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Nostr

nostr.com

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Re: Nostr

#221

Post by jasonvorhe »

sak5sk wrote: post #114
camillomiller wrote: post #5

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…

People do want alternatives. Bluesky is a clear example of that. Nostr is clearly not as big, but it's a protocol.

It's way too easy to get banned on Bluesky and to my knowledge their promises of being decentralized are comparable to Telegram being E2E encrypted.

Re: Nostr

#222

Post by jasonvorhe »

internet_points wrote: post #54
camillomiller wrote: post #5

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…

even nostr seems to want bubbles, under Why not just use Mastodon/Fediverse? they write: > The most interesting feature of Mastodon is that by its nature it creates communities with shared values that grow in each of its servers. Or, should I say, that should be a feature if it actually worked like that. In fact these are not really communities, but a mashup of users that may share some interests among each other, bu…

I think you're misinterpreting this statement. I'm using nostr for more than a year and I can publish to any free relay I want to. On Mastodon your account is tied to a specific instance while on nostr you have a private/public key pair that's independent of any relay. There are some more focused/curated relays that have additional filters/rules or only allow certain people to publish (whitelisted public keys, often paid or invite only). I know of no mechanism on nostr that would force anyone to stick to certain topics or issues.

I think the point of the quote is that Mastodon tries to be both a topic-centered community platform as well as a "everything goes" public social network like Twitter/X but the federation aspect is not true decentralization because you can easily lose your social graph/reach if some instance admin doesn't like you or your own instance gets #fediblocked.

Re: Nostr

#223

Post by AlOwain »

mwkaufma wrote: post #207

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

I believe that their intention was closer to "regardless of your personal political beliefs"; not "average of political beliefs".

Re: Nostr

#224

Post by Karrot_Kream »

enether wrote: post #213
Yizahi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And extremely centralized in the so-called Lightning version. Due to ridiculously absurd requirements of the Lightning layer (bidirectional channels on L1, locking funds in advance, solving NP-hard problem thousand times per second a scale etc.) everyone basically resorts to using very few centralized entities as a pseudo-bank, who issues virtual paper, IOUs, which which wallets trade on L2. Basically all negatives o…

It's still pretty affordable and not-hard to run your own Lightning node; The pseudo-bank hosted wallets people use (e.g Wallet of Satoshi) is purely out of convenience. The real lesson is that most people don't care enough about the underlying risks - they care about convenience.

How much BTC do you need to run a node? And what are the failure modes if the node goes down or becomes network unreachable or something? I'm not trying to be critical, just curious myself what happens if I run a node. Would be happy for any resources you have on hand if that's too much for an HN comment.

Re: Nostr

#225

Post by jasonvorhe »

staticelf wrote: post #2

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 r…

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.

Re: Nostr

#226

Post by jasonvorhe »

staticelf wrote: post #129
stonogo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

Sweden has a website called "dumpen.se" which tricks and publishes pedophile that are trying to abuse children. The leftist media hates this website because they are doing an effective job. They are calling them all kinds of things. When people are effective in tracking or publishing about pedos, there are always a lot of people saying you are the problem, not the pedos. I wonder why. There are a lot of pedos out the…

I don't see what any of this has to do with nostr.

Re: Nostr

#227

Post by Retinal7467 »

rgreeko42 wrote: post #212

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?

Right wingers have a long history of calling themselves apolitical.

Re: Nostr

#228

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

tptacek wrote: post #211

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 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 ser…

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

Re: Nostr

#229

Post by itslennysfault »

rgreeko42 wrote: post #212

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?

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.

Re: Nostr

#230

Post by ursuscamp »

tptacek wrote: post #211

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 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 ser…

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.

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