13 ms·

Nostr.how – A Complete Guide to Nostr

175 points by vmoore 4y ago

legutierr 4y ago
If anyone is interested in trying out Nostr, I would recommend downloading Damus, the iOS client that’s currently available. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131 It’s not perfect, but it feels a lot like the Twitter iOS client, and gives you an idea of what Nostr can become.
- dom96 4y ago
  Why is it designed for iPad? Surely that's always going to be secondary to iPhone use
  - leishman 4y ago
    It works on iPad afaik but isn’t natively built for it. Also works on macOS.
  - lrae 4y ago
    Did you open the link on a Mac (or maybe desktop overall)? If so I think it just prefers to show you if it is also optimized for iPad usage, because the usage on a mac would be closer to that.
- ursuscamp 4y ago
  Also, if you are interested in trying the many web clients, you could try Nostore: https://testflight.apple.com/join/ouPWAQAV https://testflight.apple.com/join/ouPWAQAV It’s a Safari extension that will store your keys and sign events for you, so you don’t need to enter them into every web page. Disclaimer: I wrote it.
- erskingardner 4y ago
  Agreed. Damus is great. Iris.to is probably the easiest to use web client.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > what Nostr can become. A timeline of a single person (Damus) shouting into the void?
  - legutierr 4y ago
    The search function can help you find accounts. Your timeline is generated from who you are following. Follow some people and it gets more interesting.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      I missed the global function. After blocking a bunch of spammers it seems better. Still seems like they generate new PK’s once in a while though, so it’s impossible to keep up.
      - leesalminen 4y ago
        I use global to find some posts of real people, then go through their profile and decide whether to follow or not. Also https://nostr.directory https://nostr.directory helps me find people on Twitter in nostr. Took a bit I’m happy with my normal feed now and use Global less and less.
micro_charm 4y ago
The article doesn't support the claims of how nostr is better than mastodon. From my quick glance at the site, it looks like relays are the equivalent to servers in mastodon, given that it's unclear why relay owners can't also ban you (as they suggest mastodon servers can ban you), why you can't post to multiple mastodon servers simultaneously (similar to broadcasting to multiple relays in nostr) and so on. Nonetheless it's good to see the broader adoption of "account creation as equivalent to public/private key creation" in social media services
- piperswe 4y ago
  With Nostr, your identity isn't attached to a relay, so if one relay doesn't like you other relays will still relay your content, while still keeping your followerbase
  - pointlessone 4y ago
    How would my followers (or whatever they’re called in nostr) know where to get my events from? It seems like optimal strategy is to send to/fetch from every relay possible. Effectively, every relay would host the whole network. In this regard federation seem a little more scalable.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      Yes, this aspect seems problematic. > to "follow" someone a user just instructs their client to query the relays it knows for posts from that public key.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      > How would my followers (or whatever they’re called in nostr) know where to get my events from? I don't know anything about Nostr, but couldn't that easily be solved by adding the relays that you use as a field in your event? Or even using a DHT to find relays that carry content from a particular user?
    - CodexArcana 4y ago
class4behavior 4y ago
The whole premise of Nostr is that you consider your access point hostile, yet its provider is still offering one. That contradiction just incentivizes bad and toxic actors to participate and dominate this network. That's why, it seems, the developers actively conflate what one would expect from a private communication platform and a social media platform. But this isn't an alternative to Mastodon or Twitter, it's an alternative to Berty, Cwtch, Speek, Briar, Anonymous Messenger, and maybe Matrix if you use it for encrypted communication only. It has a legitimate use case for people who may be forced to switch relays very often due to government censorship but still want to continue to talk in public. To anyone else the quality and culture of the moderation system is what defines the quality of their platform, but Nostr undermines the former by design. As such, it comes to no surprise that the free speech warriors from the crypto community are the main drivers of this protocol. It's just a pity that Snowden seems to have become one of them as well - and it isn't that he supports it, but how. He's just repeating the devs' own flawed narrative. Decentralization is the right path forward, but you want social media on federated platforms as you need to take care of communities with enforceable rules and provide a service to users, while for private interpersonal or group communication you can opt to federated or peer-to-peer networks.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  > The whole premise of Nostr is that you consider your access point hostile, yet its provider is still offering one. I'm confused. Doesn't this apply to a lot of projects offering hosting for E2EE services? Why should it be a problem?
  - class4behavior 4y ago
    As I said in my post - if you read it - private communication and social media are not the same. The expectations are different. On a social media platform you want some level of persistence, you want someone to be able to nurture a healthy discussion culture. But if all of your users were just fine, there are barely any advantages over a federated platform where you can migrate; much more disadvantages instead.
- gray_charger 4y ago
lapcat 4y ago
My previous Mastodon instance (mstdn.plus) broke this week, the administrator MIA, leaving 4500 active users including myself unable to move their followers to new instances or even archive their data: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html
- lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
  Mastodon is essentially centralized — you just pick who you trust with full centralized authority before they have a change of heart, fail, begin rent collecting, whatever. Nobody seems to understand how difficult it is to make a system that can guarantee its neutrality within the protocol. (Sorry HN: it requires crypto.)
  - pkulak 4y ago
    Then host your own instance. Your definition of "centralized" as "optionally requiring any trust at all" is pretty broad, and sweeps up even email.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      ActivityPub is a protocol designed for decentralization, but the Mastadon software itself really is not a great option for self hosting. In practical terms, for non-technical users (i.e. the people you need for broad adaptation) self-hosting it is a non-starter. The same is definitely true for email. There are many providers, so "centralized" is a bit of a loose label, but running your own email server comes with non-trivial pitfalls that keep most people away.
      - leesalminen 4y ago
        The `nostr-rs-relay` package is a simple self-contained rust application with a sqlite db that can run in a docker container. Super simple to self-host and if just using it to save your own notes is more than enough. https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay
pointlessone 4y ago
I read everything there and all NIPs (they look like underage RFCs, but also drunk) and I'm a little confused. - The protocol doesn't define a transport but seem to use WebSockets. How does it handle poor/dropping connections? Does it allow usage of alternate transport protocols? - Messages are defined as JSON but doesn't use much of its structure anyway. Some fields are just arrays of values. And even then some parts are just strings with some other arbitrary syntax. Seems like a poor choice. - Message signatures are signatures of stringified JSON. Given that JSON is not particularly well defined to guarantee representation stability are implementation differences handled? - Messages are just sent around without any delivery confirmation. There's a NIP to introduce delivery confirmation from the client to relay. And then there's another NIP to signal completion of messages retrieval from the relay. Both are optional. - It's unclear how to preserve/port data. A relay is supposed to keep (or not) messages and the client is supposed to send messages to multiple relays. But what happens when a relay goes down? Can a client send messages to a new relay? Should the client keep all messages just for such a case? Overall feeling after reading all that is it's XMPP but worse. It's worse defined. It's not quite decentralised as there's a single point of failure: relay. And it's unspecified how to handle demise of a relay and port data to another relay. Signing and encryption is nice but message structure makes me feel dirty. XMPP wasn't inititally meant for a decentralised public messaging but there are a few XEPs that do exactly that, as well as signing and E2E encryption. And all other good stuff like BOSH (XMPP over HTTP), for example.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > It's unclear how to preserve/port data. A relay is supposed to keep (or not) messages and the client is supposed to send messages to multiple relays. But what happens when a relay goes down? Can a client send messages to a new relay? Should the client keep all messages just for such a case? https://www.nostr.how/relays https://www.nostr.how/relays "If all the relays that you have used in the past go offline, all your posts will be unretrievable. This is one reason that Nostr allows users to connect to many relays – this ensures some degree of backup. That said, if you're really interested in being uncensorable, you can run your own personal relay." So clearly, relays are retaining copies of your data. The question is really storage capacity: if nostr becomes popular, will individual relays have enough storage capacity for all of its users?
therein 4y ago
I saw this mentioned somewhere else the other day and checked it out. Seems immature to me, something about the lack of structure in their messages, the loose ties to the type enum that they have for messages, feels as if it is not thoroughly thought out.
- ursuscamp 4y ago
  It’s something we’re building in real time, as we use it. If you visit the NIPs repo, you will see it changing by the idea. As the clients and relays try things, ideas propagate quickly. In that sense it is extremely exciting.
  - therein 4y ago
    It is definitely interesting and exciting, at least the end goal. I am still not sold on the architecture but I want to be. So relays are not able to talk to one another and if I want to be able to interact with another user in any way, we have to be sharing a relay, right? These seem like really strong limitations to me and I am having a hard time understanding why they exist. Why not start with some relay-to-relay capabilities as well like XMPP has?
    - CodexArcana 4y ago
      Relays are not prohibited from communicating with each other. There just isn't a defined and agreed on method to do so. Maybe there never will be. But that doesn't mean you can't build a relay server that has a replication feature. It would simply be proprietary.
    - ursuscamp 4y ago
      I believe multiple relay operators are currently working on R2R communication. It will probably be pretty common soon.
cactusplant7374 4y ago
I was surprised when I learned it's not really related to Bitcoin. I didn't think Jack would support something that isn't adjacent.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  It’s not really related to Bitcoin but it uses the same crypto primitives, schnorr signatures, secp256k1 elliptic curve etc, if you are building for nostr you can reuse the numerous bitcoin libraries. As a result it’s trivial to implement support for lightning network payments.
  - leesalminen 4y ago
    It’s trivial to implement support for Lightning network payments virtually anywhere at this point. Damus isn’t using any crypto primitives directly to have a pay button.
dkobia 4y ago
I’ve been using Nostr, Mastodon and Twitter concurrently for the last few months. Nostr is absolutely fascinating in its simplicity and I really enjoyed writing a Python relay in a few days - more than I should have. My thoughts: - The NIPS are not as rigorously defined as RFC's but this is a vibrant community and things are taking shape. - Relay scaling will be a problem, something Mastodon has discovered with the Twitter migration. The Damus app launch this week brought many relays to their knees. Inevitably as scale becomes necessary relays will centralize. - Spam, which is free speech in itself, is getting out of control in the relays. Proof of work regulates bots but not crypto spammers. - The relay construct while powerful, makes it difficult to build real communities with real constructive discourse, which requires some form of moderation. Some might call this censorship.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  As it is it seems like very basic spam measures would be enough to cut down on almost all the spam in relays.
  - leesalminen 4y ago
    Damus recently added a Report button. This button broadcasts a new event of a specific kind to relays with the offending note ID. Other relays/clients are free to take spam measures with this user generated data.
erskingardner 4y ago
I’m the dev behind Nostr.how. I’d love to hear your feedback on how I can make the site more clear/better at explaining Nostr. That said, while I am not the core dev on the protocol or any client/relay it’s been awesome to see the points of confusion from the comments and questions here. Keep them coming - great fodder for new guides.
- jasonjmcghee 4y ago
  Search doesn't seem to work for me. There are always no results.
  - leesalminen 4y ago
    Check out https://nostrview.com/search https://nostrview.com/search for a nostr search engine and https://nostr.net https://nostr.net for a list of various things built on nostr.
  - erskingardner 4y ago
    Still waiting on the Algolia docsearch team to get me some api keys.
blendergeek 4y ago
I have one question. Does Nostr involve a Blockchain?
- klabb3 4y ago
  I don’t think so. Blockchain is an append-only log with consensus, and Nostr doesn’t need the consensus part because it’s not harmful if clients disagree about the state of the data. However, client data is signed with Nostr which is awesome, so you can easily tell whether something is legit. If a client or a relay misbehaves it’d be very easy to tell. I really love this architecture.
  - grapesurgeon 4y ago
    [dead]
- CodexArcana 4y ago
  No. Some clients include the ability to make lightning transactions via them but that's not part of the protocol.
- anothernostrich 4y ago
  IMHO blockchain is an ugly terrible solution to a problem that had no other solution. The chain just gets bigger never smaller, requires expensive proof of work, requires complex synchronization protocols. Why so many people want to copy the worst part of bitcoin for their new billion dollar startup idea has always been beyond me. No, nostr does not have a blockchain.
- antisocialist 4y ago
  No, which is why it lacks incentives i.e. no economic reason to run relay nodes to store and transmit data.
grapesurgeon 4y ago
[dead]
Aeolun 4y ago
People have a lot of complaints, but fact is I can understand this ‘protocol’ without any effort in 5 minutes. Only Gemini came close, but even though that was technically simpler it still wasn’t as intuitive as just saying ‘use JSON’.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
drowsspa 4y ago
Honestly, I don't get the fuss about these "libertarian-inspired social network protocols". It's not like the technical side of social media is the tough one: it's always been the political and sociological one. In the end, most people aren't hardcore libertarians and do want content moderation, centralized discovery, spam blocking... I would really find it interesting if it came about a protocol that actually cared about those things and provided a way to handle them other than a megacorp doing all of it. But all those protocols operate under the assumption that people are okay with seeing really bad things that real people come up with (even CP like commented elsewhere in this thread) themselves under the guise of "full decentralized liberty". I suspect that's why they all ultimately fail or at least remain niche things. If the alternative to megacorps is this wild west, people will remain in the megacorps' social media.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  it's not even a social networking protocol, it's literally just a networking protocol for the reasons you laid out. And of course all the dynamics you talk about emerge naturally. With scale comes concentration and hierarchies out of necessity, the power to blocklist 'relays' across the largest instances, etc. All these experiments basically are a venture in rediscovering economics and politics. The internet started out decentralized. Reinventing html and web servers isn't changing anything.
- FireInsight 4y ago
  A good Mastodon instance can certanly provide what you say most people'd want. Since it's activitypub, you wont be locked in to mastodon only. And since it's foss, account migration will probably be worked on as it's the #1 critique of Mastodon (aside of onboarding).
  - dchnshA 4y ago
    Mastodon already has account migration and had it for a long time.
    - leesalminen 4y ago
newswasboring 4y ago
With the rise in decentralized social networks I was expecting a lot more tastemakers to emerge. People who are not influencers in the current sense but more like old social column writers which told us the best clubs or restaurants in the city. Are there people publishing list of people worth following or something along those lines?
anonymousnotme 4y ago
I went to: https://www.nostr.how/ https://www.nostr.how/ Then went to: https://www.nostr.how/get-started https://www.nostr.how/get-started It has a link near the bottom for client comparision: https://www.nostr.how/clients/comparison https://www.nostr.how/clients/comparison The return code for that page is 404.
antisocialist 4y ago
Nostr "relay" nodes have no economic incentive to relay and store data. Because of that, authors and readers of least popular opinions - which may be legal content that's censored elsewhere - are most likely to be easily identified and tracked. No incentive to store data, no incentive to relay data, weak privacy, no censorship resistance, relay nodes may be legally responsible for knowingly relaying data from accounts censored by the rest of the network, etc. For Nostr relay nodes it's like running a Tor Exit node where you may be the only exit node for illegal content. And for users it's like using Tor to browse the Internet thinking your metadata isn't being captured, without knowing there's just 1 or 2 exit nodes out there. There are no privacy and pseudo-anonymity advantages over "Twitter over Tor".

175 points by vmoore 4y ago

If anyone is interested in trying out Nostr, I would recommend downloading Damus, the iOS client that’s currently available. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/damus/id1628663131 It’s not perfect, but it feels a lot like the Twitter iOS client, and gives you an idea of what Nostr can become.

dom96 4y ago
Why is it designed for iPad? Surely that's always going to be secondary to iPhone use
- leishman 4y ago
  It works on iPad afaik but isn’t natively built for it. Also works on macOS.
- lrae 4y ago
  Did you open the link on a Mac (or maybe desktop overall)? If so I think it just prefers to show you if it is also optimized for iPad usage, because the usage on a mac would be closer to that.
ursuscamp 4y ago
Also, if you are interested in trying the many web clients, you could try Nostore: https://testflight.apple.com/join/ouPWAQAV https://testflight.apple.com/join/ouPWAQAV It’s a Safari extension that will store your keys and sign events for you, so you don’t need to enter them into every web page. Disclaimer: I wrote it.
erskingardner 4y ago
Agreed. Damus is great. Iris.to is probably the easiest to use web client.
Aeolun 4y ago
> what Nostr can become. A timeline of a single person (Damus) shouting into the void?
- legutierr 4y ago
  The search function can help you find accounts. Your timeline is generated from who you are following. Follow some people and it gets more interesting.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I missed the global function. After blocking a bunch of spammers it seems better. Still seems like they generate new PK’s once in a while though, so it’s impossible to keep up.
    - leesalminen 4y ago
      I use global to find some posts of real people, then go through their profile and decide whether to follow or not. Also https://nostr.directory https://nostr.directory helps me find people on Twitter in nostr. Took a bit I’m happy with my normal feed now and use Global less and less.

micro_charm 4y ago

The article doesn't support the claims of how nostr is better than mastodon. From my quick glance at the site, it looks like relays are the equivalent to servers in mastodon, given that it's unclear why relay owners can't also ban you (as they suggest mastodon servers can ban you), why you can't post to multiple mastodon servers simultaneously (similar to broadcasting to multiple relays in nostr) and so on. Nonetheless it's good to see the broader adoption of "account creation as equivalent to public/private key creation" in social media services

piperswe 4y ago
With Nostr, your identity isn't attached to a relay, so if one relay doesn't like you other relays will still relay your content, while still keeping your followerbase
- pointlessone 4y ago
  How would my followers (or whatever they’re called in nostr) know where to get my events from? It seems like optimal strategy is to send to/fetch from every relay possible. Effectively, every relay would host the whole network. In this regard federation seem a little more scalable.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    Yes, this aspect seems problematic. > to "follow" someone a user just instructs their client to query the relays it knows for posts from that public key.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > How would my followers (or whatever they’re called in nostr) know where to get my events from? I don't know anything about Nostr, but couldn't that easily be solved by adding the relays that you use as a field in your event? Or even using a DHT to find relays that carry content from a particular user?
  - CodexArcana 4y ago

class4behavior 4y ago

The whole premise of Nostr is that you consider your access point hostile, yet its provider is still offering one. That contradiction just incentivizes bad and toxic actors to participate and dominate this network. That's why, it seems, the developers actively conflate what one would expect from a private communication platform and a social media platform. But this isn't an alternative to Mastodon or Twitter, it's an alternative to Berty, Cwtch, Speek, Briar, Anonymous Messenger, and maybe Matrix if you use it for encrypted communication only. It has a legitimate use case for people who may be forced to switch relays very often due to government censorship but still want to continue to talk in public. To anyone else the quality and culture of the moderation system is what defines the quality of their platform, but Nostr undermines the former by design. As such, it comes to no surprise that the free speech warriors from the crypto community are the main drivers of this protocol. It's just a pity that Snowden seems to have become one of them as well - and it isn't that he supports it, but how. He's just repeating the devs' own flawed narrative. Decentralization is the right path forward, but you want social media on federated platforms as you need to take care of communities with enforceable rules and provide a service to users, while for private interpersonal or group communication you can opt to federated or peer-to-peer networks.

solarkraft 4y ago
> The whole premise of Nostr is that you consider your access point hostile, yet its provider is still offering one. I'm confused. Doesn't this apply to a lot of projects offering hosting for E2EE services? Why should it be a problem?
- class4behavior 4y ago
  As I said in my post - if you read it - private communication and social media are not the same. The expectations are different. On a social media platform you want some level of persistence, you want someone to be able to nurture a healthy discussion culture. But if all of your users were just fine, there are barely any advantages over a federated platform where you can migrate; much more disadvantages instead.
gray_charger 4y ago

lapcat 4y ago

My previous Mastodon instance (mstdn.plus) broke this week, the administrator MIA, leaving 4500 active users including myself unable to move their followers to new instances or even archive their data: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
Mastodon is essentially centralized — you just pick who you trust with full centralized authority before they have a change of heart, fail, begin rent collecting, whatever. Nobody seems to understand how difficult it is to make a system that can guarantee its neutrality within the protocol. (Sorry HN: it requires crypto.)
- pkulak 4y ago
  Then host your own instance. Your definition of "centralized" as "optionally requiring any trust at all" is pretty broad, and sweeps up even email.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    ActivityPub is a protocol designed for decentralization, but the Mastadon software itself really is not a great option for self hosting. In practical terms, for non-technical users (i.e. the people you need for broad adaptation) self-hosting it is a non-starter. The same is definitely true for email. There are many providers, so "centralized" is a bit of a loose label, but running your own email server comes with non-trivial pitfalls that keep most people away.
    - leesalminen 4y ago
      The `nostr-rs-relay` package is a simple self-contained rust application with a sqlite db that can run in a docker container. Super simple to self-host and if just using it to save your own notes is more than enough. https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay

pointlessone 4y ago

I read everything there and all NIPs (they look like underage RFCs, but also drunk) and I'm a little confused. - The protocol doesn't define a transport but seem to use WebSockets. How does it handle poor/dropping connections? Does it allow usage of alternate transport protocols? - Messages are defined as JSON but doesn't use much of its structure anyway. Some fields are just arrays of values. And even then some parts are just strings with some other arbitrary syntax. Seems like a poor choice. - Message signatures are signatures of stringified JSON. Given that JSON is not particularly well defined to guarantee representation stability are implementation differences handled? - Messages are just sent around without any delivery confirmation. There's a NIP to introduce delivery confirmation from the client to relay. And then there's another NIP to signal completion of messages retrieval from the relay. Both are optional. - It's unclear how to preserve/port data. A relay is supposed to keep (or not) messages and the client is supposed to send messages to multiple relays. But what happens when a relay goes down? Can a client send messages to a new relay? Should the client keep all messages just for such a case? Overall feeling after reading all that is it's XMPP but worse. It's worse defined. It's not quite decentralised as there's a single point of failure: relay. And it's unspecified how to handle demise of a relay and port data to another relay. Signing and encryption is nice but message structure makes me feel dirty. XMPP wasn't inititally meant for a decentralised public messaging but there are a few XEPs that do exactly that, as well as signing and E2E encryption. And all other good stuff like BOSH (XMPP over HTTP), for example.

lapcat 4y ago
> It's unclear how to preserve/port data. A relay is supposed to keep (or not) messages and the client is supposed to send messages to multiple relays. But what happens when a relay goes down? Can a client send messages to a new relay? Should the client keep all messages just for such a case? https://www.nostr.how/relays https://www.nostr.how/relays "If all the relays that you have used in the past go offline, all your posts will be unretrievable. This is one reason that Nostr allows users to connect to many relays – this ensures some degree of backup. That said, if you're really interested in being uncensorable, you can run your own personal relay." So clearly, relays are retaining copies of your data. The question is really storage capacity: if nostr becomes popular, will individual relays have enough storage capacity for all of its users?

therein 4y ago

I saw this mentioned somewhere else the other day and checked it out. Seems immature to me, something about the lack of structure in their messages, the loose ties to the type enum that they have for messages, feels as if it is not thoroughly thought out.

ursuscamp 4y ago
It’s something we’re building in real time, as we use it. If you visit the NIPs repo, you will see it changing by the idea. As the clients and relays try things, ideas propagate quickly. In that sense it is extremely exciting.
- therein 4y ago
  It is definitely interesting and exciting, at least the end goal. I am still not sold on the architecture but I want to be. So relays are not able to talk to one another and if I want to be able to interact with another user in any way, we have to be sharing a relay, right? These seem like really strong limitations to me and I am having a hard time understanding why they exist. Why not start with some relay-to-relay capabilities as well like XMPP has?
  - CodexArcana 4y ago
    Relays are not prohibited from communicating with each other. There just isn't a defined and agreed on method to do so. Maybe there never will be. But that doesn't mean you can't build a relay server that has a replication feature. It would simply be proprietary.
  - ursuscamp 4y ago
    I believe multiple relay operators are currently working on R2R communication. It will probably be pretty common soon.

cactusplant7374 4y ago

I was surprised when I learned it's not really related to Bitcoin. I didn't think Jack would support something that isn't adjacent.

drexlspivey 4y ago
It’s not really related to Bitcoin but it uses the same crypto primitives, schnorr signatures, secp256k1 elliptic curve etc, if you are building for nostr you can reuse the numerous bitcoin libraries. As a result it’s trivial to implement support for lightning network payments.
- leesalminen 4y ago
  It’s trivial to implement support for Lightning network payments virtually anywhere at this point. Damus isn’t using any crypto primitives directly to have a pay button.

dkobia 4y ago

I’ve been using Nostr, Mastodon and Twitter concurrently for the last few months. Nostr is absolutely fascinating in its simplicity and I really enjoyed writing a Python relay in a few days - more than I should have. My thoughts: - The NIPS are not as rigorously defined as RFC's but this is a vibrant community and things are taking shape. - Relay scaling will be a problem, something Mastodon has discovered with the Twitter migration. The Damus app launch this week brought many relays to their knees. Inevitably as scale becomes necessary relays will centralize. - Spam, which is free speech in itself, is getting out of control in the relays. Proof of work regulates bots but not crypto spammers. - The relay construct while powerful, makes it difficult to build real communities with real constructive discourse, which requires some form of moderation. Some might call this censorship.

Aeolun 4y ago
As it is it seems like very basic spam measures would be enough to cut down on almost all the spam in relays.
- leesalminen 4y ago
  Damus recently added a Report button. This button broadcasts a new event of a specific kind to relays with the offending note ID. Other relays/clients are free to take spam measures with this user generated data.

erskingardner 4y ago

I’m the dev behind Nostr.how. I’d love to hear your feedback on how I can make the site more clear/better at explaining Nostr. That said, while I am not the core dev on the protocol or any client/relay it’s been awesome to see the points of confusion from the comments and questions here. Keep them coming - great fodder for new guides.

jasonjmcghee 4y ago
Search doesn't seem to work for me. There are always no results.
- leesalminen 4y ago
  Check out https://nostrview.com/search https://nostrview.com/search for a nostr search engine and https://nostr.net https://nostr.net for a list of various things built on nostr.
- erskingardner 4y ago
  Still waiting on the Algolia docsearch team to get me some api keys.

blendergeek 4y ago

I have one question. Does Nostr involve a Blockchain?

klabb3 4y ago
I don’t think so. Blockchain is an append-only log with consensus, and Nostr doesn’t need the consensus part because it’s not harmful if clients disagree about the state of the data. However, client data is signed with Nostr which is awesome, so you can easily tell whether something is legit. If a client or a relay misbehaves it’d be very easy to tell. I really love this architecture.
- grapesurgeon 4y ago
  [dead]
CodexArcana 4y ago
No. Some clients include the ability to make lightning transactions via them but that's not part of the protocol.
anothernostrich 4y ago
IMHO blockchain is an ugly terrible solution to a problem that had no other solution. The chain just gets bigger never smaller, requires expensive proof of work, requires complex synchronization protocols. Why so many people want to copy the worst part of bitcoin for their new billion dollar startup idea has always been beyond me. No, nostr does not have a blockchain.
antisocialist 4y ago
No, which is why it lacks incentives i.e. no economic reason to run relay nodes to store and transmit data.

grapesurgeon 4y ago

[dead]

Aeolun 4y ago

People have a lot of complaints, but fact is I can understand this ‘protocol’ without any effort in 5 minutes. Only Gemini came close, but even though that was technically simpler it still wasn’t as intuitive as just saying ‘use JSON’.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

drowsspa 4y ago

Honestly, I don't get the fuss about these "libertarian-inspired social network protocols". It's not like the technical side of social media is the tough one: it's always been the political and sociological one. In the end, most people aren't hardcore libertarians and do want content moderation, centralized discovery, spam blocking... I would really find it interesting if it came about a protocol that actually cared about those things and provided a way to handle them other than a megacorp doing all of it. But all those protocols operate under the assumption that people are okay with seeing really bad things that real people come up with (even CP like commented elsewhere in this thread) themselves under the guise of "full decentralized liberty". I suspect that's why they all ultimately fail or at least remain niche things. If the alternative to megacorps is this wild west, people will remain in the megacorps' social media.

Barrin92 4y ago
it's not even a social networking protocol, it's literally just a networking protocol for the reasons you laid out. And of course all the dynamics you talk about emerge naturally. With scale comes concentration and hierarchies out of necessity, the power to blocklist 'relays' across the largest instances, etc. All these experiments basically are a venture in rediscovering economics and politics. The internet started out decentralized. Reinventing html and web servers isn't changing anything.
FireInsight 4y ago
A good Mastodon instance can certanly provide what you say most people'd want. Since it's activitypub, you wont be locked in to mastodon only. And since it's foss, account migration will probably be worked on as it's the #1 critique of Mastodon (aside of onboarding).
- dchnshA 4y ago
  Mastodon already has account migration and had it for a long time.
  - leesalminen 4y ago

newswasboring 4y ago

With the rise in decentralized social networks I was expecting a lot more tastemakers to emerge. People who are not influencers in the current sense but more like old social column writers which told us the best clubs or restaurants in the city. Are there people publishing list of people worth following or something along those lines?

anonymousnotme 4y ago

I went to: https://www.nostr.how/ https://www.nostr.how/ Then went to: https://www.nostr.how/get-started https://www.nostr.how/get-started It has a link near the bottom for client comparision: https://www.nostr.how/clients/comparison https://www.nostr.how/clients/comparison The return code for that page is 404.

antisocialist 4y ago

Nostr "relay" nodes have no economic incentive to relay and store data. Because of that, authors and readers of least popular opinions - which may be legal content that's censored elsewhere - are most likely to be easily identified and tracked. No incentive to store data, no incentive to relay data, weak privacy, no censorship resistance, relay nodes may be legally responsible for knowingly relaying data from accounts censored by the rest of the network, etc. For Nostr relay nodes it's like running a Tor Exit node where you may be the only exit node for illegal content. And for users it's like using Tor to browse the Internet thinking your metadata isn't being captured, without knowing there's just 1 or 2 exit nodes out there. There are no privacy and pseudo-anonymity advantages over "Twitter over Tor".