I have been seeing a lot of shilling for mastodon lately, so I thought I would step in and shill Nostr for a bit.<p>https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr<p>Fun facts about Nostr:<p>* Nostr stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays". It is an odd acronym, but I like it.<p>* 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).<p>* Relays are simply dumb data stores for events that clients publish and subscribe to.<p>* Clients don't trust relays to be honest, so all events are self-signed. Your pubkey is your userid.<p>* 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.<p>(shameless self plug)
https://github.com/cmdruid/nostr-emitter<p>* Nostr is powerful enough to host chat apps very easily. Here is a rip of Telegram, running on Nostr:<p>https://anigma.io<p>* There's a lot of fun things you can do with Nostr. Check out all these cool projects!<p>https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr<p>* We are constantly discussing how to improve the protocol. Come join the conversation here:<p>https://t.me/nostr_protocol
https://anigma.io
https://damus.io
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips<p>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.<p>If you have any questions about nostr please feel free to ask.<p>Also, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I hope we're all feeling fat and sassy today. :-D
So how does nostr propose to solve the problem where there is, in fact, quite a lot of content that you <i>want</i> 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?<p><a href="https://abovethelaw.com/2022/11/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/" rel="nofollow">https://abovethelaw.com/2022/11/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-spe...</a> 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 <i>anyone</i> setting up a "free speech" platform.<p>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.
I don't agree Nostr is P2P since clients must connect to relays and there's no provision at the time for client to client connectivity.
I found out about Nostr and due to the simplicity of the protocol I was able to start building right away.
I implemented a relay using Typescript:
<a href="https://github.com/Cameri/nostr-ts-relay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Cameri/nostr-ts-relay</a>
I also wrote this dead simple SMTP to Nostr gateway: <a href="https://github.com/Cameri/smtp-nostr-gateway" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Cameri/smtp-nostr-gateway</a>
I'm beginning to think that ActivityPub will never add anti-censorship features into the core protocol (for example, independent IDs that don't live on a relay server). Because I spoke with a core developer on ActivityPub stuff a couple of years ago about the issue of servers going offline and losing your account and he said that he was working on it.<p>But I wouldn't be surprised if he was discouraged from continuing this work because ultimately people <i>like</i> ActivityPub <i>because</i> server admins can be little dictators that censor and ban at will.
A huge advantage to many large projects is separations of concerns, particularly in the case of protocol (or API/etc) vs policy.<p>From the sounds of it, you have the protocol but not the policy. Which is by itself huge that they are separate, but now the clients (?) needs flexible policy, no? Otherwise its just going to turn into a billion people all talking in the same room, or your going to have a ton of tiny rooms with no activity. The discoverability of interesting rooms will be difficult. Its sorta the IRC problem in a nutshell (or discord/etc). Balancing the noise, vs the quiet is the difficult part (AFAIK).
So reading the github page this sounds basically like a variation on RSS.<p>There are a number of web servers that host content (either for free or for money) [called relays].<p>Clients download recent posts<p>Identity is based on public key, allowing users more control and the ability to easily change relays.<p>So is RSS + pubkey based identity the right way to think about this?
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).<p>There are still features that many apps will need such as tying multiple devices to an identity, abuse prevention for relay operators, etc.
Link to nostr NIPs (nostr improvement proposals): <a href="https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/README.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/README.md</a><p>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.
Last year: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061</a>
shill: One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.<p>It's not shilling. It's recommending. Shilling is a bad thing. It's a simple thing.
> <i>A relay doesn't talk to another relay, only directly to users.</i><p>Can you elaborate on this point? It would seem that meshing relays would've facilitated the dispersal of updates.
I don’t understand —- this isn’t a P2P protocol since it isn’t peer to peer by definition. And the “relays” don’t even relay anything … a “relay” is a server acting as a Dropbox that you have to query.
<a href="https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr</a> literally says "it is not P2P".
How do I discover people and follow
on <a href="https://branle.netlify.app/" rel="nofollow">https://branle.netlify.app/</a> ? I can’t figure it out
At this point I don't see much point in adopting something that doesn't support ActivityPub. I'd rather just use Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma with some heavy blocklists.