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Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders

news.ycombinator.com

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Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders

#1

Post by kdragon »

I have been seeing a lot of shilling for mastodon lately, so I thought I would step in and shill Nostr for a bit.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

Fun facts about Nostr:

* Nostr stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays". It is an odd acronym, but I like it.

* Nostr uses websockets and relays to build a really simple P2P network. We also steal a few ideas from bitcoin (ECDSA ids, schnorr-signed events).

* Relays are simply dumb data stores for events that clients publish and subscribe to.

* Clients don't trust relays to be honest, so all events are self-signed. Your pubkey is your userid.

* It is stupid simple to build a Nostr client. You can easily do it in less than 400 lines of JavaScript. And it runs in the browser.

(shameless self plug) https://github.com/cmdruid/nostr-emitter

* Nostr is powerful enough to host chat apps very easily. Here is a rip of Telegram, running on Nostr:

https://anigma.io

* There's a lot of fun things you can do with Nostr. Check out all these cool projects!

https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

* We are constantly discussing how to improve the protocol. Come join the conversation here:

https://t.me/nostr_protocol https://anigma.io https://damus.io https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips

Thank you for reading my nostr shill post. I did not create nostr, nor do I get any monies for promotion. I just think it's really cool and I have a lot of fun building stuff that punches though nats.

If you have any questions about nostr please feel free to ask.

Also, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I hope we're all feeling fat and sassy today. :-D

Re: Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders

#4

Post by klabb3 »

Not saying this is the future, but something like it is. All of the core decisions here are solid (pub key identities, signed events, dumb relays).

There are still features that many apps will need such as tying multiple devices to an identity, abuse prevention for relay operators, etc.

Re: Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders

#5

Post by chromatin »

Link to nostr NIPs (nostr improvement proposals): https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/README.md

One of the neat things about nostr is that while it has already been used to build a decentralized Twitter like social network, the protocol could also be used to build encrypted P2P chat, traditional discussion forum, alerting/push style notifications, and numerous other applications.

Re: Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders

#7

Post by chromatin »

klabb3 wrote: post #4

Not saying this is the future, but something like it is. All of the core decisions here are solid (pub key identities, signed events, dumb relays). There are still features that many apps will need such as tying multiple devices to an identity, abuse prevention for relay operators, etc.

A couple of ideas that have been tossed around for relay abuse prevention:

- Proof of work: computing some hash, which is not enough to be onerous but enough to reduce spam

- micropayment over Bitcoin lightning network

Re: Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders

#8

Post by kdragon »

rgbrgb wrote: post #3

Cool! How do you discover users to follow on nostr?

Great question! Relays aren't involved in curation or discovery, so it fall on the client.

You can request very broad subscriptions from relays! For example, here is a site that subscribes to everything, showing you a gods-eye view of events streaming into a relay:

https://nostr.info/relays

Events have different "kinds", so you can filter this based on the type of traffic you are looking for (like public posts or user profiles).

Platforms like damus.io are more user-friendly, and offer better tools for discovering users and content.

You can subscribe to a user's feed via their pubkey, so discovery methods typically revolve around learning pub keys.

Re: Nostr is a stupid simple P2P protocol that works, built by builders

#10

Post by egypturnash »

So how does nostr propose to solve the problem where there is, in fact, quite a lot of content that you want to filter out, whether because it makes for a better experience for the people using this protocol to talk to each other, or because there are some pretty solid laws about things that various governments require people to filter out?

https://abovethelaw.com/2022/11/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-spe... is a pretty decent rundown of a mix of these things; it is specifically pointed at Elon Musk's decision to buy Twitter and make it a haven for "free speech" but it is a glimpse at what is in the future for anyone setting up a "free speech" platform.

My experience as someone who has been running a Mastodon server since 2017 is that while "we are all for FREE SPEECH, we only block what the government ABSOLUTELY requires us to block!" sounds noble, in practice nodes of the Fediverse that say this become havens for people who are only there to be assholes to other people, and any sane admin will sigh and block the whole server, because it's just going to be a continual source of rude nasty bullshit.

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