8 ms·

Nostr – Decentralized social network

ravenbitcoin 3y ago
If you're on Android, use Amethyst. If you're on iOS, use Damus. If you're on the web, https://snort.social https://snort.social and https://iris.to https://iris.to 🫂
- lovvtide 3y ago
  Also on web, https://satellite.earth https://satellite.earth if you prefer reading conversations as threaded comments
rideontime 3y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163590 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937223
benwerd 3y ago
For what it's worth, Nos is a pretty great iOS app for this: https://www.nostrapps.com/apps/nos-social https://www.nostrapps.com/apps/nos-social
pharmakom 3y ago
Nothing about the Nostr protocol struck me as particularly interesting. Spam control, moderation and anonymity are not really dealt with. Why the hype?
- robcohen 3y ago
  I feel the same way. It seems like it doesn’t even try to solve most of the hardest problems for decentralization. I too find it weird, but it is fun to play with.
- irusensei 3y ago
  > anonymity are not really dealt with Why would you need to deal with anonymity?
  - de_keyboard 3y ago
    Does Nostr have any mechanisms to ensure anonymity, or can the relay log everything?
    - mikem170 3y ago
      > Does Nostr have any mechanisms to ensure anonymity Your identity on the network is a public/private key pair. You don't have to associate your real name with your posts, if you don't want to. And you can have multiple key pair identities if you want. Posts are plain text by default, but encrypted private messages can also be exchanged. You can choose what relays to post to, and obfuscate your ip address with a vpn or tor if you desire. > can the relay log everything Yes, subject to the above mitigations.
- newswasboring 3y ago
  I guess because it's the only one on the market? At least afaik
- ravenbitcoin 3y ago
  I don't see much spam. It's far, far less than Twitter. I can mute people I don't want to see. And I can be anonymous if I want. What exactly did you mean?
  - graypegg 3y ago
    Is it possible you don’t see much spam because it’s currently not big enough to be worth spamming?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - hospitalJail 3y ago
      As much as I like the idea of anonymous posting, there are some serious issues with spam/astroturfing. I'm ready to join a social media website that requires a social security number, photo ID, and interview process. I've had enough of propagandists and marketers.
- javier123454321 3y ago
  It's simple, you can develop a client or relay without too much effort, and has an active dev community. It's also FUN. It keeps me going back on a way that Mastodon never did. Not to mention client interoperability is dead easy. It kinda just works which is really nice.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  All these projects don't understand that it's not the principle of free communication or the idea of sharing content that made networks like twitter and facebook so successful. It was an army of engineers and designers working closely together with marketing people and even psychologists to maximise user engagement and retention. Heck, you could just endlessly recycle the same algorithmic content mixed with camouflaged marketing influencers sans any real stuff and people will suck it up like crazy (looking at you, tiktok). One of the key things nostr criticises (addictiveness) is what will keep it from succeeding on any broader scale.
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    What makes you think their goal is succeeding on the broader scale, though?
    - volkk 3y ago
      right. was going to ask the same thing. i'm okay with it being a relative niche. that is to say, writers, economists, artists, etc with a lean towards tech. i'm completely fine with Nostr not becoming the worldwide phenom so that it doesn't attract the spam and the types of people that comes along with popularity.
    - sigmoid10 3y ago
      From their website: >Nostr is a protocol, designed for simplicity, that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network. So they basically want to create twitter without Musk (or anyone in charge for that matter). Nothing wrong with that goal, it's just highly unlikely to succeed given the fundamental shortcomings of this approach.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        "A global network" doesn't mean "the dominant global network", though. Mastodon is global, for example.
        3y ago
- dtdannen 3y ago
  How did you use it? The default setting is anonymous unless you reveal who you are. After I muted a small number of people and used some paid relays I don’t see spam or bad content. Coolest feature is that you can switch clients while keeping the same relays and all your data stays with you. Plus a bunch of clients have this auto translate feature so people are talking to each other regardless of the language they speak. I started following some people in other languages - very unique social media experience.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    You are already paying for paid relays ? What is the reasoning? Congrats on your first comment by the way.
    - ursuscamp 3y ago
      I used paid relays. The reasons are higher quality content. It works alright for spam prevention. Also, I use the nostr.wine filter relay, which is pretty neat. You can connect to it and it will pull notes from your web of contacts (your follows, plus their follows). Additionally, it will rebroadcast your notes to public relays. It's a pretty nice way to keep your feed quiet (not spammy), but also allow your notes to make it out to the broader public nostr sphere.
      - dizhn 3y ago
        I will have to look into this more. It sounds like it's not as simple as the project website makes it sound.
- haarts 3y ago
  There's little spam at the moment. There will be. But at that time the relays (pieces of server software that relay nostr messages) can step in and implement spam control via whatever they see fit. Perhaps some smart filtering, perhaps pay a few sats to have a message relayed or perhaps some real name policy. Clients can pick a (set of) relay(s) which fit their preference best. Or not, and accept the default. The protocol is surprisingly simple to read [1], many relays and clients exist already. I exchanged messages with a friend of mine who was using a very different client and it just worked! Personally I like the fact that you can 'like' posts by sending a couple of sats via Lightning. I think it is a great motivator to write thoughtful, quality content. Currently nostr is radical, weird and unpolished. The Amethyst client is slow at times. But the pace of development is incredible. [1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
  - cube2222 3y ago
    Could you expand on how relays differ (mostly conceptually) from something like Mastodon instances? Adding because Nostr seems to be marketed as something more decentralized than that, and I'd like to get a deeper understanding.
    - RobotToaster 3y ago
      My understanding is the relays don't actually... relay, like mastodon instances do. With mastodon your client only talks to one "instance" to see all the "instances" that "instance" is federated with. With Nostr your client connects to every "relay" you want to see content from, there isn't really any communication between "relays".
    - masukomi 3y ago
      This is gossip protocol not a federated thing. assuming it's the same as Scuttlebutt (also gossip protocol) a relay is literally just a relay. There's no "home server". You don't have an account on anyone's machine. You just shove data out to "people" who are listening to you. In scuttlebutt the relays are configured so that anyone can ask it to "follow" them and then they send their data to it. Anyone who listens to that relay can get any data the relay has. in scuttlebutt the problem was that I never felt like i could trust a relay to exist for more than 6 months, so i just followed every one i could. No-one wants to set up a relay, and relays have to have a static domain / ip so that you know where to look for them. It's not like tor where you can just leave your computer on and that's good enough. I expect the same problems here.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > Why the hype? Jack Dorsey is a co-founder, that's it. I feel like "nostr.com" has been showing up on the HN front page, with no context, at least once every week.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    Someone's got professionals pumping it, for sure. Along with the recent context-free appearances on the front page, note that this is the 2nd post from submitter @throwaway689236.
  - erskingardner 3y ago
    Jack Dorsey funded some of the early development through a grant. Nostr has no co-founders or CEO. It's a protocol, not a company.
  - jonesjohns 3y ago
    Jack is not a cofounder. Nostr.com is owned by a random user (not sure who, but can probably figure it out). Nostr was created on 2020 by an anon developer named fiatjaf. Jack made grants to nostr devs in 2022 (among other FOSS projects) after he first discovered it. He has no part in the development of the protocol other than the grants, although he is an active user.
- rektide 3y ago
  Nostr is decentralized. I think a big part of the idea is that relays just dont carry spam/bad actors. The protocol doesn't, as of yet, have need to handle most of your "it doesn't handle complex social issues X Y or Z" nags because it so far handles these problems socially, not technically, and that's been working for now. Nostr is all based on anonymous cryptographic identifiers, so it seems like you have some special definition of anonymity that you are looking for, as it seems nothing if not anonymous. Having a stable identifier allows relays to know who to send versus who not to send, and allows connecting data together. Users are free to sock puppet up to their hearts content, if they wish to further diffuse traffic. The appeal? The appeal here is that this is an incredibly malleable & comprehensible low level tool for messaging. Competitors like AtProto or ActivityPub involve complex protocols to exchange/syndicate data around, as much as the payload of the messages themselves. They are high level visions for what a network is. By compare, Nostr's low level approach is organic & searching not a refined final product, but a thriving ecosystem of expanding ideas. Nostr has extreme elegance as a protocol by being focused primarily on messages themselves, which start as very simple & understandable self signing devices. The transport & exchange of messages is almost incidental, and indeed, Nostr over shoebox or carrier pigeon is possible. This allows a lot more flexibility with how the network can form distributed connections, allows great offline capabilities, allows creative relays & creative/selective distribution mechanisms to form. Nostr is an excellent base layer. The base specs are quite short & direct. It's a protocol one can happily implement in a weekend. Nostr has incredibly wild applications, because it is a simple extensible base. There's a wide variety of interesting capabilities that have already need accepted as Nostr Implementation Possibilities, NIPS, that grow & build on one another. Nostr base protocol is just a start, just the seed of an idea, one that's meant to be iterated on & expanded, and it's so easy & direct to do so. This is the biggest advantage by far; I cannot stress this enough. Not trying to do absolutely everything & making a modular simple protocol to start building & iterating from is all the wins, is the Bazaar to the ambitious Cathedrals. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips Nostr is by far the most malleable, most open set of possibilities, the most grow able, of the social networks we have. Everything else seems to have been designed to arrive somewhat fully formed, ready to go, but Nostr's strength is that it doesn't purport to know every use case & to have a total picture of what it is. It's a much simpler idea, with much more focus on finding out the uses.
- jonesjohns 3y ago
  Spam control = relay configuration Moderation = client side moderation features, most allow muting and blur images from unknown accounts prior to opening. If you don’t like the way a client moderates, move to another Anonymity = not sure how it’s not anonymous. There’s no sign up, no email, no password. It’s just keypairs being generated. Use a vpn.
- drowsspa 3y ago
  The responses are quite funny "yeah we don't need to have moderation or spam control as opposed to literally any other successful social network". I don't really get excited when that's the default response, because it means they don't get that that's basically the point of a social network. Coming up with a protocol is not that hard. The technical side is fun to work with, but I guess technologists don't realize that the human side is way harder to do.
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  When I see a platform that advertises as 'censorship-resistant' as it's top line I just figure it for libertarian bullshit.
jb55 3y ago
Author of damus[1] here. We’ve seen a crazy growth in nostr in the past couple of months. Damus itself sees about 1000 to 10,000 download per week, and we’re up to about 500k to 1mil+ users (hard to get exact numbers on a decentralized network). Exciting times for social networking protocols! [1] https://damus.io https://damus.io
- irusensei 3y ago
  I love Damus and Nostr. Thanks and please keep up the good work.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
  I like alternatives to big sites but this sentence makes me nervous: "Bitcoin & , the native currency of the internet." Is there a need for this?
  - xk_id 3y ago
    It’s okay, it’s only technology. It’s been around for almost two decades and it’s open source. Nothing to be afraid of. You can conquer your fear through diligent studying. Good luck!
  - jb55 3y ago
    Its optional, you don’t need to attach a lightning address to your profile and you will receive no bitcoin for your posts.
  - DJBunnies 3y ago
    Why does it make you nervous?
    - evilspammer 3y ago
      because 99.999% of cryptocurrency projects are scams
      - stiltzkin 3y ago
sak5sk 3y ago
Nostr user here, absolutely love everything I am seeing. I think Nostr is deeply misunderstood by onlookers and I'd like to share a few things that may help clear things up: 1. Nostr is not a social network - it's a protocol on top of many social networks can be built. 2. Nostr is not limited to the social use cases - and I think that is the killer advantage here. With Nostr, you can integrate various other types of apps to facilitate not only chat but content distribution AND payments. One click payments with zaps. 3. Zaps are going to open up a floodgate of use cases that have a significant advantage over legacy ways of doing things. For example: if you have a music app with multiple recording artists, any time someone zaps or streams their song, all artists involved could get paid instantly. 4. Nostr is a discovery powerhouse that enables content to be easily discovered across platforms without gatekeeping. For creators this is great news because they can just publish in one place and be in all (willingly) participating clients/apps. This alone is a huge development that I don't think too many are grasping just yet. Yes, it is still clunky at times, but the UX and UI is getting better over time. The development model makes it easy for anyone to jump in and build. You are not limited to any particular way of doing things and can create a custom experience for your audience while having access to the entirety of the protocol. Some resources for people: - https://www.heynostr.com/ https://www.heynostr.com/ - https://www.nostrapps.com/ https://www.nostrapps.com/
- Encrypt-Keeper 3y ago
  That's a huge benefit over social media projects like Mastodon, which lack discovery features entirely.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > Nostr is a discovery powerhouse that enables content to be easily discovered across platforms without gatekeeping. For creators this is great news because they can just publish in one place and be in all (willingly) participating clients/apps. Beyond the marketing barf, what makes this a "discovery powerhouse"? From the description, it doesn't sound any different from Mastodon, or having an email newsletter, or publishing your own website.
  - 3y ago
Barrin92 3y ago
Calling Nostr a social network to me seems like a category error. It's a messaging protocol. People might build a social network on top of it, but it's not necessarily going to have any of the properties Nostr has, the same way Facebook is built on top of html. If you want to solve social issues at a protocol level, there need to be social mechanisms in the protocol. That would honestly be kind of interesting to see. But Nostr is just a reinvented networking stack.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Seems like it's more than that considering they have mobile apps coming that are definitely social networks.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    I can build a social networking mobile app on top of HTTP but does that make HTTP a social network?
65 3y ago
Does Nostr use ActivityPub or is it a proprietary implementation?
- erskingardner 3y ago
  Nope – it is its own thing. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
  - themusicgod1 3y ago
    stop linking to github!
- rchaud 3y ago
  The latter.
cube2222 3y ago
On the last HN thread about Nostr I've mentioned Bluesky, and talked about its qualities, including the separation of various duties, like the feed, moderation, storage, etc. into different entities that can be pluggable. Since that I got an invite (thank you, Sam!) and I'm even more bullish now (though I'm not much of a social media poster myself). Compared to Nostr it seems like there's a first-party "base" app that most people can use, which has UX very similar to Twitter, with the assumption that people will be able to make their pick of app/moderation/feed/... later based on merit, not lock-in. It seems like in the recent days/weeks a lot of non-technical various public figures have onboarded Bluesky, thanks to this ease of getting started. Folks that I wouldn't expect there for a while yet. To any Nostr users - how's that developing there? Based on my cursory look onboarding looks quite a bit more daunting. Anyway, the Twitter blue checkmark seems to be a blessing for decentralized social networks. EDIT: Since I already got an email about it 5 mins after writing this - No, I don't have any invite codes, sorry. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35692378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35692378
- stiltzkin 3y ago
  What do you think of Bluesky TOS?
  - cube2222 3y ago
    Anything in particular?
    - timbit42 3y ago
      This: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767315
- javier123454321 3y ago
  Download amethyst on Android or Damus on IOS. You're onboarded. Set up a lightning wallet to receive tips for valuable content. No wait list for this decentralized protocol. No native app, no dev team, no terms of service.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
erskingardner 3y ago
Lots of misconceptions here. If you're interested in learning more I'd highly recommend reading up a bit, https://nostr.how https://nostr.how (disclaimer, I'm the maintainer of that site).
- rchaud 3y ago
  Shouldn't explanatory information be on nostr.com? What credibility does this 3rd party site have?
natural219 3y ago
I had the chance to speak to some Nostr devs this weekend. My impression (like other mentions below) is that it seems less like a social network than it does a messaging protocol. As with all tech protocols, there's potential for more sophisticated things to be built on top of them, but I didn't get a clear sense that Nostr people are interested or serious about product engineering to make this a "Twitter killer" or some other popular buzzword. There was an interesting discussion on how to limit spam in distributed networks, the primordial problem of any social web endeavor. The two poles seem to be relying on "financial incentives" vs "identity gatekeeping". For those that believe in the power of the free market to regulate tricky social problems, I think Nostr has a lot of promise.
colesantiago 3y ago
This 'Nostr' thing will never take off, it has too much 'cryptocurrency' laden features that nobody asked for. yuck.
- javier123454321 3y ago
  A culture of tipping for content you find valuable at the click of a button that works for people to cash out regardless of their jurisdiction is yucky to you? I guess, i see it as one of it's biggest selling points, however you can turn it off in some clients
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - colesantiago 3y ago
    How do people cash out of a token that isn't a currency? I'm not interested in being blasted with prophetic bitcoin nonsense 24/7 on every thread or on any conversation I have with people. I opened a random web client and saw too many 'cryptidots' on this nostr thing. No way this will grow.
    - javier123454321 3y ago
      Honestly the content being almost exclusively about Bitcoin and Nostr might be it's biggest problem.
      - bubersson 3y ago
        There are ways to get non-bitcoin or non-nostr content - like following hashtags (in Amethyst and other clients), for example #grownostr #F1 #beerchain, etc. Generally whatever interest you have, follow the hashtag.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    You're twisting words. Tipping is not the problem here, it's the cryptocurrencies. If you can't see how people mistrust them then you're probably deeply invested in them yourself. As long as there is no real value in the real world it will remain inflated by confidence, which reeks of scam. And no one pizza place here or a bitcoin atm there does not make a difference. So far the only real goods and services crypto has traded at scale are on an illegal black market.
roribolden 3y ago
K3s + kilo and key exchange via video works well enough for me. No need to dig into a black box protocol concept and implementation hiding in the corner of the ‘net
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Entinel 3y ago
Nostr doesn't need to become the new Twitter and I think it fills a fun niche but I think bluesky will eventually be that new Twitter because your average Joe just wants to go to twitter.com/whatever and not have to mess around with other people's domains, private keys, and whatever. Again, I think Nostr is great and eventually I imagine you can just push to both platforms but the people I follow on Twitter are not technical by any means and Bluesky is probably where they will land.
- valianteffort 3y ago
  In the same way your average person doesn't care about privacy, they don't care about Elon Musk's shenanigans. Twitter is not failing in the way his detractors continue to hope. Bluesky will never gain any more traction than Rumble, Truth, Gab, or Mastadon. It will fade into obscurity before even launching just like Clubhouse. Because offering the same exact service, with seemingly no visible changes, does not matter to most people.
  - Entinel 3y ago
    > In the same way your average person doesn't care about privacy, they don't care about Elon Musk's shenanigans. They obviously do care about Elon's shenanigans. Celebrities are leaving Twitter, politicians are leaving Twitter, companies are leaving Twitter, news organizations are leaving Twitter. These are the people Twitter should be concerned about because they have the followers and people will go where they go and they are currently going to bluesky.
  - agentdrtran 3y ago
    There's been a steady attrition of celebrities and other major players from the platform. social media platforms don't die overnight, they die over time.
- Grendalor 3y ago
  Yes, this is right. Nostr will be more like Mastodon was before Elon ... a smallish place for enthusiasts of decentralization, albeit following a different protocol than Mastodon, of course. Bluesky is already the new Twitter, you can tell. The cool kids all want to be on Bluesky. In effect, the very low rate drip of invites approach they are following, coupled with a virtual megaton of almost entirely gushing, breathless positive stories from the tech press are generating a high pent-up demand and a sense of virality even while it has a tiny userbase. The people running it are very clever, and are clearly doing everything they can to become the alternative for disgruntled Twitter users that Mastodon, Nostr and others are not (and arguably never were trying to be ... Bluesky is, by contrast, trying like heck to be exactly that). Does this mean Twitter dies? No, I don't think so. What I think it means, though, is that, like the MSM, we will have likely two microblogging platforms that are broken into socio-ideological camps, like we have with most of the other media. It's new for social media, of course (not that there haven't been wing platforms before, but they have been small), but not new for media in general or the internet in general. And one could say that it's actually somewhat surprising that it took so long for this kind of split to happen in social media as well, but it kind of "feels right" that it's happening, given the very divergent ways that people have reacted to Twitter over the past year. It seems "right" that there should be separate services for people based on the kind of ideology and views they prefer, since this is how pretty much everyone rolls in every other aspect of the media already anyway.
brethna 3y ago
So, I am surprised the Fediverse is not mentioned. Already bigger and better than anything Nostr is trying to do. Why reinvent the wheel? Or why not join the wheel?
- wedesoft 3y ago
  distributed > federated
  - pornel 3y ago
    I don't think this is always true. Centralized services have practical benefits, and federation is a compromise between fully decentralized and centralized. Federation frees individual users from key management (a trivial issue for HN users, but a big pain for less technical users). Instance admins can handle spam and abuse for entire communities, and what is acceptable varies between communities. Data can be aggregated per instance instead of independently fetched per user. For example, previews for external links can be cached per instance, since you trust your instance. In a fully distributed system it'd be either vulnerable to manipulation (since HTTPS doesn't offer a way for others to cryptographically verify data originates from a URL, without contacting the origin server) or every user would have to fetch a link preview themselves, which has DDoS potential and tracking risks.
- themusicgod1 3y ago
  and there's a fediverse nostr bridge allowing users from both networks to communicate (insofar as they don't hide from eachother) https://mostr.pub/ https://mostr.pub/
wedesoft 3y ago
Wrote a post om how to access Nostr using the iris.to web client in case it helps: https://www.wedesoft.de/software/2023/04/25/nostr/ https://www.wedesoft.de/software/2023/04/25/nostr/
lucabs 3y ago
[dead]
agg23 3y ago
Saw a post about Nostr on here a week or so ago and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I don't think it's likely to become the next platform (and the crypto stuff probably doesn't help), but I just find enjoyment with the minimal spec and how simple it all is. I don't understand how moderation or handling the large transfers of duplicate data between relays and clients will work.
malikNF 3y ago
If someone’s looking for a fun project to do on a weekend. Going through and implementing the nips for nostr is really fun. You can make a mvp version of a client in a afternoon.
netbioserror 3y ago
This has zero chance of working if normies have to fiddle with keypairs.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  There's no reason they have to "fiddle" with it. Generating a new keypair could be a button. Normies use keypairs every time they connect to an https site. They just don't know it, nor is there any reason why they should.
  - netbioserror 3y ago
    This is not a function of "could." They're already asking users to do it. If they "could," why didn't they? To make something easy, you first have to actually make it easy. Not let forum users argue about how easy it "could" be.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      > If they "could," why didn't they? Because this is early days? Surely you don't imagine that every product emerges in its final form? Maybe instead you could explain why they couldn't. As I noted, people seem to be able to use TLS to make secure connections to websites without generating keypairs from the command line, or whatever. Edit: and in fact this has been done. https://nostr.how/en/guides/iris https://nostr.how/en/guides/iris Type in your name. Hit "Go". Done.
Kye 3y ago
Everything I've heard makes it sound like it's for people who don't think Mastodon's onboarding is confusing enough.
p-o 3y ago
Today, we have a lot more bandwidth at home. I always wondered if having a "social network" device at home would make sense in the future. I imagine a device like a router or an Apple TV, that you connect at home. Then, you own it, everything you post is on your little device. Maybe you pay a few bucks a months so you can upload an encrypted backup in the cloud somewhere. There's obviously downsides to it, but I think I would buy such a device.
- password4321 3y ago
  Sounds like a good app for an old phone!
themusicgod1 3y ago
Virtually all nodes are github-only, and all nodes require github software to run

If you're on Android, use Amethyst. If you're on iOS, use Damus. If you're on the web, https://snort.social https://snort.social and https://iris.to https://iris.to 🫂

lovvtide 3y ago
Also on web, https://satellite.earth https://satellite.earth if you prefer reading conversations as threaded comments

rideontime 3y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163590 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937223

benwerd 3y ago

For what it's worth, Nos is a pretty great iOS app for this: https://www.nostrapps.com/apps/nos-social https://www.nostrapps.com/apps/nos-social

pharmakom 3y ago

Nothing about the Nostr protocol struck me as particularly interesting. Spam control, moderation and anonymity are not really dealt with. Why the hype?

robcohen 3y ago
I feel the same way. It seems like it doesn’t even try to solve most of the hardest problems for decentralization. I too find it weird, but it is fun to play with.
irusensei 3y ago
> anonymity are not really dealt with Why would you need to deal with anonymity?
- de_keyboard 3y ago
  Does Nostr have any mechanisms to ensure anonymity, or can the relay log everything?
  - mikem170 3y ago
    > Does Nostr have any mechanisms to ensure anonymity Your identity on the network is a public/private key pair. You don't have to associate your real name with your posts, if you don't want to. And you can have multiple key pair identities if you want. Posts are plain text by default, but encrypted private messages can also be exchanged. You can choose what relays to post to, and obfuscate your ip address with a vpn or tor if you desire. > can the relay log everything Yes, subject to the above mitigations.
newswasboring 3y ago
I guess because it's the only one on the market? At least afaik
ravenbitcoin 3y ago
I don't see much spam. It's far, far less than Twitter. I can mute people I don't want to see. And I can be anonymous if I want. What exactly did you mean?
- graypegg 3y ago
  Is it possible you don’t see much spam because it’s currently not big enough to be worth spamming?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    As much as I like the idea of anonymous posting, there are some serious issues with spam/astroturfing. I'm ready to join a social media website that requires a social security number, photo ID, and interview process. I've had enough of propagandists and marketers.
javier123454321 3y ago
It's simple, you can develop a client or relay without too much effort, and has an active dev community. It's also FUN. It keeps me going back on a way that Mastodon never did. Not to mention client interoperability is dead easy. It kinda just works which is really nice.
sigmoid10 3y ago
All these projects don't understand that it's not the principle of free communication or the idea of sharing content that made networks like twitter and facebook so successful. It was an army of engineers and designers working closely together with marketing people and even psychologists to maximise user engagement and retention. Heck, you could just endlessly recycle the same algorithmic content mixed with camouflaged marketing influencers sans any real stuff and people will suck it up like crazy (looking at you, tiktok). One of the key things nostr criticises (addictiveness) is what will keep it from succeeding on any broader scale.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  What makes you think their goal is succeeding on the broader scale, though?
  - volkk 3y ago
    right. was going to ask the same thing. i'm okay with it being a relative niche. that is to say, writers, economists, artists, etc with a lean towards tech. i'm completely fine with Nostr not becoming the worldwide phenom so that it doesn't attract the spam and the types of people that comes along with popularity.
  - sigmoid10 3y ago
    From their website: >Nostr is a protocol, designed for simplicity, that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network. So they basically want to create twitter without Musk (or anyone in charge for that matter). Nothing wrong with that goal, it's just highly unlikely to succeed given the fundamental shortcomings of this approach.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      "A global network" doesn't mean "the dominant global network", though. Mastodon is global, for example.
      - 3y ago
dtdannen 3y ago
How did you use it? The default setting is anonymous unless you reveal who you are. After I muted a small number of people and used some paid relays I don’t see spam or bad content. Coolest feature is that you can switch clients while keeping the same relays and all your data stays with you. Plus a bunch of clients have this auto translate feature so people are talking to each other regardless of the language they speak. I started following some people in other languages - very unique social media experience.
- dizhn 3y ago
  You are already paying for paid relays ? What is the reasoning? Congrats on your first comment by the way.
  - ursuscamp 3y ago
    I used paid relays. The reasons are higher quality content. It works alright for spam prevention. Also, I use the nostr.wine filter relay, which is pretty neat. You can connect to it and it will pull notes from your web of contacts (your follows, plus their follows). Additionally, it will rebroadcast your notes to public relays. It's a pretty nice way to keep your feed quiet (not spammy), but also allow your notes to make it out to the broader public nostr sphere.
    - dizhn 3y ago
      I will have to look into this more. It sounds like it's not as simple as the project website makes it sound.
haarts 3y ago
There's little spam at the moment. There will be. But at that time the relays (pieces of server software that relay nostr messages) can step in and implement spam control via whatever they see fit. Perhaps some smart filtering, perhaps pay a few sats to have a message relayed or perhaps some real name policy. Clients can pick a (set of) relay(s) which fit their preference best. Or not, and accept the default. The protocol is surprisingly simple to read [1], many relays and clients exist already. I exchanged messages with a friend of mine who was using a very different client and it just worked! Personally I like the fact that you can 'like' posts by sending a couple of sats via Lightning. I think it is a great motivator to write thoughtful, quality content. Currently nostr is radical, weird and unpolished. The Amethyst client is slow at times. But the pace of development is incredible. [1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
- cube2222 3y ago
  Could you expand on how relays differ (mostly conceptually) from something like Mastodon instances? Adding because Nostr seems to be marketed as something more decentralized than that, and I'd like to get a deeper understanding.
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    My understanding is the relays don't actually... relay, like mastodon instances do. With mastodon your client only talks to one "instance" to see all the "instances" that "instance" is federated with. With Nostr your client connects to every "relay" you want to see content from, there isn't really any communication between "relays".
  - masukomi 3y ago
    This is gossip protocol not a federated thing. assuming it's the same as Scuttlebutt (also gossip protocol) a relay is literally just a relay. There's no "home server". You don't have an account on anyone's machine. You just shove data out to "people" who are listening to you. In scuttlebutt the relays are configured so that anyone can ask it to "follow" them and then they send their data to it. Anyone who listens to that relay can get any data the relay has. in scuttlebutt the problem was that I never felt like i could trust a relay to exist for more than 6 months, so i just followed every one i could. No-one wants to set up a relay, and relays have to have a static domain / ip so that you know where to look for them. It's not like tor where you can just leave your computer on and that's good enough. I expect the same problems here.
rchaud 3y ago
> Why the hype? Jack Dorsey is a co-founder, that's it. I feel like "nostr.com" has been showing up on the HN front page, with no context, at least once every week.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  Someone's got professionals pumping it, for sure. Along with the recent context-free appearances on the front page, note that this is the 2nd post from submitter @throwaway689236.
- erskingardner 3y ago
  Jack Dorsey funded some of the early development through a grant. Nostr has no co-founders or CEO. It's a protocol, not a company.
- jonesjohns 3y ago
  Jack is not a cofounder. Nostr.com is owned by a random user (not sure who, but can probably figure it out). Nostr was created on 2020 by an anon developer named fiatjaf. Jack made grants to nostr devs in 2022 (among other FOSS projects) after he first discovered it. He has no part in the development of the protocol other than the grants, although he is an active user.
rektide 3y ago
Nostr is decentralized. I think a big part of the idea is that relays just dont carry spam/bad actors. The protocol doesn't, as of yet, have need to handle most of your "it doesn't handle complex social issues X Y or Z" nags because it so far handles these problems socially, not technically, and that's been working for now. Nostr is all based on anonymous cryptographic identifiers, so it seems like you have some special definition of anonymity that you are looking for, as it seems nothing if not anonymous. Having a stable identifier allows relays to know who to send versus who not to send, and allows connecting data together. Users are free to sock puppet up to their hearts content, if they wish to further diffuse traffic. The appeal? The appeal here is that this is an incredibly malleable & comprehensible low level tool for messaging. Competitors like AtProto or ActivityPub involve complex protocols to exchange/syndicate data around, as much as the payload of the messages themselves. They are high level visions for what a network is. By compare, Nostr's low level approach is organic & searching not a refined final product, but a thriving ecosystem of expanding ideas. Nostr has extreme elegance as a protocol by being focused primarily on messages themselves, which start as very simple & understandable self signing devices. The transport & exchange of messages is almost incidental, and indeed, Nostr over shoebox or carrier pigeon is possible. This allows a lot more flexibility with how the network can form distributed connections, allows great offline capabilities, allows creative relays & creative/selective distribution mechanisms to form. Nostr is an excellent base layer. The base specs are quite short & direct. It's a protocol one can happily implement in a weekend. Nostr has incredibly wild applications, because it is a simple extensible base. There's a wide variety of interesting capabilities that have already need accepted as Nostr Implementation Possibilities, NIPS, that grow & build on one another. Nostr base protocol is just a start, just the seed of an idea, one that's meant to be iterated on & expanded, and it's so easy & direct to do so. This is the biggest advantage by far; I cannot stress this enough. Not trying to do absolutely everything & making a modular simple protocol to start building & iterating from is all the wins, is the Bazaar to the ambitious Cathedrals. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips Nostr is by far the most malleable, most open set of possibilities, the most grow able, of the social networks we have. Everything else seems to have been designed to arrive somewhat fully formed, ready to go, but Nostr's strength is that it doesn't purport to know every use case & to have a total picture of what it is. It's a much simpler idea, with much more focus on finding out the uses.
jonesjohns 3y ago
Spam control = relay configuration Moderation = client side moderation features, most allow muting and blur images from unknown accounts prior to opening. If you don’t like the way a client moderates, move to another Anonymity = not sure how it’s not anonymous. There’s no sign up, no email, no password. It’s just keypairs being generated. Use a vpn.
drowsspa 3y ago
The responses are quite funny "yeah we don't need to have moderation or spam control as opposed to literally any other successful social network". I don't really get excited when that's the default response, because it means they don't get that that's basically the point of a social network. Coming up with a protocol is not that hard. The technical side is fun to work with, but I guess technologists don't realize that the human side is way harder to do.
sleepybrett 3y ago
When I see a platform that advertises as 'censorship-resistant' as it's top line I just figure it for libertarian bullshit.

jb55 3y ago

Author of damus[1] here. We’ve seen a crazy growth in nostr in the past couple of months. Damus itself sees about 1000 to 10,000 download per week, and we’re up to about 500k to 1mil+ users (hard to get exact numbers on a decentralized network). Exciting times for social networking protocols! [1] https://damus.io https://damus.io

irusensei 3y ago
I love Damus and Nostr. Thanks and please keep up the good work.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
I like alternatives to big sites but this sentence makes me nervous: "Bitcoin & , the native currency of the internet." Is there a need for this?
- xk_id 3y ago
  It’s okay, it’s only technology. It’s been around for almost two decades and it’s open source. Nothing to be afraid of. You can conquer your fear through diligent studying. Good luck!
- jb55 3y ago
  Its optional, you don’t need to attach a lightning address to your profile and you will receive no bitcoin for your posts.
- DJBunnies 3y ago
  Why does it make you nervous?
  - evilspammer 3y ago
    because 99.999% of cryptocurrency projects are scams
    - stiltzkin 3y ago

sak5sk 3y ago

Nostr user here, absolutely love everything I am seeing. I think Nostr is deeply misunderstood by onlookers and I'd like to share a few things that may help clear things up: 1. Nostr is not a social network - it's a protocol on top of many social networks can be built. 2. Nostr is not limited to the social use cases - and I think that is the killer advantage here. With Nostr, you can integrate various other types of apps to facilitate not only chat but content distribution AND payments. One click payments with zaps. 3. Zaps are going to open up a floodgate of use cases that have a significant advantage over legacy ways of doing things. For example: if you have a music app with multiple recording artists, any time someone zaps or streams their song, all artists involved could get paid instantly. 4. Nostr is a discovery powerhouse that enables content to be easily discovered across platforms without gatekeeping. For creators this is great news because they can just publish in one place and be in all (willingly) participating clients/apps. This alone is a huge development that I don't think too many are grasping just yet. Yes, it is still clunky at times, but the UX and UI is getting better over time. The development model makes it easy for anyone to jump in and build. You are not limited to any particular way of doing things and can create a custom experience for your audience while having access to the entirety of the protocol. Some resources for people: - https://www.heynostr.com/ https://www.heynostr.com/ - https://www.nostrapps.com/ https://www.nostrapps.com/

Encrypt-Keeper 3y ago
That's a huge benefit over social media projects like Mastodon, which lack discovery features entirely.
rchaud 3y ago
> Nostr is a discovery powerhouse that enables content to be easily discovered across platforms without gatekeeping. For creators this is great news because they can just publish in one place and be in all (willingly) participating clients/apps. Beyond the marketing barf, what makes this a "discovery powerhouse"? From the description, it doesn't sound any different from Mastodon, or having an email newsletter, or publishing your own website.
- 3y ago

Barrin92 3y ago

Calling Nostr a social network to me seems like a category error. It's a messaging protocol. People might build a social network on top of it, but it's not necessarily going to have any of the properties Nostr has, the same way Facebook is built on top of html. If you want to solve social issues at a protocol level, there need to be social mechanisms in the protocol. That would honestly be kind of interesting to see. But Nostr is just a reinvented networking stack.

rchaud 3y ago
Seems like it's more than that considering they have mobile apps coming that are definitely social networks.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  I can build a social networking mobile app on top of HTTP but does that make HTTP a social network?

65 3y ago

Does Nostr use ActivityPub or is it a proprietary implementation?

erskingardner 3y ago
Nope – it is its own thing. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
- themusicgod1 3y ago
  stop linking to github!
rchaud 3y ago
The latter.

cube2222 3y ago

On the last HN thread about Nostr I've mentioned Bluesky, and talked about its qualities, including the separation of various duties, like the feed, moderation, storage, etc. into different entities that can be pluggable. Since that I got an invite (thank you, Sam!) and I'm even more bullish now (though I'm not much of a social media poster myself). Compared to Nostr it seems like there's a first-party "base" app that most people can use, which has UX very similar to Twitter, with the assumption that people will be able to make their pick of app/moderation/feed/... later based on merit, not lock-in. It seems like in the recent days/weeks a lot of non-technical various public figures have onboarded Bluesky, thanks to this ease of getting started. Folks that I wouldn't expect there for a while yet. To any Nostr users - how's that developing there? Based on my cursory look onboarding looks quite a bit more daunting. Anyway, the Twitter blue checkmark seems to be a blessing for decentralized social networks. EDIT: Since I already got an email about it 5 mins after writing this - No, I don't have any invite codes, sorry. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35692378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35692378

stiltzkin 3y ago
What do you think of Bluesky TOS?
- cube2222 3y ago
  Anything in particular?
  - timbit42 3y ago
    This: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767315
javier123454321 3y ago
Download amethyst on Android or Damus on IOS. You're onboarded. Set up a lightning wallet to receive tips for valuable content. No wait list for this decentralized protocol. No native app, no dev team, no terms of service.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

erskingardner 3y ago

Lots of misconceptions here. If you're interested in learning more I'd highly recommend reading up a bit, https://nostr.how https://nostr.how (disclaimer, I'm the maintainer of that site).

rchaud 3y ago
Shouldn't explanatory information be on nostr.com? What credibility does this 3rd party site have?

natural219 3y ago

I had the chance to speak to some Nostr devs this weekend. My impression (like other mentions below) is that it seems less like a social network than it does a messaging protocol. As with all tech protocols, there's potential for more sophisticated things to be built on top of them, but I didn't get a clear sense that Nostr people are interested or serious about product engineering to make this a "Twitter killer" or some other popular buzzword. There was an interesting discussion on how to limit spam in distributed networks, the primordial problem of any social web endeavor. The two poles seem to be relying on "financial incentives" vs "identity gatekeeping". For those that believe in the power of the free market to regulate tricky social problems, I think Nostr has a lot of promise.

colesantiago 3y ago

This 'Nostr' thing will never take off, it has too much 'cryptocurrency' laden features that nobody asked for. yuck.

javier123454321 3y ago
A culture of tipping for content you find valuable at the click of a button that works for people to cash out regardless of their jurisdiction is yucky to you? I guess, i see it as one of it's biggest selling points, however you can turn it off in some clients
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- colesantiago 3y ago
  How do people cash out of a token that isn't a currency? I'm not interested in being blasted with prophetic bitcoin nonsense 24/7 on every thread or on any conversation I have with people. I opened a random web client and saw too many 'cryptidots' on this nostr thing. No way this will grow.
  - javier123454321 3y ago
    Honestly the content being almost exclusively about Bitcoin and Nostr might be it's biggest problem.
    - bubersson 3y ago
      There are ways to get non-bitcoin or non-nostr content - like following hashtags (in Amethyst and other clients), for example #grownostr #F1 #beerchain, etc. Generally whatever interest you have, follow the hashtag.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  You're twisting words. Tipping is not the problem here, it's the cryptocurrencies. If you can't see how people mistrust them then you're probably deeply invested in them yourself. As long as there is no real value in the real world it will remain inflated by confidence, which reeks of scam. And no one pizza place here or a bitcoin atm there does not make a difference. So far the only real goods and services crypto has traded at scale are on an illegal black market.

roribolden 3y ago

K3s + kilo and key exchange via video works well enough for me. No need to dig into a black box protocol concept and implementation hiding in the corner of the ‘net

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Entinel 3y ago

Nostr doesn't need to become the new Twitter and I think it fills a fun niche but I think bluesky will eventually be that new Twitter because your average Joe just wants to go to twitter.com/whatever and not have to mess around with other people's domains, private keys, and whatever. Again, I think Nostr is great and eventually I imagine you can just push to both platforms but the people I follow on Twitter are not technical by any means and Bluesky is probably where they will land.

valianteffort 3y ago
In the same way your average person doesn't care about privacy, they don't care about Elon Musk's shenanigans. Twitter is not failing in the way his detractors continue to hope. Bluesky will never gain any more traction than Rumble, Truth, Gab, or Mastadon. It will fade into obscurity before even launching just like Clubhouse. Because offering the same exact service, with seemingly no visible changes, does not matter to most people.
- Entinel 3y ago
  > In the same way your average person doesn't care about privacy, they don't care about Elon Musk's shenanigans. They obviously do care about Elon's shenanigans. Celebrities are leaving Twitter, politicians are leaving Twitter, companies are leaving Twitter, news organizations are leaving Twitter. These are the people Twitter should be concerned about because they have the followers and people will go where they go and they are currently going to bluesky.
- agentdrtran 3y ago
  There's been a steady attrition of celebrities and other major players from the platform. social media platforms don't die overnight, they die over time.
Grendalor 3y ago
Yes, this is right. Nostr will be more like Mastodon was before Elon ... a smallish place for enthusiasts of decentralization, albeit following a different protocol than Mastodon, of course. Bluesky is already the new Twitter, you can tell. The cool kids all want to be on Bluesky. In effect, the very low rate drip of invites approach they are following, coupled with a virtual megaton of almost entirely gushing, breathless positive stories from the tech press are generating a high pent-up demand and a sense of virality even while it has a tiny userbase. The people running it are very clever, and are clearly doing everything they can to become the alternative for disgruntled Twitter users that Mastodon, Nostr and others are not (and arguably never were trying to be ... Bluesky is, by contrast, trying like heck to be exactly that). Does this mean Twitter dies? No, I don't think so. What I think it means, though, is that, like the MSM, we will have likely two microblogging platforms that are broken into socio-ideological camps, like we have with most of the other media. It's new for social media, of course (not that there haven't been wing platforms before, but they have been small), but not new for media in general or the internet in general. And one could say that it's actually somewhat surprising that it took so long for this kind of split to happen in social media as well, but it kind of "feels right" that it's happening, given the very divergent ways that people have reacted to Twitter over the past year. It seems "right" that there should be separate services for people based on the kind of ideology and views they prefer, since this is how pretty much everyone rolls in every other aspect of the media already anyway.

brethna 3y ago

So, I am surprised the Fediverse is not mentioned. Already bigger and better than anything Nostr is trying to do. Why reinvent the wheel? Or why not join the wheel?

wedesoft 3y ago
distributed > federated
- pornel 3y ago
  I don't think this is always true. Centralized services have practical benefits, and federation is a compromise between fully decentralized and centralized. Federation frees individual users from key management (a trivial issue for HN users, but a big pain for less technical users). Instance admins can handle spam and abuse for entire communities, and what is acceptable varies between communities. Data can be aggregated per instance instead of independently fetched per user. For example, previews for external links can be cached per instance, since you trust your instance. In a fully distributed system it'd be either vulnerable to manipulation (since HTTPS doesn't offer a way for others to cryptographically verify data originates from a URL, without contacting the origin server) or every user would have to fetch a link preview themselves, which has DDoS potential and tracking risks.
themusicgod1 3y ago
and there's a fediverse nostr bridge allowing users from both networks to communicate (insofar as they don't hide from eachother) https://mostr.pub/ https://mostr.pub/

wedesoft 3y ago

Wrote a post om how to access Nostr using the iris.to web client in case it helps: https://www.wedesoft.de/software/2023/04/25/nostr/ https://www.wedesoft.de/software/2023/04/25/nostr/

lucabs 3y ago

[dead]

agg23 3y ago

Saw a post about Nostr on here a week or so ago and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I don't think it's likely to become the next platform (and the crypto stuff probably doesn't help), but I just find enjoyment with the minimal spec and how simple it all is. I don't understand how moderation or handling the large transfers of duplicate data between relays and clients will work.

malikNF 3y ago

If someone’s looking for a fun project to do on a weekend. Going through and implementing the nips for nostr is really fun. You can make a mvp version of a client in a afternoon.

netbioserror 3y ago

This has zero chance of working if normies have to fiddle with keypairs.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
There's no reason they have to "fiddle" with it. Generating a new keypair could be a button. Normies use keypairs every time they connect to an https site. They just don't know it, nor is there any reason why they should.
- netbioserror 3y ago
  This is not a function of "could." They're already asking users to do it. If they "could," why didn't they? To make something easy, you first have to actually make it easy. Not let forum users argue about how easy it "could" be.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > If they "could," why didn't they? Because this is early days? Surely you don't imagine that every product emerges in its final form? Maybe instead you could explain why they couldn't. As I noted, people seem to be able to use TLS to make secure connections to websites without generating keypairs from the command line, or whatever. Edit: and in fact this has been done. https://nostr.how/en/guides/iris https://nostr.how/en/guides/iris Type in your name. Hit "Go". Done.

Kye 3y ago

Everything I've heard makes it sound like it's for people who don't think Mastodon's onboarding is confusing enough.

p-o 3y ago

Today, we have a lot more bandwidth at home. I always wondered if having a "social network" device at home would make sense in the future. I imagine a device like a router or an Apple TV, that you connect at home. Then, you own it, everything you post is on your little device. Maybe you pay a few bucks a months so you can upload an encrypted backup in the cloud somewhere. There's obviously downsides to it, but I think I would buy such a device.

password4321 3y ago
Sounds like a good app for an old phone!

themusicgod1 3y ago

Virtually all nodes are github-only, and all nodes require github software to run