9 ms·

Nostr

393 points by dtj1123 1y ago

staticelf 1y ago
I like the idea of nostr but when I tried to use it it was a lot of CP which made me instantly stop using it. I guess the issue with this type of protocols is that there must be a way to prevent these very dark and illegal content. As a user I don't want to see it and the submitter should be found and jailed for distributing it. Right now, it's hard to know where it even comes from since it can come from any of the relay you are connected to. Most apps do not show which relay the content originates from and honestly, what can you do? I guess one solution is to only use paid relayes or heavily restricted ones that require invitation. But if that is the case, it kind of defeats the purpose of Nostr to begin with IMO.
- nunobrito 1y ago
  That statement is wrong at best scenario and fake at worst. I'm a long time user of NOSTR. When you enter the network through any of the main clients you will only see curated topics (trending). The WoT assures that the best content comes up.
  - stonogo 1y ago
    I had almost exactly the same experience and lost interest for the same reason. Am I wrong or fake?
    - Geep5 1y ago
      Same experience here, im still trying to but that's tough to get past.
    - nunobrito 1y ago
      Either of them. I can't even fathom how this would be your first time experience there, other people here on this topic confirm that it doesn't happen. If you feel that is wrong, please describe the steps to replicate such situation.
      - stonogo 1y ago
        Happy to help. Step 1: In 2023, notice a crypto spam post on Mastodon with a weird account name. Step 2: Look up what could have made that post, which was bridged from some other service. Step 3: Set up a key, grab a client (I used a web client that deployed to Netlify's free tier). Step 4: Follow some howtos, add relays, follow some accounts that repeat other accounts, try to figure out how discovery works. Step 5: Start seeing really disturbing content. Step 6: Delete all this stuff, and write it off in the same bucket as Freenet. Step 7: Wait some years. Step 8: Get called a liar on a web forum.
        t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
        What relays were you on? I have never seen CP on nostr. Did you start off following the crypto spammer mentioned or that was just what caused you to find nostr? I'd be curious how you built your initial follow list, as that and the relays you were on is the source of what you see. Kind of like if you go to weird ass websites you'll see that content, but nostr itself doesn't expose anything to a user, it's only a network for content read/write.
        stonogo 1y ago
        I did not keep detailed notes, but there were a couple Gists and a couple blogs that listed relays and stuff to follow. I'm perfectly willing to accept that there was bad stuff in thoses lists, but I don't really care about the mechanisms behind it. Easier just to move on.
        nunobrito 1y ago
        Come on, so much effort writing and yet so vague. The easiest way to try NOSTR is using any of the common web platforms like https://primal.net https://primal.net or https://yakihonne.com/ https://yakihonne.com/ Heck, you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years. It is very unbelievable that you followed such a complicated process, even went to effort of deploying to a server (what?!?) and then somehow you see disturbing content without looking explicitly for it. In case you are sincere, try it again using any of the common methods.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    Yeah, when a layperson says $SOCIAL_MEDIA is full of child pornography, it often just means legal anime content that would be on advertisements everywhere in Tokyo, especially anime contents that are LESS explicitly sexualized. This happens because Japan always has disproportionately massive online presence with significantly better democratized attention engineering, and so content selections naturally mimic a crossing at Akihabara(despite it almost has been entirely superseded by Chinese tech cultural centers such as Shenzhen), not the Times Square(in NYC), which infuriates a lot of somewhat vocal people. And, the reason why I must bring this up is that it is not merely it is inaccurate labeling, but it is also counter productive to not face it straight on. Such as, people would move away from pornography, making it less actually pornographic, which is more child-pornographic by the standards of people using this term in this manner, because that is what are considered LESS sexualized contents by its producers, which by the way exist in orders of millions in Japan and leaking out fast into Asia at large. TLDR. Hating anime, fine. Just don't call it CP. Your words sound opposite of intent. That's what brought us here. So stop.
    - staticelf 1y ago
      1. I am not a layperson. I used nostr while it was still under active development and when it only had a few NIPs finished. 2. I have been to Japan several times, I know the difference between anime/hentai/lolita and stuff like that. This is not what I was experiencing. 3. I have nothing against pornography in general. The issue is that when people bring up shit like this, we are not taken seriously and this hurts projects like nostr. It will never reach momentum if no steps are taken to prevent illegal material and dark shit like CP. Calling me a liar makes me believe that you are intentionally are downplaying the experiences I and others have, which is helping pedophiles and similar people share their illegal content freely and without consequences. Why I do not know and you should seriously think about it and stop.
      - numpad0 1y ago
        - The smaller group says they see TONS of $thing, - the larger group says they see NONE of $thing, - both are looking at the EXACT same thing. -> The disagreement is in the definition of $thing. It can't get clearer. How else would you explain it? Either you're lying(I guess not), or your definition is way off, or those secret underground organizations made some mistake and their secret Facebook group illegal content leaked out(no such thing on Nostr). By far the most likely scenario is that you're grouping from traffic cones to boxes of oranges to parrots in a forest into the exact same category of offensive contents by standards that nobody else could even understand.
  - staticelf 1y ago
    What exactly is wrong about my statement? Stating that my experience is wrong is stupid. I don't know how the app I used works. I simply used the "Snort" app, connected to a few relays and did not use it for a couple of months. Then I came back and instantly saw CP freely shared. Instantly removed the app from the phone. You can't say that it don't exist when people like me have seen it with their own set of eyes. This only makes protocols/projects like nostr set to fail, since regular people won't fucking care and just think of the nostr as something pedophiles are using, which they would not be incorrect in thinking at this moment. I was betting on nostr in the beginning, I was running my own relay and started on a nostr client. But I gave up since clients came popping up everywhere so I didn't really have time to compete.
- photios 1y ago
  That's quite the bold faced lie. I've been on nostr for years and it's been pretty friendly and never offensive.
  - BoorishBears 1y ago
    3 people have shared this experience in the thread. Is there a fundamental reason this wouldn't be true? Isn't it a place where people can anonymously share multimedia with minimal moderation? In my experience even the most toy application exposed to the wider internet will face this issue.
    - nunobrito 1y ago
      Everytime NOSTR is mentioned there are people from other networks coming here to spread FUD. The best thing is asking them to provide steps for replicating their claims, which they won't since it is the not the common user experience at all.
      - immibis 1y ago
        Everything I don't like is FUD.
      - 0xAFFFF 1y ago
        Every time a crypto user faces criticism over their favorite technology they frame it as FUD. Quite a marvel of nature.
        nunobrito 1y ago
        Not really. Cryptos are born out of criticism for current systems and they are an ever evolving technology fueled by those same critics. What doesn't make sense is when the other party starts making stories just to tarnish other competing technologies. Just now the OP was asked to provide details to replicate his findings and those were indeed very "fuzzy" to say the least.
- nothankyou777 1y ago
  [dead]
- the_real_cher 1y ago
  Its horrible but that kind of content means theres no censorship. Its on the individual to block that kind of stuff.
  - yellowapple 1y ago
    The problem is that in many jurisdictions (including the ones to which the vast majority of HN users are likely subject), by the time you've received “that kind of stuff” you're already in legal hot water.
- hardran3 1y ago
  Anytime I see something that is NSFW it is from the fediverse bridge.
- digitalbase 1y ago
  I think this is a real problem of "an open network". Disgusting people will find the network and abuse it. There is a very insightful thread on nostr about it -> https://asknostr.site/question/note1lhvk3kkmaev6qzlpzzns69vwgdh4s0vh48scux9h4flnv5ztd0ks9484a8 https://asknostr.site/question/note1lhvk3kkmaev6qzlpzzns69vw... The top voted answer was > Relays have to become more whitelisted and less open, and clients have to implement outbox model and stop relying on 2 or 3 big relays, then we can just stop worrying about this.
  - sebastix 1y ago
    > I think this is a real problem of "an open network". Disgusting people will find the network and abuse it. Question. Do you prefer open or closed networks? I'm sure you are aware that the internet is an open network.
- jasonvorhe 1y ago
  It's a more censorship resistant platform, of course it'll see some spam. If this happens, you'll see lots of outrage, people see it as a way to test out and improve WoT. The content (images, videos) itself is often quickly removed by blossom/media relay runners, especially if people report it and once they're cleared the spam notes are basically worthless to anyone because they're just dead links and spammy/abusive hashtags. Due to the hashtags is still quite easy to purge them. I run my own relay and self reported it whenever one of these notes or uploads hit my systems. I built a quick shell script using AI to take care of almost all of that.
camillomiller 1y ago
I find open protocols the most naive endeavour in tech nowadays. The reason why social media protocols work is because the incentive is to have them siloed, controlled, and artificially convincing people through algorithmic suggestions that posting what they had for lunch is somewhat interesting. These protocols seem to think that people actually want an alternative to what Instagram, Facebook, X etc. give them. They don't, we all just want the comfort of our own little bubble and a constant feeling of perceived fame. The rest, and all the talk about the protocol that underlines this is just fluff for nerds that will have zero impact in a society dominated by tech capital. Do you wanna change social media? Try and find and effective way to bring them down.
- immibis 1y ago
  I downvoted this because I don't like the way it makes me feel.
  - camillomiller 1y ago
    That is admitting that you downvoted against the exact rules of HN, but suit yourself :D
- Quindecillion 1y ago
  Do you have any suggestions for an effective way to bring them down? Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?
  - camillomiller 1y ago
    Pushing for strict regulation that forces them to have disclaimers like cigarettes, and treating them officially like the public health disaster they are. The free market, despite what the capitalistic religion leads you to think, is still not the only option.
  - digitalbase 1y ago
    My approach for bringing them down is working on better systems/UX than what the closed-silos currently offer...And we have a long way to go. But...Nostr (and other decentralised social media protocols) can offer things the existing platforms can not do: interoperability. Imagine the people you follow to be the same from FB, to strava, to spotify... Imagine the content (signed notes) you make are available on different clients/platforms That UX, perhaps for use-cases and projects we can't imagine today will be so much better than what we have today. I've tasted a little bit of just that switching between my Nostr twitter-like client (Primal/Yakihonne) and the Podcast app (foundtain.fm). It blew my mind. This opens use cases the existing platforms can only dream about.
TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
Last time I tried navigating the Nostr ecosystem I found their Twitter-equivalent platform and it was full of people posting about cryptocurrencies and other topics that weren't of particular interest to me. Are there any major figures of interest primarily participating on any Nostr platform? Or is there any kind of uniquely interesting content that is being primarily produced and shared on Nostr?
- littlecranky67 1y ago
  Nostr doesn't have an "algorithm" that tries to find posts that you engage with. You should follow your own list of people, and then you will see their content. There are some clients trying to be more smart, though. The "algorithm" in any social media is a blessing and a curse. Nostr shifts the responsibility of what to show to the clients.
  - TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
    Right, and I'm asking if there any interesting figures primarily using this platform to share interesting content because I don't know of any, and I didn't find any niches that were best served by this platform. In the past, the way that I would typically get to know people online was either through niche topic-specific forums or IRC channels. Then eventually if we got to know each other well enough, we would connect on other platforms. The modern version of this seems to be Discord. These platforms are all topic focused, rather than being user-first. Discoverability is important! And one of the limitations of search or tag based discoverability is that you're limited to finding things which you already know about. But it doesn't help you find new things that you don't know about! This doesn't mean that algorithmic discoverability is the only option, for example: you could find some way to map the user's interest spaces and search for unexplored or undiscovered nodes.
    - littlecranky67 1y ago
      Nostr supports #hashtags just as twitter.
    - 1y ago
christoph123 1y ago
What's a good place to get started? Any favorite apps from these? https://nostrapps.com/ https://nostrapps.com/
- nunobrito 1y ago
  https://yakihonne.com/ https://yakihonne.com/ tends to be a good experience for browser and has apps, after that https://primal.net https://primal.net is also quite good as introduction since their UI is similar to what you are used in other platforms. Then there is https://www.amethyst.social/ https://www.amethyst.social/ which is excellent because it brings out more of the potential of the platform.
  - hardran3 1y ago
    Both good choices. Amethyst is a great choice for Android. Jumble.social is a good web client.
  - cropcirclbureau 1y ago
    Word of warning: was blasted with NSFW on the first page of that link.
    - nunobrito 1y ago
      No you didn't. Please stop the FUD. You and your 3 friends tend to do the same every time NOSTR is mentioned just because you use another platform. Please be honest and admit the affiliation.
      - oblongdefeat 1y ago
        I just went to Yakihonne while not logged in -- it took me to the Home "Global" feed. Scrolling down a bit to see what was there I was met with a link to "HD Porn Videos" and the preview image was essentially a frame from whatever video was being promoted. I wasn't "blasted" with NSFW but it was definitely present (and not very far down the feed). And the feed seems to be chronologically ordered, so depending on your timing something like that could be front and center.
littlecranky67 1y ago
Glad to see Nostr on top of HN. It is in its infancy, but Nostr allows for "zapps" (basically sending instant micropayments via bitcoin-lightning) - so instead of using ads and dubious algorithms, you can show your appreciation to content creators by small payments. This is a model for an ad-free, decentralized social media system.
- anon1395 1y ago
  Bitcoin is regulated as hell
  - littlecranky67 1y ago
    As far as I understand as a non-US citizen, the recent presidential bills anchor your (US citizen-) right to deal in bitcoin between private entities. So the "good" kind of regulation.
  - nunobrito 1y ago
    Not everyone there is a bitcoin boomer. You'll find plenty of monero users and things that are a bit more serious than that.
    - littlecranky67 1y ago
      It is noteworthy that zapps are based on lightning (which is Layer-2 for bitcoin), and similar in privacy as monero (and instantaneous).
      - mettamage 1y ago
        Does lightning work now? A few years ago, I remember they had quite some difficulties. Maybe I should brush up my knowledge.
        nunobrito 1y ago
        It is OK for small amounts like paying a coffee or a few cents. Not reliable for larger values.
lukaslukas 1y ago
I don't understand. Can someone explain it to me from a technical/IT perspective? Is it like HTTP or JSON, or like XMPP...? "An open protocol with a chance of working" = ?huh? "Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech"" = ???huh? "BEEP BOOP" ???wtf?? Please don't explain technical things as if you were talking to children. Explain them as if you were talking to a colleague sitting next to you. Talk to them as a person and as a professional.
- littlecranky67 1y ago
  Nostr is decentrialized, working with public/private keys. there is a very basic message format, messages are sent to "relays" that forward and store messages to other relays. It is up to the relays (anybody can be a relay) to connect to each others, chose a policy what/whose content to forward, whom to grant access, and how long to store and re-broadcast messages. If you are familiar with the IRC chat system, it is similar to IRC but with JSON messages and the ability to store & resend messages on the servers. Servers have to connect to each other and are free to each have their own policies.
- nunobrito 1y ago
  It is basically email on steroids. You write an email (note/message) but instead of sending it to one server, you can send it to multiple servers of your choice. Each message is digitally signed with your keys and a time stamp, so you can verify that the identity is truly yours no matter where the message came from. In my opinion is the most innovative way of communicating that I've seen in the last 20 years. There is no concept of server nor permanent location. A relay can refuse to receive your messages, but they can't block your account because you can always write new notes, sign them and send to wherever people want to read your texts. Imagine the case with Trump when he got blocked from Twitter. With a click of a button they have deplatformed him, with NOSTR he would have just continued writing and people would simply tune to another relay to keep reading his texts. On top of that are other good developments. For example, file sharing also became decentralized. So files, images and other media can be sent to the relays and you mention them from the notes based on the file hash which is good save content when someone else hosting your texts and media decides to stop hosting.
Ambolia 1y ago
It would be cool if you could somehow form chains of trust with this, maybe even with links to other social media, where you could "follow other people that this guy has vetted". I want my social media censored and curated, but I want to choose my own censors and curators.
- sak5sk 1y ago
  Nostr actually has web of trust (WoT) implementations. I think Coracle has this and some others. Nostur even lets you specify how far you want your web of trust to reach. Pretty cool stuff!
- HuwFulcher 1y ago
  There is the concept of Data Vending Machines (DVMs) and curated follow lists now. There’s also work on a Web of Trust in some clients that filters notes from people that don’t meet the WOT score. It’s essentially a weighted score based on who you follow and who they follow
benrutter 1y ago
Hope this doesn't come accross as rhetorical, it's a genuine question! Nostr users, how does this differ in your experience from Mastodon? At first glance it seems like the same idea but with the extra ingredient of blockchain, I'm not sure what this adds though, anonymity?
- nunobrito 1y ago
  First of all there is some confusion because blockchain doesn't play a role here. You start by creating a pair of public/private keys. That is your "account" but is independent from everything else (e.g. not tied to any specific tool nor web service). Then you create texts (notes) which are digitally signed with your private key. Using the public key anyone can verify it was you writing it and nobody else. There is no blockchain in the process, these simple text messages get sent to a multiple number of relays (you can even host them yourself) and other people can read them very freely. The main difference to mastodon is that exists no central server where someone registers an account and has the power to kick you out from the site (deplatform). This also solves the problem with the mastodon servers decides to stop the service and suddenly everything is gone. On NOSTR your texts are your texts, and there are multiple copies everywhere (more than 1000 free relays at the momment).
  - benrutter 1y ago
    Ahhh, that's a helpful explanation, thanks! So with Nostr - it's decentralised to the point that I'm (me the user) the individual point that's sending et, rather than Mastodon which is decentralised less such that there's multiple servers with many users.
    - nunobrito 1y ago
      That is correct. Plus, these are just plain text messages in the end of the day. So you can always download and read them easily. I'm an old person from the forum days and was really annoying that whenever a forum would go down, all the useful posts and info shared over the years would disappear too. With this kind of mechanism, it is easier to rescue that data. NOSTR isn't just about twitter-clones, it can basically be used to replicate blogs, forum and chat apps that exchange messges.
keiferski 1y ago
Something I don’t quite get about these new social networks that are clearly aimed at technical people: my model of a truly decentralized social network is more like a network of privately hosted personal websites, à la the original web. Not yet another platform I need to make an account to interact on separately. Have there been any attempts to make more of a “network” that incentivizes operating personal websites but adds a mechanism for typical social media features like chat, a feed, etc. in a centralized way? The only thing I can think of is RSS, and that is only a way to follow content publication.
- CaptArmchair 1y ago
  This an interesting question. Forgive my meandering take on this. We already have a mix of technologies to achieve that effect. Sort of. Simplified, you can host a personal website on shared hosting, a VPS, or wherever, at the same time chat via IRC or XMPP, and use RSS to create feeds to share tidbits about yourself. Nothing stops you from combining different programs and services to get that. So, what are the problems you're actually trying to solve here? Do you want to improve accessibility, that is: lower the bar for non-technical people to join feeds, publish their own thoughts, join group chats,...? Do you want to improve discoverability across what we already have? Make it easier for everyone to serendipitous finding information? Like, search, recommendations, linking, pub/sub, and so on? Do you want to solve sustainability? Developing models that also cover the expenses involved i.e. either covering the costs in maintaining tech, or redistributing the costs? Do you want to solve governance, the issue of providing enough affordances to communities to moderate/govern themselves? These are big questions, and once you try to solve them together, you'll have to make trade-offs, inevitably. Decentralizing everything sounds great, but that has an impact on discoverability, as well as accessibility. Not having another account sounds great, but that hides complex debates about online and offline, distributed identities. Even more so, if you dig deeper, our approach these affordances is based on our values. And those can be very different depending on who you talk to. That's where things enter the murky, ambiguous teritory of sociology, culture, and so on where few absolute truths are offered. That doesn't mean we should just accept throw up hands and accept the status quo, though. Talking in terms of a single "network" or a single "protocol" is too crude to approach these questions. The intrinsic value the Internet offers us, can be found in a handful foundational design principles like standardization, composition, openness,... which allow us to create many networks that host many diverse communities. Each to their own isn't a bad thing as it's too naive to think that there's a catch-all solution that caters to everyone's needs. Balkanization, such as it is, becomes really problematic if it erodes common beliefs we hold about a free, open and accessible digital global network. Many "technical" people who are active in these niches like Mastodon, Nostr, the Fediverse, or even the Smolweb, do so because they are steeped in a particular (counter)culture that espouses the same values that also led to the birth of the early Internet. Cyberspace really is a marketplace of ideas first. Technologies are an expression of that.
Tepix 1y ago
Even if you don't use Nostr as a microblogging social network, it can provide a useful layer. For example Trystero https://oxism.com/trystero https://oxism.com/trystero (MIT licensed) can use it to establish P2P WebRTC connections without requiring a central server.
- scirob 1y ago
  Thats cool I have been thinking of using nostr , Bittorrent DHT and Mastadon as a cencership resistant multi channel redundant broadcast beakon. All methods must go down before your nodes can't find each other anymore.
- vincnetas 1y ago
  wow this is amazing. was thinking about whipping something similar for my own project but glad that someone had same problem before. saved me some time.
- jchw 1y ago
  This is very interesting. In a similar vein, I was wondering a while ago if either Nostr or ATProto could potentially work as part of a peer-to-peer instant messaging system, specifically as a way to have persistent storage and offline messaging. (But using it to establish connections is pretty clever, too.)
- zenmac 1y ago
  This is very interesting! Can this forgo needing the STUN/TURN server? If this is the case then it is huge!
deleted 1y ago
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dbushell 1y ago
A big misconception I've seen is the assumption that Nostr relays are federated and share messages between one another. This is not how it works. So if you're building a "Twitter clone" the client app must search multiple relays and post to multiple relays. If clients are not using a relay in common they cannot see one another. The end result is a bad experience for both user and developer. Using a single relay is centralised and defeats the point. Using multiple relays is slow and cumbersome and requires the user to know/care which relays they are connecting to. When I played with Nostr a couple years ago the "NIPs" were already a complete mess. Later NIPs supersede earlier NIPs changing how clients are supposed to interpret messages. At least some are flagged as "unrecommended: deprecated" now.
- causalitycone 1y ago
  Yep. There is no common model for message propagation, so there is no “net force” or clear direction.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  This is a valid observation and hurdle of sorts. One to me, which is a fascinating problem to work on. There are a few approaches to solve this. For instance NIP65, where one defines on their profile meta which relays they read/write to, giving clients the ability to discover all the right content. That's just one approach, and some are exploring other ideas. It seems like a very solvable problem anyway.
- nunobrito 1y ago
  There are some messed up things on a few NIP because the technology evolved fast. Most NIP are fine and continuously improved. This is trivial to solve when there is there a periodic release of the NIP as done in other specs. So far there hasn't been much need for that formality, most developers understand quickly how to create tools on top of it.
- maxloh 1y ago
  It is somehow misleading to feature a Twitter clone on the front page when Mastodon is a better way to achieve that. The protocol's real value lies in other use cases.
dewey 1y ago
I've tried to use it many times, through Damos on iOS, but it's littered with dead and abandoned projects and an alternative UI that worked one day, will just be gone later. In the end the content I was seeing there was almost exclusively about Nostr and Crypto so it wasn't that interested to keep using it.
- sak5sk 1y ago
  Yeah, it takes people to get good content worth paying attention to but if everyone says "it's dead" then it will remain dead. But if people voted with attention and said "yeah, it's kind of dead, but if I hang out here and my friends join, then it will be less dead and people will notice and also join..." You basically create the future you want.
  - dewey 1y ago
    That just describes any social network cold-start problem. If you want to solve that it needs to be really easy for regular users to join and contribute. Example: Click "Join Nostr" on the nostr.com landing page and the first thing you see is "private" and "public" keys. Click next, you land on 4 example nostr clients. One is broken, the other one is filled with japanese content, the other one is a GitHub repository etc. It's a cool project from a technical pov as the system is quite simple but you can not expect regular content to start popping up if the experience is only tailored towards motivated tech nerds. I tried to improve that by making it easy to syndicate the content of Kirby (A blogging framework) to Nostr (https://github.com/dewey/kirby-posse/pull/9 https://github.com/dewey/kirby-posse/pull/9) but ran into many issues with how the various clients support and show images and lost interest along the way.
causalitycone 1y ago
The Nostr protocol as such does not look like a huge revelation. JSON, hashes, signatures, and that’s about it. JSON is not a cryptographer’s best friend, by the way. Effectively, everything else is left to be implemented. That probably explains try-everything-see-what-works approach to client apps?
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  You're missing the point if you are evaluating it by looking at random facets like JSON and hashes. Nostr is an interoperable data layer. Anyone can build on it, and users don't get locked in, since the data layer is separate from the apps (clients). It puts the onus on app developers to make a compelling experience, and not F over The (not their) users. This upending is imo what the revelation is. Likewise, that everything is left to be implemented paints a picture of how developers can make it how they want. Like lego but you can design the bricks too. Cool.
- Cameri 1y ago
  Could you elaborate on "JSON is not a cryptographer's best friend"? JSON is not a dog, for example, but that doesn't tell much.
thrownawaysz 1y ago
>apolitical communication commons Some people say that labeling yourself apolitical is 1, a polticial statement 2, a privilege itself which puts you into a certain socio-political position
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  > 2, a privilege itself which puts you into a certain socio-political position And others say that we should use our positions of privilege to help others, which seems to apply in this case.
- vincnetas 1y ago
  whats up with people being afraid of being political. its your duty as citizen to be political. in ancient grece apolotical people were called "idiots". literally thats the origin of the word.
  - t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
    I think you miss the point. On Nostr because technology is apolitical, you can be anything you want - political or not. A draw for some is exactly that; if they've been de-platformed elsewhere for political views, on nostr that can't happen.
    - spiderfarmer 1y ago
      I have never truly seen anyone deplatformed over political views. In the end they were always deplatformed for a lack of decency.
      - Klaster_1 1y ago
        This is authoritarian regime bread and butter. Create barriers that only right people can surmount, ban platforms where prominent opponents publish their media, block sources of income or just outright ban websites and newspapers and TG channels.
      - 1y ago
Arathorn 1y ago
> "An open protocol with a chance of working" One of the most depressing things about the decentralised protocol space is the adversarial attitude to other projects - whether that's Nostr v. ActivityPub v. ATproto v Nostr, XMPP v. Matrix v. IRCv3 v. Deltachat, etc. Imagine if the energy spent on positioning yourself relative to other open-source projects (who should be fellow travellers, if anything) was instead invested into competing with the centralised proprietary incumbents instead. The same applies to open source as a whole, but it's depressing to see the same vibes leach into the literal tagline of the project.
- rollcat 1y ago
  Doesn't help that all of the major decentralized protocols have been very effectively undermined and pushed aside. GTalk first de-federated (weakening XMPP as a whole), then killed XMPP support completely. Reader effectively killed RSS for casual users. Email has been swallowed whole by the oligopoly of GMail+Yahoo+Outlook+iCloud+etc; spam is a real problem, so if you're self-hosting your email, you kinda expect to be blocked by default by the large networks. Existing, corporate-backed efforts are "open-washing" their services. Signal is supposed to be using an open protocol, but IIRC won't even let you join their network if you use an alt client. Following Twitter's demise, Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet? Actually open networks? Mastodon took off like crazy, but everyone tried to register on the "main", biggest instance - we got bamboozled so hard, we can't even comprehend what "decentralized" is actually supposed to mean. ActivityPub as a protocol? Ted Unangst decided to build his own client from the spec, and was constantly running into Mastodonisms. <https://flak.tedunangst.com/search?q=activitypub https://flak.tedunangst.com/search?q=activitypub> Matrix? It has effectively one client (Element) that isn't a security disaster. <https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...> Anything left, worth of anyone's attention?
  - r721 1y ago
    >Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet? Related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291
Karrot_Kream 1y ago
There's also Stacker News which is centralized like Reddit or HN but uses BTC micropayments over Lightning in lieu of upvotes. It's a lot slower than HN but so far the SNR is a lot higher. It's also a bit dominated by Bitcoin content (much like some Nostr stuff.) Whether that's just a function of size or not is yet to be seen.
iberator 1y ago
How does it differ from the Freenet[1] project? AFIK Freenet is the only truly resilient anonymous network that lasted +20 years without literally a single successful attack by the state actor. It's like RAID over the internet over encryption with global replication of data. Amazing project for PHD thesis lol 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphanet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphanet
- nunobrito 1y ago
  Both things serve different purposes. Imagine it this way, freenet needs electricity and servers to keep running. NOSTR messages can be printed in paper (handwritten even) and you'd still be able to verify it belongs to a specific person. Basically freenet builds a network for communication (roads) but NOSTR is only about messages (cars) and doesn't really care about which road is using. There is no centralization because there is no coordination. There is not even knowledge of what can be happening elsewhere because these messages might not even be using internet to be shared (e.g. radio or paper messages) On the other side this is what makes it so powerful. You can download the full set of text messages from someone into your disk, that disk be found centuries later and digital archaeologists could easily read the contents because it is plain text. So it isn't competing against freenet, it will use it very happily when available as option.
ellis0n 1y ago
Also, if you have iOS, you can join the TestFlight of the new better BitChat Nostr here: https://www.reddit.com/r/bitchat/comments/1nd1zh8/ive_created_a_better_version_of_bitchat_for_ios/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bitchat/comments/1nd1zh8/ive_create...
seymon 1y ago
Is there any concept of private key rotation or something else? In case a client with a nostr key on it got compromised or something similar? With a traditional password passed logins I would just set a new password from another machine. Regeneration of a new nostr key would mean it's a new account isn't it?
- digitalbase 1y ago
  There is Frost Key Rotation and/or Key bunkers https://asknostr.site/question/note1534t79a5nk8ajcx8xqlsa3prukvequ9dkvjygr002p454yv08k5s5a957d https://asknostr.site/question/note1534t79a5nk8ajcx8xqlsa3pr... But it's still early and not all clients support it.
logicchains 1y ago
One potential positive of the recent censorship and deplatforming targeting the left is that it may accelerate the development of censorship-resistant platforms like Nostr, given the left has far more technologists than the right.
numpad0 1y ago
My back-burner idea: the equivalents of Nostr relays, Mastodon instances, Discord servers, etc. needs to be self-hostable in client apps for decentralized social media to work. Not only classical P2P software did exactly this, it worked/works beautifully. The only reason classical P2P software did not work and did not replace WWW as application was because of piracy prosecutions that makes users responsible for hosting data with unknown content that would be later revealed to users to have been pirated content that the user would be criminally responsible a la illegal substances through airport checkpoints. That's bad - both the fact that users' passive actions are incriminating, and substances too. So the next-gen P2P would have to have plausible logging content filters such as AI-based CP and Hollywood detectors that would stop relaying of such content so that users can defend themselves in criminal courts. Or the systems could also be in-circle specific so nothing of value is lost if everyone in a terrorist group would be prosecuted together, though I imagine that could hamper network growth. But fundamentally, I think the model has to be that all clients are also servers. That's the best way to decentralize a social media.
- woile 1y ago
  I think this is how iroh works. They have "relays" which are servers that help establish a connection between 2 clients if necessary. https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/relay https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/relay
- fiatjaf 1y ago
  This is cool but P2P doesn't work. Iroh also relies on "relays" in a sense. Nostr makes that explicit and gives relays identities so they can freely enact policies instead of having to hack that in weird ways.
sak5sk 1y ago
Some nostr apps to demonstrate what it's capable of: https://www.openux.app/ https://www.openux.app/ - Mobbin alternative https://kinostr.com/ https://kinostr.com/ - movies with chat room https://zap.stream/ https://zap.stream/ - live streaming similar to Twitch https://dtan.xyz/ https://dtan.xyz/ - torrents https://zapstore.dev/ https://zapstore.dev/ - permissionless app store https://nostrnests.com/ https://nostrnests.com/ - audio room chats https://zapmeacoffee.com/ https://zapmeacoffee.com/ - like buy me a coffee
- digitalbase 1y ago
  I've been working on a Quora/StackOverflow alternative (on top of Nostr). https://asknostr.site/ https://asknostr.site/ I hope this demonstrates how a distributed social protocol can solve many use cases and the advantage to the end-user: - do not get rugpulled by (VC backed) companies that own your data - receive zaps/money by contributing - data is truely available to everyone (but signed by author)
  - BinaryIgor 1y ago
    There are also tradeoffs: * relays can just go away - you don't have your data then * there is both user-friendly and secure way of managing your private keys; additionally, once your keys are gone, your identity is gone - there is no "I forgot my password" procedure
    - agalush 1y ago
      If you're worried about the durability of your contents, you can publish them on multiple relays, even self-hosted ones. Also, events are just JSON content: you can easily dump them on your local storage and republish on another relay whenever you want.
gwd 1y ago
Don't know much about Nostr, but wondered re the spam problem, if it would make sense to introduce the idea of proof-of-work for the identities? A quick search shows that the have optional PoW proposals for notes (i.e., individual posts), but I didn't see anything about PoW for identities. People could spend $1, or $5, or $50 of compute for an identity, and others could use the cost of the identity as a filter. Having a $5 ID put on a blacklist would make poor behavior of any sort more costly.
- digitalbase 1y ago
  Here is the Network Implementation Proposal for POW (https://nips.nostr.com/13 https://nips.nostr.com/13) Identity on nostr is just a public/private keypair. You can enhance that identity by sending a kind0 (metadata) note with your name, bio, pictures. So i guess you're suggestion to add PoW for kind0 events which is covered by NIP13 too.
  - gwd 1y ago
    Right, so the general NIP13 could be used to define a "ID proof-of-work" note attached to an ID. You could add PoW notes after ID creation, or create new, more difficult notes if the original one turned out to be insufficient. But although there's the technical components available to easily build such a thing, you're not aware of such a standard having been discussed, much less defined? EDIT: To be clear, the idea for this would be a equivalent of the "blue check mark", but 1) you pay it yourself and 2) you can make it as cheap or expensive as you want.
- fiatjaf 1y ago
  Yes, that makes sense and that can be used later by relays and clients in order to decide whether to store or display notes from identities. In fact that's a pretty good idea.
r721 1y ago
I still don't understand how Nostr would behave in this hypothetical scenario - a bad actor creates 100k key pairs (via residential proxies) and posts 10 LLM-generated replies to each new post. Who would fight with that wave of spam exactly and how?
- digitalbase 1y ago
  This is happening today. The answer is trusted relays and Web of Trust Long-time nostr user. My feeds are all spam free. Not to say there aren't any other problems :-)
  - r721 1y ago
    I guess it's easier with commercial spam when they have to advertise something, and that could be detected (website, product, etc) But when it's just a new account with a few LLM-generated replies - how would trusted relay automatically detect the malicious intent?
- fiatjaf 1y ago
  You only read from the relays you want, relays have all the tools in the world to reject spam, therefore the solution is just to have clients that help the user enforce selecting only what they deem as "safe" relays in order to read replies from.
tempodox 1y ago
> Nostr is an apolitical communication commons. A simple standard that […] can be used to spread information freely. Not controlled by any corporation or government … One could argue that this is a deeply political thing, just not one that the usual suspects would care for. +1.
mwkaufma 1y ago
"apolitical communication commons" So, for center-right users.
- AlOwain 1y ago
  I believe that their intention was closer to "regardless of your personal political beliefs"; not "average of political beliefs".
- dlivingston 1y ago
  where does this idea that apolitical = right-leaning come from?
  - mwkaufma 1y ago
    All the right-leaning people who loudly insist on being labeled "apolitical."
    - dlivingston 1y ago
      Like who?
- kinakomochidayo 1y ago
  Well, with all the Bitcoin maxis on there, more like right, far-right
BinaryIgor 1y ago
I've revisited this idea/protocol a few times and still have my doubts: * is there even a need for it? I would say that most people are quite happy with centralized platforms; I don't see it changing anytime soon (why?) * wouldn't we end up in the centralized world anyways? Even though there could be multiple NOSTR clients and relays, we all know how network effect works - people will flock to a single or a few best ones; does it really change the situation that we have today - a few centralized platforms? * I don't see clear incentives in this protocol that would improve current social media landscape - granted that I don't particularly like current ads/sell your attention model I am not sure that having a protocol like this is better that having a few centralized platforms - today's situation. Not to even mention technical challenges and worse user experience that NOSTR brings
- jasonvorhe 1y ago
  It's quite common for people with rather controversial topics to have backup accounts listed in their bio because centralized platforms are so prone to deplatforming people. If that's acceptable to you, then nostr probably isn't for you. I prefer not to beg anyone for permission to publish my opinions on the internet.
  - BinaryIgor 1y ago
    Why not to have a website then? That's the only thing that where the content is truly Yours. In NOSTR, even though yes there is more than one relay, but you still need their permission to publish; and yes, you can run your own relay - but you might host your own website too - no need for new apps and protocols to do this
    - nout 1y ago
      The difference is that on nostr you can have immediate interactions with others, you can get their comments, you can message with them, etc. In your example you can think about nostr as a protocol on top of "your own websites" that allows all people with "your own website" to effectively communicate and live interact with each other. And creating "your own website" is just a matter of clicking a button in any nostr app that generates private key and public key pair.
tptacek 1y ago
I think it's worth knowing that the cryptography in Nostr appears to be a wreck. Here's a paper from EuroS&P this year, also presented at Black Hat on the crypto track: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1459.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1459.pdf The vulnerabilities here are pretty :yikes: * The event protocol that drives the system doesn't authenticate public keys, so asymmetric signatures are performative: attackers that can intercept messages (Nostr servers, the presumed adversary of an E2EE messaging system) can just swap out keys and re-sign. * Two major clients, the mobile phone Damus app and the web Iris app, don't even verify signatures to begin with. * DMs in this system are unauthenticated CBC, so attackers can simply bitflip messages and events to say what they want. * The apps do automatic link-preview, so they've managed to reconstitute the EFAIL attack: attackers can locate links within messages (they'll be revealed by SNI and DNS anyways) and then bitflip them to point to attacker-controlled servers, exposing both the URLs (which will often contain tokens) and, with a bit of extra work, the message itself (by tacking `?foo=` onto a URL). * There's no key separation in the system, so you can trick users into running a subprotocol other than the messaging system, then establishing a session key, which will then be used for messaging. These are really basic errors; this is mid-aughts-level cryptographic engineering. There are probably a variety of other reasons to use Nostr, but end-to-end security does not appear to be one of them.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  why is this the first time that I came across these issues. Someone should talk about these issues asap. What federated platform might be the more secure tho protocol wise, bluesky (at protocol) or fediverse
  - nout 1y ago
    The paper seems to be referencing issues in client apps during early development of those apps that have since been fixed. So that's likely why it's not being talked about now.
- ursuscamp 1y ago
  So, I was part of the Nostr community for quite a while and was the author of a popular Nostr extension for Safari, before eventually giving up on Nostr for various reasons. I haven't read that entire paper. Mainly, I skipped to the section you mention here: > The event protocol that drives the system doesn't authenticate public keys, so asymmetric signatures are performative: attackers that can intercept messages (Nostr servers, the presumed adversary of an E2EE messaging system) can just swap out keys and re-sign. I think you and the authors perhaps misunderstand the Nostr protocol. Nostr is, effectively, an identity system tied to a public key. The cryptography is sound. Your identity is your public key. When you request a user's profile, or their events, you request it specifically by their public key. That is unforgeable (assuming no bugs in the implementation, like what the authors found in Damus). This does present UX issues that can manifest as security issues, such as "how can you verify that a user with a certain public is who they say they are instead of an impostor". That is a separate issue from whether the cryptography itself is sound.
rgreeko42 1y ago
My "apolitical" shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. What an odd word to use in the first sentence of your product description, which also includes the word "open", an inherently political concept in this context. Did/does Nostr have some cryptocurrency connection or am I thinking of something else?
- skeptrune 1y ago
  yeah, lots of bitcoiners
- Retinal7467 1y ago
  Right wingers have a long history of calling themselves apolitical.
- itslennysfault 1y ago
  They explicitly don't have a "nostr coin" or do anything "on chain" which I applaud them for especially since the Venn Diagram of Nostr and the crypto community is basically a circle.
- tegiddrone 1y ago
  I concur and "apolitical" is probably not the best word. I think it is an attempt to convey that the platform can't ban people. It is resistant from infrastructure censorship. Here is an example specific use case: https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/ https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/ I find that example pretty humorous... Damn, what kind of controversy is Pamela spreading? I like it but feel nervous that there is synergy with the bitcoin space. Hype and validation is thick in that space
philip1209 1y ago
The issue with all of these open social protocol is that they fail to grasp that they are built for entertainment, and hence the modulated emotional reactions are a feature not a bug.
- TJTorola 1y ago
  Existing social platforms are built for profit, which modulates emotion for engagement (something kind of like entertainment, but I wouldn't say I'm entertained exactly by the rage bait I'm often fed by algorithms). Users of an open protocol might select for the same experience, or they might not, I think that's yet to be seen. This also assumes that this fantasy open protocol could also escape the pressures of maximizing profit.
lxe 1y ago
Why can't these projects separate the use-cases from philosophies and from implementation when presenting them? At first glance I don't understand what this is. Is it a social network? A protocol? "Pro-censorship? I need to read some blog article... It's been like this with scuttlebutt/gossip, and rest of the alternative internet/fediverse with mastodont and activitypub and diaspora. Instead of asking questions like "How is this different than email? How does it compare to twitter?", I have to start with "What am I looking at? A technical implementation or a product? Is it a website or an app? What am I supposed to do with this? There's also Urbit, which I'm sure not a single one of you can explain exactly what it is. It's not as bad as "Web3", I'll give it that. Bluesky got it right. So did gemini to some extent.
- jonstaab 1y ago
  Nostr is essentially a compromise between p2p and traditional web architectures. It cuts with the grain of the internet by using web servers, while reducing the dependence users have on servers by using keys for identity and digital signatures for authenticating data. The effect is that users have "credible exit" (among other things), which has been discussed for years. This doesn't really create any new "use cases", which is why the use case is often described as "whatever, it's the new internet". What it does do is introduce a very different set of trade-offs which favor user control over platform control (with the attendant UX trade-offs (or at least a different set of UX idioms)). The reason the focus is on social is because that represents the majority of applications that do exist, the original motivation for building the protocol, and a value proposition (censorship resistance) that lots of people can relate to.
  - Wilduck 1y ago
    I don't want to be mean, but this post has exactly the problem the person you're replying to was complaining about. The person you're replying to, I think, would like an explanation that reads more like "It's like Twitter, but not tied to a mega-corp, just for you and your pals". I don't know if that description actually fits Nostr though because, like the person you're replying to, I have a pretty hard time understanding what Nostr actually _is_.
SLWW 1y ago
The most endearing thing about Nostr is that the User IDs are just the most concise, and shortest of all ActivityPub Compat. protocols.
jrflowers 1y ago
I love this: >Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" Under a tag that says “pro-censorship”. I think I could maybe (?) imagine what they’re trying to say there, but “a lack of censorship is political and the presence of censorship is apolitical” sounds like something a person would say after a humongous bong rip of salvia or sustaining a life-threatening amount of blood loss
Wismerarie 1y ago
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chwahoo 1y ago
I haven't closely followed distributed protocols like this in years so might just be just behind the times, but I can't recall ever seeing "Pro Censorship" as a badge on a technology. Seems to fit with real-world trends that confuse and frustrate me. I'm not saying we need a censorship-proof world, just that I find this quite jarring. I suspect I might be missing some context.
curtisszmania 1y ago
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nikolay 1y ago
Nostr is terrible! There are so many "standards," I'm not sure how they expect adoption. Compare them to Bluesky - which is much more complicated under the hood, but so easy to use! Just look at Gossip's settings - it's a nightmare!
bginna93 1y ago
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bginna93 1y ago
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zenmac 1y ago
Whoever is in charge of the front page of nostr.com ? There is a broken link pointing to "https://njump.me/nevent1qqsxstdgkge3k9mtezv4z4lpp88p3lnqta9k0k6n8hex0a4zv62pdmqzyqalp33lewf5vdq847t6te0wvnags0gs0mu72kz8938tn24wlfze6pfalk0 https://njump.me/nevent1qqsxstdgkge3k9mtezv4z4lpp88p3lnqta9k..." regarding economic incentives of relays operational.

393 points by dtj1123 1y ago

I like the idea of nostr but when I tried to use it it was a lot of CP which made me instantly stop using it. I guess the issue with this type of protocols is that there must be a way to prevent these very dark and illegal content. As a user I don't want to see it and the submitter should be found and jailed for distributing it. Right now, it's hard to know where it even comes from since it can come from any of the relay you are connected to. Most apps do not show which relay the content originates from and honestly, what can you do? I guess one solution is to only use paid relayes or heavily restricted ones that require invitation. But if that is the case, it kind of defeats the purpose of Nostr to begin with IMO.

nunobrito 1y ago
That statement is wrong at best scenario and fake at worst. I'm a long time user of NOSTR. When you enter the network through any of the main clients you will only see curated topics (trending). The WoT assures that the best content comes up.
- stonogo 1y ago
  I had almost exactly the same experience and lost interest for the same reason. Am I wrong or fake?
  - Geep5 1y ago
    Same experience here, im still trying to but that's tough to get past.
  - nunobrito 1y ago
    Either of them. I can't even fathom how this would be your first time experience there, other people here on this topic confirm that it doesn't happen. If you feel that is wrong, please describe the steps to replicate such situation.
    - stonogo 1y ago
      Happy to help. Step 1: In 2023, notice a crypto spam post on Mastodon with a weird account name. Step 2: Look up what could have made that post, which was bridged from some other service. Step 3: Set up a key, grab a client (I used a web client that deployed to Netlify's free tier). Step 4: Follow some howtos, add relays, follow some accounts that repeat other accounts, try to figure out how discovery works. Step 5: Start seeing really disturbing content. Step 6: Delete all this stuff, and write it off in the same bucket as Freenet. Step 7: Wait some years. Step 8: Get called a liar on a web forum.
      - t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
        What relays were you on? I have never seen CP on nostr. Did you start off following the crypto spammer mentioned or that was just what caused you to find nostr? I'd be curious how you built your initial follow list, as that and the relays you were on is the source of what you see. Kind of like if you go to weird ass websites you'll see that content, but nostr itself doesn't expose anything to a user, it's only a network for content read/write.
        stonogo 1y ago
        I did not keep detailed notes, but there were a couple Gists and a couple blogs that listed relays and stuff to follow. I'm perfectly willing to accept that there was bad stuff in thoses lists, but I don't really care about the mechanisms behind it. Easier just to move on.
      - nunobrito 1y ago
        Come on, so much effort writing and yet so vague. The easiest way to try NOSTR is using any of the common web platforms like https://primal.net https://primal.net or https://yakihonne.com/ https://yakihonne.com/ Heck, you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years. It is very unbelievable that you followed such a complicated process, even went to effort of deploying to a server (what?!?) and then somehow you see disturbing content without looking explicitly for it. In case you are sincere, try it again using any of the common methods.
- numpad0 1y ago
  Yeah, when a layperson says $SOCIAL_MEDIA is full of child pornography, it often just means legal anime content that would be on advertisements everywhere in Tokyo, especially anime contents that are LESS explicitly sexualized. This happens because Japan always has disproportionately massive online presence with significantly better democratized attention engineering, and so content selections naturally mimic a crossing at Akihabara(despite it almost has been entirely superseded by Chinese tech cultural centers such as Shenzhen), not the Times Square(in NYC), which infuriates a lot of somewhat vocal people. And, the reason why I must bring this up is that it is not merely it is inaccurate labeling, but it is also counter productive to not face it straight on. Such as, people would move away from pornography, making it less actually pornographic, which is more child-pornographic by the standards of people using this term in this manner, because that is what are considered LESS sexualized contents by its producers, which by the way exist in orders of millions in Japan and leaking out fast into Asia at large. TLDR. Hating anime, fine. Just don't call it CP. Your words sound opposite of intent. That's what brought us here. So stop.
  - staticelf 1y ago
    1. I am not a layperson. I used nostr while it was still under active development and when it only had a few NIPs finished. 2. I have been to Japan several times, I know the difference between anime/hentai/lolita and stuff like that. This is not what I was experiencing. 3. I have nothing against pornography in general. The issue is that when people bring up shit like this, we are not taken seriously and this hurts projects like nostr. It will never reach momentum if no steps are taken to prevent illegal material and dark shit like CP. Calling me a liar makes me believe that you are intentionally are downplaying the experiences I and others have, which is helping pedophiles and similar people share their illegal content freely and without consequences. Why I do not know and you should seriously think about it and stop.
    - numpad0 1y ago
      - The smaller group says they see TONS of $thing, - the larger group says they see NONE of $thing, - both are looking at the EXACT same thing. -> The disagreement is in the definition of $thing. It can't get clearer. How else would you explain it? Either you're lying(I guess not), or your definition is way off, or those secret underground organizations made some mistake and their secret Facebook group illegal content leaked out(no such thing on Nostr). By far the most likely scenario is that you're grouping from traffic cones to boxes of oranges to parrots in a forest into the exact same category of offensive contents by standards that nobody else could even understand.
- staticelf 1y ago
  What exactly is wrong about my statement? Stating that my experience is wrong is stupid. I don't know how the app I used works. I simply used the "Snort" app, connected to a few relays and did not use it for a couple of months. Then I came back and instantly saw CP freely shared. Instantly removed the app from the phone. You can't say that it don't exist when people like me have seen it with their own set of eyes. This only makes protocols/projects like nostr set to fail, since regular people won't fucking care and just think of the nostr as something pedophiles are using, which they would not be incorrect in thinking at this moment. I was betting on nostr in the beginning, I was running my own relay and started on a nostr client. But I gave up since clients came popping up everywhere so I didn't really have time to compete.
photios 1y ago
That's quite the bold faced lie. I've been on nostr for years and it's been pretty friendly and never offensive.
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  3 people have shared this experience in the thread. Is there a fundamental reason this wouldn't be true? Isn't it a place where people can anonymously share multimedia with minimal moderation? In my experience even the most toy application exposed to the wider internet will face this issue.
  - nunobrito 1y ago
    Everytime NOSTR is mentioned there are people from other networks coming here to spread FUD. The best thing is asking them to provide steps for replicating their claims, which they won't since it is the not the common user experience at all.
    - immibis 1y ago
      Everything I don't like is FUD.
    - 0xAFFFF 1y ago
      Every time a crypto user faces criticism over their favorite technology they frame it as FUD. Quite a marvel of nature.
      - nunobrito 1y ago
        Not really. Cryptos are born out of criticism for current systems and they are an ever evolving technology fueled by those same critics. What doesn't make sense is when the other party starts making stories just to tarnish other competing technologies. Just now the OP was asked to provide details to replicate his findings and those were indeed very "fuzzy" to say the least.
nothankyou777 1y ago
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the_real_cher 1y ago
Its horrible but that kind of content means theres no censorship. Its on the individual to block that kind of stuff.
- yellowapple 1y ago
  The problem is that in many jurisdictions (including the ones to which the vast majority of HN users are likely subject), by the time you've received “that kind of stuff” you're already in legal hot water.
hardran3 1y ago
Anytime I see something that is NSFW it is from the fediverse bridge.
digitalbase 1y ago
I think this is a real problem of "an open network". Disgusting people will find the network and abuse it. There is a very insightful thread on nostr about it -> https://asknostr.site/question/note1lhvk3kkmaev6qzlpzzns69vwgdh4s0vh48scux9h4flnv5ztd0ks9484a8 https://asknostr.site/question/note1lhvk3kkmaev6qzlpzzns69vw... The top voted answer was > Relays have to become more whitelisted and less open, and clients have to implement outbox model and stop relying on 2 or 3 big relays, then we can just stop worrying about this.
- sebastix 1y ago
  > I think this is a real problem of "an open network". Disgusting people will find the network and abuse it. Question. Do you prefer open or closed networks? I'm sure you are aware that the internet is an open network.
jasonvorhe 1y ago
It's a more censorship resistant platform, of course it'll see some spam. If this happens, you'll see lots of outrage, people see it as a way to test out and improve WoT. The content (images, videos) itself is often quickly removed by blossom/media relay runners, especially if people report it and once they're cleared the spam notes are basically worthless to anyone because they're just dead links and spammy/abusive hashtags. Due to the hashtags is still quite easy to purge them. I run my own relay and self reported it whenever one of these notes or uploads hit my systems. I built a quick shell script using AI to take care of almost all of that.

camillomiller 1y ago

I find open protocols the most naive endeavour in tech nowadays. The reason why social media protocols work is because the incentive is to have them siloed, controlled, and artificially convincing people through algorithmic suggestions that posting what they had for lunch is somewhat interesting. These protocols seem to think that people actually want an alternative to what Instagram, Facebook, X etc. give them. They don't, we all just want the comfort of our own little bubble and a constant feeling of perceived fame. The rest, and all the talk about the protocol that underlines this is just fluff for nerds that will have zero impact in a society dominated by tech capital. Do you wanna change social media? Try and find and effective way to bring them down.

immibis 1y ago
I downvoted this because I don't like the way it makes me feel.
- camillomiller 1y ago
  That is admitting that you downvoted against the exact rules of HN, but suit yourself :D
Quindecillion 1y ago
Do you have any suggestions for an effective way to bring them down? Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?
- camillomiller 1y ago
  Pushing for strict regulation that forces them to have disclaimers like cigarettes, and treating them officially like the public health disaster they are. The free market, despite what the capitalistic religion leads you to think, is still not the only option.
- digitalbase 1y ago
  My approach for bringing them down is working on better systems/UX than what the closed-silos currently offer...And we have a long way to go. But...Nostr (and other decentralised social media protocols) can offer things the existing platforms can not do: interoperability. Imagine the people you follow to be the same from FB, to strava, to spotify... Imagine the content (signed notes) you make are available on different clients/platforms That UX, perhaps for use-cases and projects we can't imagine today will be so much better than what we have today. I've tasted a little bit of just that switching between my Nostr twitter-like client (Primal/Yakihonne) and the Podcast app (foundtain.fm). It blew my mind. This opens use cases the existing platforms can only dream about.

TheAceOfHearts 1y ago

Last time I tried navigating the Nostr ecosystem I found their Twitter-equivalent platform and it was full of people posting about cryptocurrencies and other topics that weren't of particular interest to me. Are there any major figures of interest primarily participating on any Nostr platform? Or is there any kind of uniquely interesting content that is being primarily produced and shared on Nostr?

littlecranky67 1y ago
Nostr doesn't have an "algorithm" that tries to find posts that you engage with. You should follow your own list of people, and then you will see their content. There are some clients trying to be more smart, though. The "algorithm" in any social media is a blessing and a curse. Nostr shifts the responsibility of what to show to the clients.
- TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
  Right, and I'm asking if there any interesting figures primarily using this platform to share interesting content because I don't know of any, and I didn't find any niches that were best served by this platform. In the past, the way that I would typically get to know people online was either through niche topic-specific forums or IRC channels. Then eventually if we got to know each other well enough, we would connect on other platforms. The modern version of this seems to be Discord. These platforms are all topic focused, rather than being user-first. Discoverability is important! And one of the limitations of search or tag based discoverability is that you're limited to finding things which you already know about. But it doesn't help you find new things that you don't know about! This doesn't mean that algorithmic discoverability is the only option, for example: you could find some way to map the user's interest spaces and search for unexplored or undiscovered nodes.
  - littlecranky67 1y ago
    Nostr supports #hashtags just as twitter.
  - 1y ago

christoph123 1y ago

What's a good place to get started? Any favorite apps from these? https://nostrapps.com/ https://nostrapps.com/

nunobrito 1y ago
https://yakihonne.com/ https://yakihonne.com/ tends to be a good experience for browser and has apps, after that https://primal.net https://primal.net is also quite good as introduction since their UI is similar to what you are used in other platforms. Then there is https://www.amethyst.social/ https://www.amethyst.social/ which is excellent because it brings out more of the potential of the platform.
- hardran3 1y ago
  Both good choices. Amethyst is a great choice for Android. Jumble.social is a good web client.
- cropcirclbureau 1y ago
  Word of warning: was blasted with NSFW on the first page of that link.
  - nunobrito 1y ago
    No you didn't. Please stop the FUD. You and your 3 friends tend to do the same every time NOSTR is mentioned just because you use another platform. Please be honest and admit the affiliation.
    - oblongdefeat 1y ago
      I just went to Yakihonne while not logged in -- it took me to the Home "Global" feed. Scrolling down a bit to see what was there I was met with a link to "HD Porn Videos" and the preview image was essentially a frame from whatever video was being promoted. I wasn't "blasted" with NSFW but it was definitely present (and not very far down the feed). And the feed seems to be chronologically ordered, so depending on your timing something like that could be front and center.

littlecranky67 1y ago

Glad to see Nostr on top of HN. It is in its infancy, but Nostr allows for "zapps" (basically sending instant micropayments via bitcoin-lightning) - so instead of using ads and dubious algorithms, you can show your appreciation to content creators by small payments. This is a model for an ad-free, decentralized social media system.

anon1395 1y ago
Bitcoin is regulated as hell
- littlecranky67 1y ago
  As far as I understand as a non-US citizen, the recent presidential bills anchor your (US citizen-) right to deal in bitcoin between private entities. So the "good" kind of regulation.
- nunobrito 1y ago
  Not everyone there is a bitcoin boomer. You'll find plenty of monero users and things that are a bit more serious than that.
  - littlecranky67 1y ago
    It is noteworthy that zapps are based on lightning (which is Layer-2 for bitcoin), and similar in privacy as monero (and instantaneous).
    - mettamage 1y ago
      Does lightning work now? A few years ago, I remember they had quite some difficulties. Maybe I should brush up my knowledge.
      - nunobrito 1y ago
        It is OK for small amounts like paying a coffee or a few cents. Not reliable for larger values.

lukaslukas 1y ago

I don't understand. Can someone explain it to me from a technical/IT perspective? Is it like HTTP or JSON, or like XMPP...? "An open protocol with a chance of working" = ?huh? "Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech"" = ???huh? "BEEP BOOP" ???wtf?? Please don't explain technical things as if you were talking to children. Explain them as if you were talking to a colleague sitting next to you. Talk to them as a person and as a professional.

littlecranky67 1y ago
Nostr is decentrialized, working with public/private keys. there is a very basic message format, messages are sent to "relays" that forward and store messages to other relays. It is up to the relays (anybody can be a relay) to connect to each others, chose a policy what/whose content to forward, whom to grant access, and how long to store and re-broadcast messages. If you are familiar with the IRC chat system, it is similar to IRC but with JSON messages and the ability to store & resend messages on the servers. Servers have to connect to each other and are free to each have their own policies.
nunobrito 1y ago
It is basically email on steroids. You write an email (note/message) but instead of sending it to one server, you can send it to multiple servers of your choice. Each message is digitally signed with your keys and a time stamp, so you can verify that the identity is truly yours no matter where the message came from. In my opinion is the most innovative way of communicating that I've seen in the last 20 years. There is no concept of server nor permanent location. A relay can refuse to receive your messages, but they can't block your account because you can always write new notes, sign them and send to wherever people want to read your texts. Imagine the case with Trump when he got blocked from Twitter. With a click of a button they have deplatformed him, with NOSTR he would have just continued writing and people would simply tune to another relay to keep reading his texts. On top of that are other good developments. For example, file sharing also became decentralized. So files, images and other media can be sent to the relays and you mention them from the notes based on the file hash which is good save content when someone else hosting your texts and media decides to stop hosting.

Ambolia 1y ago

It would be cool if you could somehow form chains of trust with this, maybe even with links to other social media, where you could "follow other people that this guy has vetted". I want my social media censored and curated, but I want to choose my own censors and curators.

sak5sk 1y ago
Nostr actually has web of trust (WoT) implementations. I think Coracle has this and some others. Nostur even lets you specify how far you want your web of trust to reach. Pretty cool stuff!
HuwFulcher 1y ago
There is the concept of Data Vending Machines (DVMs) and curated follow lists now. There’s also work on a Web of Trust in some clients that filters notes from people that don’t meet the WOT score. It’s essentially a weighted score based on who you follow and who they follow

benrutter 1y ago

Hope this doesn't come accross as rhetorical, it's a genuine question! Nostr users, how does this differ in your experience from Mastodon? At first glance it seems like the same idea but with the extra ingredient of blockchain, I'm not sure what this adds though, anonymity?

nunobrito 1y ago
First of all there is some confusion because blockchain doesn't play a role here. You start by creating a pair of public/private keys. That is your "account" but is independent from everything else (e.g. not tied to any specific tool nor web service). Then you create texts (notes) which are digitally signed with your private key. Using the public key anyone can verify it was you writing it and nobody else. There is no blockchain in the process, these simple text messages get sent to a multiple number of relays (you can even host them yourself) and other people can read them very freely. The main difference to mastodon is that exists no central server where someone registers an account and has the power to kick you out from the site (deplatform). This also solves the problem with the mastodon servers decides to stop the service and suddenly everything is gone. On NOSTR your texts are your texts, and there are multiple copies everywhere (more than 1000 free relays at the momment).
- benrutter 1y ago
  Ahhh, that's a helpful explanation, thanks! So with Nostr - it's decentralised to the point that I'm (me the user) the individual point that's sending et, rather than Mastodon which is decentralised less such that there's multiple servers with many users.
  - nunobrito 1y ago
    That is correct. Plus, these are just plain text messages in the end of the day. So you can always download and read them easily. I'm an old person from the forum days and was really annoying that whenever a forum would go down, all the useful posts and info shared over the years would disappear too. With this kind of mechanism, it is easier to rescue that data. NOSTR isn't just about twitter-clones, it can basically be used to replicate blogs, forum and chat apps that exchange messges.

keiferski 1y ago

Something I don’t quite get about these new social networks that are clearly aimed at technical people: my model of a truly decentralized social network is more like a network of privately hosted personal websites, à la the original web. Not yet another platform I need to make an account to interact on separately. Have there been any attempts to make more of a “network” that incentivizes operating personal websites but adds a mechanism for typical social media features like chat, a feed, etc. in a centralized way? The only thing I can think of is RSS, and that is only a way to follow content publication.

CaptArmchair 1y ago
This an interesting question. Forgive my meandering take on this. We already have a mix of technologies to achieve that effect. Sort of. Simplified, you can host a personal website on shared hosting, a VPS, or wherever, at the same time chat via IRC or XMPP, and use RSS to create feeds to share tidbits about yourself. Nothing stops you from combining different programs and services to get that. So, what are the problems you're actually trying to solve here? Do you want to improve accessibility, that is: lower the bar for non-technical people to join feeds, publish their own thoughts, join group chats,...? Do you want to improve discoverability across what we already have? Make it easier for everyone to serendipitous finding information? Like, search, recommendations, linking, pub/sub, and so on? Do you want to solve sustainability? Developing models that also cover the expenses involved i.e. either covering the costs in maintaining tech, or redistributing the costs? Do you want to solve governance, the issue of providing enough affordances to communities to moderate/govern themselves? These are big questions, and once you try to solve them together, you'll have to make trade-offs, inevitably. Decentralizing everything sounds great, but that has an impact on discoverability, as well as accessibility. Not having another account sounds great, but that hides complex debates about online and offline, distributed identities. Even more so, if you dig deeper, our approach these affordances is based on our values. And those can be very different depending on who you talk to. That's where things enter the murky, ambiguous teritory of sociology, culture, and so on where few absolute truths are offered. That doesn't mean we should just accept throw up hands and accept the status quo, though. Talking in terms of a single "network" or a single "protocol" is too crude to approach these questions. The intrinsic value the Internet offers us, can be found in a handful foundational design principles like standardization, composition, openness,... which allow us to create many networks that host many diverse communities. Each to their own isn't a bad thing as it's too naive to think that there's a catch-all solution that caters to everyone's needs. Balkanization, such as it is, becomes really problematic if it erodes common beliefs we hold about a free, open and accessible digital global network. Many "technical" people who are active in these niches like Mastodon, Nostr, the Fediverse, or even the Smolweb, do so because they are steeped in a particular (counter)culture that espouses the same values that also led to the birth of the early Internet. Cyberspace really is a marketplace of ideas first. Technologies are an expression of that.

Tepix 1y ago

Even if you don't use Nostr as a microblogging social network, it can provide a useful layer. For example Trystero https://oxism.com/trystero https://oxism.com/trystero (MIT licensed) can use it to establish P2P WebRTC connections without requiring a central server.

scirob 1y ago
Thats cool I have been thinking of using nostr , Bittorrent DHT and Mastadon as a cencership resistant multi channel redundant broadcast beakon. All methods must go down before your nodes can't find each other anymore.
vincnetas 1y ago
wow this is amazing. was thinking about whipping something similar for my own project but glad that someone had same problem before. saved me some time.
jchw 1y ago
This is very interesting. In a similar vein, I was wondering a while ago if either Nostr or ATProto could potentially work as part of a peer-to-peer instant messaging system, specifically as a way to have persistent storage and offline messaging. (But using it to establish connections is pretty clever, too.)
zenmac 1y ago
This is very interesting! Can this forgo needing the STUN/TURN server? If this is the case then it is huge!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dbushell 1y ago

A big misconception I've seen is the assumption that Nostr relays are federated and share messages between one another. This is not how it works. So if you're building a "Twitter clone" the client app must search multiple relays and post to multiple relays. If clients are not using a relay in common they cannot see one another. The end result is a bad experience for both user and developer. Using a single relay is centralised and defeats the point. Using multiple relays is slow and cumbersome and requires the user to know/care which relays they are connecting to. When I played with Nostr a couple years ago the "NIPs" were already a complete mess. Later NIPs supersede earlier NIPs changing how clients are supposed to interpret messages. At least some are flagged as "unrecommended: deprecated" now.

causalitycone 1y ago
Yep. There is no common model for message propagation, so there is no “net force” or clear direction.
t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
This is a valid observation and hurdle of sorts. One to me, which is a fascinating problem to work on. There are a few approaches to solve this. For instance NIP65, where one defines on their profile meta which relays they read/write to, giving clients the ability to discover all the right content. That's just one approach, and some are exploring other ideas. It seems like a very solvable problem anyway.
nunobrito 1y ago
There are some messed up things on a few NIP because the technology evolved fast. Most NIP are fine and continuously improved. This is trivial to solve when there is there a periodic release of the NIP as done in other specs. So far there hasn't been much need for that formality, most developers understand quickly how to create tools on top of it.
maxloh 1y ago
It is somehow misleading to feature a Twitter clone on the front page when Mastodon is a better way to achieve that. The protocol's real value lies in other use cases.

dewey 1y ago

I've tried to use it many times, through Damos on iOS, but it's littered with dead and abandoned projects and an alternative UI that worked one day, will just be gone later. In the end the content I was seeing there was almost exclusively about Nostr and Crypto so it wasn't that interested to keep using it.

sak5sk 1y ago
Yeah, it takes people to get good content worth paying attention to but if everyone says "it's dead" then it will remain dead. But if people voted with attention and said "yeah, it's kind of dead, but if I hang out here and my friends join, then it will be less dead and people will notice and also join..." You basically create the future you want.
- dewey 1y ago
  That just describes any social network cold-start problem. If you want to solve that it needs to be really easy for regular users to join and contribute. Example: Click "Join Nostr" on the nostr.com landing page and the first thing you see is "private" and "public" keys. Click next, you land on 4 example nostr clients. One is broken, the other one is filled with japanese content, the other one is a GitHub repository etc. It's a cool project from a technical pov as the system is quite simple but you can not expect regular content to start popping up if the experience is only tailored towards motivated tech nerds. I tried to improve that by making it easy to syndicate the content of Kirby (A blogging framework) to Nostr (https://github.com/dewey/kirby-posse/pull/9 https://github.com/dewey/kirby-posse/pull/9) but ran into many issues with how the various clients support and show images and lost interest along the way.

causalitycone 1y ago

The Nostr protocol as such does not look like a huge revelation. JSON, hashes, signatures, and that’s about it. JSON is not a cryptographer’s best friend, by the way. Effectively, everything else is left to be implemented. That probably explains try-everything-see-what-works approach to client apps?

t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
You're missing the point if you are evaluating it by looking at random facets like JSON and hashes. Nostr is an interoperable data layer. Anyone can build on it, and users don't get locked in, since the data layer is separate from the apps (clients). It puts the onus on app developers to make a compelling experience, and not F over The (not their) users. This upending is imo what the revelation is. Likewise, that everything is left to be implemented paints a picture of how developers can make it how they want. Like lego but you can design the bricks too. Cool.
Cameri 1y ago
Could you elaborate on "JSON is not a cryptographer's best friend"? JSON is not a dog, for example, but that doesn't tell much.

thrownawaysz 1y ago

>apolitical communication commons Some people say that labeling yourself apolitical is 1, a polticial statement 2, a privilege itself which puts you into a certain socio-political position

AlecSchueler 1y ago
> 2, a privilege itself which puts you into a certain socio-political position And others say that we should use our positions of privilege to help others, which seems to apply in this case.
vincnetas 1y ago
whats up with people being afraid of being political. its your duty as citizen to be political. in ancient grece apolotical people were called "idiots". literally thats the origin of the word.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  I think you miss the point. On Nostr because technology is apolitical, you can be anything you want - political or not. A draw for some is exactly that; if they've been de-platformed elsewhere for political views, on nostr that can't happen.
  - spiderfarmer 1y ago
    I have never truly seen anyone deplatformed over political views. In the end they were always deplatformed for a lack of decency.
    - Klaster_1 1y ago
      This is authoritarian regime bread and butter. Create barriers that only right people can surmount, ban platforms where prominent opponents publish their media, block sources of income or just outright ban websites and newspapers and TG channels.
    - 1y ago

Arathorn 1y ago

> "An open protocol with a chance of working" One of the most depressing things about the decentralised protocol space is the adversarial attitude to other projects - whether that's Nostr v. ActivityPub v. ATproto v Nostr, XMPP v. Matrix v. IRCv3 v. Deltachat, etc. Imagine if the energy spent on positioning yourself relative to other open-source projects (who should be fellow travellers, if anything) was instead invested into competing with the centralised proprietary incumbents instead. The same applies to open source as a whole, but it's depressing to see the same vibes leach into the literal tagline of the project.

rollcat 1y ago
Doesn't help that all of the major decentralized protocols have been very effectively undermined and pushed aside. GTalk first de-federated (weakening XMPP as a whole), then killed XMPP support completely. Reader effectively killed RSS for casual users. Email has been swallowed whole by the oligopoly of GMail+Yahoo+Outlook+iCloud+etc; spam is a real problem, so if you're self-hosting your email, you kinda expect to be blocked by default by the large networks. Existing, corporate-backed efforts are "open-washing" their services. Signal is supposed to be using an open protocol, but IIRC won't even let you join their network if you use an alt client. Following Twitter's demise, Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet? Actually open networks? Mastodon took off like crazy, but everyone tried to register on the "main", biggest instance - we got bamboozled so hard, we can't even comprehend what "decentralized" is actually supposed to mean. ActivityPub as a protocol? Ted Unangst decided to build his own client from the spec, and was constantly running into Mastodonisms. <https://flak.tedunangst.com/search?q=activitypub https://flak.tedunangst.com/search?q=activitypub> Matrix? It has effectively one client (Element) that isn't a security disaster. <https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...> Anything left, worth of anyone's attention?
- r721 1y ago
  >Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet? Related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291

Karrot_Kream 1y ago

There's also Stacker News which is centralized like Reddit or HN but uses BTC micropayments over Lightning in lieu of upvotes. It's a lot slower than HN but so far the SNR is a lot higher. It's also a bit dominated by Bitcoin content (much like some Nostr stuff.) Whether that's just a function of size or not is yet to be seen.

iberator 1y ago

How does it differ from the Freenet[1] project? AFIK Freenet is the only truly resilient anonymous network that lasted +20 years without literally a single successful attack by the state actor. It's like RAID over the internet over encryption with global replication of data. Amazing project for PHD thesis lol 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphanet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphanet

nunobrito 1y ago
Both things serve different purposes. Imagine it this way, freenet needs electricity and servers to keep running. NOSTR messages can be printed in paper (handwritten even) and you'd still be able to verify it belongs to a specific person. Basically freenet builds a network for communication (roads) but NOSTR is only about messages (cars) and doesn't really care about which road is using. There is no centralization because there is no coordination. There is not even knowledge of what can be happening elsewhere because these messages might not even be using internet to be shared (e.g. radio or paper messages) On the other side this is what makes it so powerful. You can download the full set of text messages from someone into your disk, that disk be found centuries later and digital archaeologists could easily read the contents because it is plain text. So it isn't competing against freenet, it will use it very happily when available as option.

ellis0n 1y ago

Also, if you have iOS, you can join the TestFlight of the new better BitChat Nostr here: https://www.reddit.com/r/bitchat/comments/1nd1zh8/ive_created_a_better_version_of_bitchat_for_ios/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bitchat/comments/1nd1zh8/ive_create...

seymon 1y ago

Is there any concept of private key rotation or something else? In case a client with a nostr key on it got compromised or something similar? With a traditional password passed logins I would just set a new password from another machine. Regeneration of a new nostr key would mean it's a new account isn't it?

digitalbase 1y ago
There is Frost Key Rotation and/or Key bunkers https://asknostr.site/question/note1534t79a5nk8ajcx8xqlsa3prukvequ9dkvjygr002p454yv08k5s5a957d https://asknostr.site/question/note1534t79a5nk8ajcx8xqlsa3pr... But it's still early and not all clients support it.

logicchains 1y ago

One potential positive of the recent censorship and deplatforming targeting the left is that it may accelerate the development of censorship-resistant platforms like Nostr, given the left has far more technologists than the right.

numpad0 1y ago

My back-burner idea: the equivalents of Nostr relays, Mastodon instances, Discord servers, etc. needs to be self-hostable in client apps for decentralized social media to work. Not only classical P2P software did exactly this, it worked/works beautifully. The only reason classical P2P software did not work and did not replace WWW as application was because of piracy prosecutions that makes users responsible for hosting data with unknown content that would be later revealed to users to have been pirated content that the user would be criminally responsible a la illegal substances through airport checkpoints. That's bad - both the fact that users' passive actions are incriminating, and substances too. So the next-gen P2P would have to have plausible logging content filters such as AI-based CP and Hollywood detectors that would stop relaying of such content so that users can defend themselves in criminal courts. Or the systems could also be in-circle specific so nothing of value is lost if everyone in a terrorist group would be prosecuted together, though I imagine that could hamper network growth. But fundamentally, I think the model has to be that all clients are also servers. That's the best way to decentralize a social media.

woile 1y ago
I think this is how iroh works. They have "relays" which are servers that help establish a connection between 2 clients if necessary. https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/relay https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/relay
fiatjaf 1y ago
This is cool but P2P doesn't work. Iroh also relies on "relays" in a sense. Nostr makes that explicit and gives relays identities so they can freely enact policies instead of having to hack that in weird ways.

sak5sk 1y ago

Some nostr apps to demonstrate what it's capable of: https://www.openux.app/ https://www.openux.app/ - Mobbin alternative https://kinostr.com/ https://kinostr.com/ - movies with chat room https://zap.stream/ https://zap.stream/ - live streaming similar to Twitch https://dtan.xyz/ https://dtan.xyz/ - torrents https://zapstore.dev/ https://zapstore.dev/ - permissionless app store https://nostrnests.com/ https://nostrnests.com/ - audio room chats https://zapmeacoffee.com/ https://zapmeacoffee.com/ - like buy me a coffee

digitalbase 1y ago
I've been working on a Quora/StackOverflow alternative (on top of Nostr). https://asknostr.site/ https://asknostr.site/ I hope this demonstrates how a distributed social protocol can solve many use cases and the advantage to the end-user: - do not get rugpulled by (VC backed) companies that own your data - receive zaps/money by contributing - data is truely available to everyone (but signed by author)
- BinaryIgor 1y ago
  There are also tradeoffs: * relays can just go away - you don't have your data then * there is both user-friendly and secure way of managing your private keys; additionally, once your keys are gone, your identity is gone - there is no "I forgot my password" procedure
  - agalush 1y ago
    If you're worried about the durability of your contents, you can publish them on multiple relays, even self-hosted ones. Also, events are just JSON content: you can easily dump them on your local storage and republish on another relay whenever you want.

gwd 1y ago

Don't know much about Nostr, but wondered re the spam problem, if it would make sense to introduce the idea of proof-of-work for the identities? A quick search shows that the have optional PoW proposals for notes (i.e., individual posts), but I didn't see anything about PoW for identities. People could spend $1, or $5, or $50 of compute for an identity, and others could use the cost of the identity as a filter. Having a $5 ID put on a blacklist would make poor behavior of any sort more costly.

digitalbase 1y ago
Here is the Network Implementation Proposal for POW (https://nips.nostr.com/13 https://nips.nostr.com/13) Identity on nostr is just a public/private keypair. You can enhance that identity by sending a kind0 (metadata) note with your name, bio, pictures. So i guess you're suggestion to add PoW for kind0 events which is covered by NIP13 too.
- gwd 1y ago
  Right, so the general NIP13 could be used to define a "ID proof-of-work" note attached to an ID. You could add PoW notes after ID creation, or create new, more difficult notes if the original one turned out to be insufficient. But although there's the technical components available to easily build such a thing, you're not aware of such a standard having been discussed, much less defined? EDIT: To be clear, the idea for this would be a equivalent of the "blue check mark", but 1) you pay it yourself and 2) you can make it as cheap or expensive as you want.
fiatjaf 1y ago
Yes, that makes sense and that can be used later by relays and clients in order to decide whether to store or display notes from identities. In fact that's a pretty good idea.

r721 1y ago

I still don't understand how Nostr would behave in this hypothetical scenario - a bad actor creates 100k key pairs (via residential proxies) and posts 10 LLM-generated replies to each new post. Who would fight with that wave of spam exactly and how?

digitalbase 1y ago
This is happening today. The answer is trusted relays and Web of Trust Long-time nostr user. My feeds are all spam free. Not to say there aren't any other problems :-)
- r721 1y ago
  I guess it's easier with commercial spam when they have to advertise something, and that could be detected (website, product, etc) But when it's just a new account with a few LLM-generated replies - how would trusted relay automatically detect the malicious intent?
fiatjaf 1y ago
You only read from the relays you want, relays have all the tools in the world to reject spam, therefore the solution is just to have clients that help the user enforce selecting only what they deem as "safe" relays in order to read replies from.

tempodox 1y ago

> Nostr is an apolitical communication commons. A simple standard that […] can be used to spread information freely. Not controlled by any corporation or government … One could argue that this is a deeply political thing, just not one that the usual suspects would care for. +1.

mwkaufma 1y ago

"apolitical communication commons" So, for center-right users.

AlOwain 1y ago
I believe that their intention was closer to "regardless of your personal political beliefs"; not "average of political beliefs".
dlivingston 1y ago
where does this idea that apolitical = right-leaning come from?
- mwkaufma 1y ago
  All the right-leaning people who loudly insist on being labeled "apolitical."
  - dlivingston 1y ago
    Like who?
kinakomochidayo 1y ago
Well, with all the Bitcoin maxis on there, more like right, far-right

BinaryIgor 1y ago

I've revisited this idea/protocol a few times and still have my doubts: * is there even a need for it? I would say that most people are quite happy with centralized platforms; I don't see it changing anytime soon (why?) * wouldn't we end up in the centralized world anyways? Even though there could be multiple NOSTR clients and relays, we all know how network effect works - people will flock to a single or a few best ones; does it really change the situation that we have today - a few centralized platforms? * I don't see clear incentives in this protocol that would improve current social media landscape - granted that I don't particularly like current ads/sell your attention model I am not sure that having a protocol like this is better that having a few centralized platforms - today's situation. Not to even mention technical challenges and worse user experience that NOSTR brings

jasonvorhe 1y ago
It's quite common for people with rather controversial topics to have backup accounts listed in their bio because centralized platforms are so prone to deplatforming people. If that's acceptable to you, then nostr probably isn't for you. I prefer not to beg anyone for permission to publish my opinions on the internet.
- BinaryIgor 1y ago
  Why not to have a website then? That's the only thing that where the content is truly Yours. In NOSTR, even though yes there is more than one relay, but you still need their permission to publish; and yes, you can run your own relay - but you might host your own website too - no need for new apps and protocols to do this
  - nout 1y ago
    The difference is that on nostr you can have immediate interactions with others, you can get their comments, you can message with them, etc. In your example you can think about nostr as a protocol on top of "your own websites" that allows all people with "your own website" to effectively communicate and live interact with each other. And creating "your own website" is just a matter of clicking a button in any nostr app that generates private key and public key pair.

tptacek 1y ago

I think it's worth knowing that the cryptography in Nostr appears to be a wreck. Here's a paper from EuroS&P this year, also presented at Black Hat on the crypto track: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1459.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1459.pdf The vulnerabilities here are pretty :yikes: * The event protocol that drives the system doesn't authenticate public keys, so asymmetric signatures are performative: attackers that can intercept messages (Nostr servers, the presumed adversary of an E2EE messaging system) can just swap out keys and re-sign. * Two major clients, the mobile phone Damus app and the web Iris app, don't even verify signatures to begin with. * DMs in this system are unauthenticated CBC, so attackers can simply bitflip messages and events to say what they want. * The apps do automatic link-preview, so they've managed to reconstitute the EFAIL attack: attackers can locate links within messages (they'll be revealed by SNI and DNS anyways) and then bitflip them to point to attacker-controlled servers, exposing both the URLs (which will often contain tokens) and, with a bit of extra work, the message itself (by tacking `?foo=` onto a URL). * There's no key separation in the system, so you can trick users into running a subprotocol other than the messaging system, then establishing a session key, which will then be used for messaging. These are really basic errors; this is mid-aughts-level cryptographic engineering. There are probably a variety of other reasons to use Nostr, but end-to-end security does not appear to be one of them.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
why is this the first time that I came across these issues. Someone should talk about these issues asap. What federated platform might be the more secure tho protocol wise, bluesky (at protocol) or fediverse
- nout 1y ago
  The paper seems to be referencing issues in client apps during early development of those apps that have since been fixed. So that's likely why it's not being talked about now.
ursuscamp 1y ago
So, I was part of the Nostr community for quite a while and was the author of a popular Nostr extension for Safari, before eventually giving up on Nostr for various reasons. I haven't read that entire paper. Mainly, I skipped to the section you mention here: > The event protocol that drives the system doesn't authenticate public keys, so asymmetric signatures are performative: attackers that can intercept messages (Nostr servers, the presumed adversary of an E2EE messaging system) can just swap out keys and re-sign. I think you and the authors perhaps misunderstand the Nostr protocol. Nostr is, effectively, an identity system tied to a public key. The cryptography is sound. Your identity is your public key. When you request a user's profile, or their events, you request it specifically by their public key. That is unforgeable (assuming no bugs in the implementation, like what the authors found in Damus). This does present UX issues that can manifest as security issues, such as "how can you verify that a user with a certain public is who they say they are instead of an impostor". That is a separate issue from whether the cryptography itself is sound.

rgreeko42 1y ago

My "apolitical" shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. What an odd word to use in the first sentence of your product description, which also includes the word "open", an inherently political concept in this context. Did/does Nostr have some cryptocurrency connection or am I thinking of something else?

skeptrune 1y ago
yeah, lots of bitcoiners
Retinal7467 1y ago
Right wingers have a long history of calling themselves apolitical.
itslennysfault 1y ago
They explicitly don't have a "nostr coin" or do anything "on chain" which I applaud them for especially since the Venn Diagram of Nostr and the crypto community is basically a circle.
tegiddrone 1y ago
I concur and "apolitical" is probably not the best word. I think it is an attempt to convey that the platform can't ban people. It is resistant from infrastructure censorship. Here is an example specific use case: https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/ https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/ I find that example pretty humorous... Damn, what kind of controversy is Pamela spreading? I like it but feel nervous that there is synergy with the bitcoin space. Hype and validation is thick in that space

philip1209 1y ago

The issue with all of these open social protocol is that they fail to grasp that they are built for entertainment, and hence the modulated emotional reactions are a feature not a bug.

TJTorola 1y ago
Existing social platforms are built for profit, which modulates emotion for engagement (something kind of like entertainment, but I wouldn't say I'm entertained exactly by the rage bait I'm often fed by algorithms). Users of an open protocol might select for the same experience, or they might not, I think that's yet to be seen. This also assumes that this fantasy open protocol could also escape the pressures of maximizing profit.

lxe 1y ago

Why can't these projects separate the use-cases from philosophies and from implementation when presenting them? At first glance I don't understand what this is. Is it a social network? A protocol? "Pro-censorship? I need to read some blog article... It's been like this with scuttlebutt/gossip, and rest of the alternative internet/fediverse with mastodont and activitypub and diaspora. Instead of asking questions like "How is this different than email? How does it compare to twitter?", I have to start with "What am I looking at? A technical implementation or a product? Is it a website or an app? What am I supposed to do with this? There's also Urbit, which I'm sure not a single one of you can explain exactly what it is. It's not as bad as "Web3", I'll give it that. Bluesky got it right. So did gemini to some extent.

jonstaab 1y ago
Nostr is essentially a compromise between p2p and traditional web architectures. It cuts with the grain of the internet by using web servers, while reducing the dependence users have on servers by using keys for identity and digital signatures for authenticating data. The effect is that users have "credible exit" (among other things), which has been discussed for years. This doesn't really create any new "use cases", which is why the use case is often described as "whatever, it's the new internet". What it does do is introduce a very different set of trade-offs which favor user control over platform control (with the attendant UX trade-offs (or at least a different set of UX idioms)). The reason the focus is on social is because that represents the majority of applications that do exist, the original motivation for building the protocol, and a value proposition (censorship resistance) that lots of people can relate to.
- Wilduck 1y ago
  I don't want to be mean, but this post has exactly the problem the person you're replying to was complaining about. The person you're replying to, I think, would like an explanation that reads more like "It's like Twitter, but not tied to a mega-corp, just for you and your pals". I don't know if that description actually fits Nostr though because, like the person you're replying to, I have a pretty hard time understanding what Nostr actually _is_.

SLWW 1y ago

The most endearing thing about Nostr is that the User IDs are just the most concise, and shortest of all ActivityPub Compat. protocols.

jrflowers 1y ago

I love this: >Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" Under a tag that says “pro-censorship”. I think I could maybe (?) imagine what they’re trying to say there, but “a lack of censorship is political and the presence of censorship is apolitical” sounds like something a person would say after a humongous bong rip of salvia or sustaining a life-threatening amount of blood loss

Wismerarie 1y ago

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chwahoo 1y ago

I haven't closely followed distributed protocols like this in years so might just be just behind the times, but I can't recall ever seeing "Pro Censorship" as a badge on a technology. Seems to fit with real-world trends that confuse and frustrate me. I'm not saying we need a censorship-proof world, just that I find this quite jarring. I suspect I might be missing some context.

curtisszmania 1y ago

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nikolay 1y ago

Nostr is terrible! There are so many "standards," I'm not sure how they expect adoption. Compare them to Bluesky - which is much more complicated under the hood, but so easy to use! Just look at Gossip's settings - it's a nightmare!

bginna93 1y ago

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bginna93 1y ago

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zenmac 1y ago

Whoever is in charge of the front page of nostr.com ? There is a broken link pointing to "https://njump.me/nevent1qqsxstdgkge3k9mtezv4z4lpp88p3lnqta9k0k6n8hex0a4zv62pdmqzyqalp33lewf5vdq847t6te0wvnags0gs0mu72kz8938tn24wlfze6pfalk0 https://njump.me/nevent1qqsxstdgkge3k9mtezv4z4lpp88p3lnqta9k..." regarding economic incentives of relays operational.