Nostr – Decentralized social network

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

> 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.

Nope – it is its own thing. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

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

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.

The latter.