]
- Semaphor 4y ago
  What is? How would this scenario be prevented?
- nine_k 4y ago
  I'd appreciate a bit more detailed answer. If the problem that Nostr solves is, say, posting NYT headlines, pub crawl reports, or cute cat pictures, it's fine, but most centralized tools are also fine. If the problem which Nostr is trying to solve is being censorship-resistant and allow for dissemination of information which is actively being suppressed, relay safety considerations become important. Less safety means fewer relays, and a need of a personal connection / trust to be admitted.

say_it_as_it_is 4y ago

Moderation is an essential part of community management, even in darknets. Trust in what is said and what is promised as part of a transaction is what attracts and retains members of the community. Just because you can create a censorship resistant network doesn't mean you should.

irusensei 4y ago
Nostr is a protocol. Are there moderation functionalities in RSS, SMTP or HTTP? Do matrix and XMPP protocols have some central authority overseeing what server a talks to server b? It’s up to the relays implement their own moderation features and clients filter what they don’t want to see.
- pornel 4y ago
  I don't think these protocols are quite comparable to a Twitter-like "town square" model, so they don't have the same problems. But where they overlap, they do some "censorship": SMTP will delete spam, XMPP servers will kick out spammers and harassers. The problem with Twitter is that unlike RSS, it shows content from people you did not subscribe to (e.g. you get replies, you see strangers' replies to your friend's posts). The content is public, so unlike e-mail, receiving abuse is not just your private problem, but a problem for the network's image and reputation. But in either case, when normal users (not righteous keyboard warriors) find some content to be horrible, they don't want to see it. If they keep being bombarded with unwanted content, they leave. For Mastodon/Twitter/Gab that may be "political" content, but the problem in general is similar to spam.
  - gkbrk 4y ago
    > SMTP will delete spam Can you point to the part on the SMTP RFC that specifies the spam deletion behaviour? > XMPP servers will kick out spammers and harassers Nothing prevents nostr servers from kicking out based on account or IP address or message content > The problem with Twitter is that unlike RSS, it shows content from people you did not subscribe to. This is not Twitter, any client can decide which content to show. And there are clients that do not show any content from people you don't explicitly follow.

lormayna 4y ago

Nostr is very interesting, for some aspects it looks like a decentralized NNTP.

zikduruqe 4y ago

I joined a Nostr relay the other night, and every time I posted a Lightning Node invoice for 100 sats, within minutes I got 2 cents in my wallet. So at least I made some money from this. :) I'm following the project/protocol, it seems interesting. Here are some NIPS https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips

dochtman 4y ago
In NIP-04 I noticed that DMs can be encrypted using AES-CBC. IIUC, this is not a very robust mode for using AES. Seems surprising for a greenfield project.
- snowstormsun 4y ago
  What's wrong with CBC? I think the bigger problem is the symmetric keys are not using a key derivation function and are therefore not uniformly random: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/72 https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/72
  - mprime1 4y ago
    > What's wrong with CBC? It’s not tamper proof, ie signed, unlike GCM > Some modern modes of operation combine confidentiality and authenticity in an efficient way, and are known as authenticated encryption modes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operati... I’d also add: CBC requires padding and GCM does not. Minor convenience.
    - gkbrk 4y ago
      Nostr messages are all signed though. Why would you want two signatures on a message. And if two signatures are better than one, why not 3 signatures?
      - mprime1 4y ago

FreeTrade 4y ago

I'm working on software (member.cash) that bridges multiple decentralized social networks together and recently added support for Nostr. Compared to the others, Nostr is optimized for innovation - it is easy to build new features on top and we'll see a lot of growth and evolution because of that. I really like that about it. The problems I see with it right now are 1. Timestamps are easily forgeable 2. Difficult to control spam 3. Little incentive to run relays 4. Difficult to search the whole network There are ideas on how to solve all of the problems, like POW on messages, like super relays(basically a mempool), there's a NIP for timestamps. My guess is that it will evolve towards something that looks a lot like a blockchain. Decentralized Social is one of the few places where a blockchain actually makes sense. This will be interesting because the founding group is ideologically opposed to using a blockchain for anything but the holy BTC.

digdugdirk 4y ago
Knowing nothing about this space, can you explain a bit more how/why Nostr is easy to build upon where others aren't?
- FreeTrade 4y ago
  Other networks can be opinionated about which transactions are valid, whereas Nostr relays will forward any transactions right now.
monk_cactus 4y ago
As far as I understand, a blockchain is only needed to achieve consensus on the network state. Why does social media require this?
- leishman 4y ago
  Nostr doesn’t use a blockchain
  - legutierr 4y ago

gigatexal 4y ago

I don't understand Nostr's comments on trying to be deplatform-proof. On Mastodon, for example, if you get kicked off a node just spin up your own node. If nobody wants to hear you spewing your stuff then you'll soon be screaming into the void but what you post will still be viewable on the web and to those that subscribe to you. So I don't get what Nostr is trying to do.

larrysalibra 4y ago
If you get kicked off a mastodon server, you lose your followers and posts unless you're able to move your account before you're kicked off - which requires the cooperation of the server that wants to kick you off. > If nobody wants to hear you spewing your stuff then you'll soon be screaming into the void but what you post will still be viewable on the web and to those that subscribe to you. People who are de-platformed are almost always people who others WANT to hear. Think of all the famous people deplatformed from big tech social media...10s of millions of followers each. It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them. > So I don't get what Nostr is trying to do. It took me a while to get my head around it as well. The intro and faq on the github repo really helped me. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
- gigatexal 4y ago
  Nah fam. Trump got kicked off of twitter and the world was better for it. Same with Nick Fuentes. The list goes on.
- acdha 4y ago
  > It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them. More accurately, it was because they repeatedly broke the terms of service and the companies were no longer willing to use their resources to provide free amplification for them. They had legal agreements with the platform and despite many warnings and leeway which isn’t extended to most people, chose to break the contracts.

snowstormsun 4y ago

Does somebody know whether the same or something similar could be achieved by using the "Network News Transfer Protocol" (nntp), without designing a whole new protocol?

thinkmassive 4y ago
From the Wikipedia page: > NNTP is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (netnews) between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. nostr relays are not supposed to connect with other relays (I think to avoid the inevitable concentration of centralized hubs), which is a small but very significant difference
fiatjaf 4y ago
What would we gain by doing that?
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Access to the existing NNTP infrastructure. It's not worth it IMO, the state of NNTP servers is quite bad.
- snowstormsun 4y ago
  Perhaps you could avoid some pitfalls, which only become obvious when the practical application of the protocol is scaled. I have not dived deep into either nntp or nostr, but existing standards might offer useful considerations that could be reused. For example, it seems like nntp exchanges first a list of articles and clients only download the ones they don't have already. Does nostr do something similar? Like being able to get a list of event ids with minimal metadata and clients can selectively request the whole event data afterwards. As events might contain bigger text blobs, that could be important for performance or for adding placeholders to the UI. In general, it seems to me that nostr and nostr clients might need to come up with good strategies for caching and bandwith optimizations, considering the decentralized design. But please correct me if I am wrong.

wcerfgba 4y ago

Is there a threat model? This does not seem to provide any metadata anonymity: if you ask a relay for someone's pubs, they know you're the person asking for it. Perhaps this could be layered with onion routing through relays to sole that though. At which point this feels like cryptographically-addressed NNTP, which is neato!

milansuk 4y ago

Does Nostr have a Wikipedia page? I'm wondering how old is it, the people behind it, some stories?

friend_and_foe 4y ago
Not that old, I believe the initial spec was put together last year? Written by a developer named fiatjaf who is also a bitcoin contributor.

leishman 4y ago

We’re building a Nostr relay in Elixir if anyone is interested: https://github.com/RiverFinancial/nostrex https://github.com/RiverFinancial/nostrex

rufusroflpunch 4y ago

I am thoroughly addicted to nostr. I've been building a browser extension for Safari for it, and I feel like I'm part of something amazing being built.