Nostr – Decentralized social network

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!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;damus.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;damus.io</a>

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

Nostr user here, absolutely love everything I am seeing. I think Nostr is deeply misunderstood by onlookers and I&#x27;d like to share a few things that may help clear things up:<p>1. Nostr is not a social network - it&#x27;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&#x2F;apps. This alone is a huge development that I don&#x27;t think too many are grasping just yet.<p>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.<p>Some resources for people:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heynostr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heynostr.com&#x2F;</a> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nostrapps.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nostrapps.com&#x2F;</a>

On the last HN thread about Nostr I&#x27;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.<p>Since that I got an invite (thank you, Sam!) and I&#x27;m even more bullish now (though I&#x27;m not much of a social media poster myself).<p>Compared to Nostr it seems like there&#x27;s a first-party &quot;base&quot; 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&#x2F;moderation&#x2F;feed&#x2F;... later based on merit, not lock-in.<p>It seems like in the recent days&#x2F;weeks a lot of non-technical various public figures have onboarded Bluesky, thanks to this ease of getting started. Folks that I wouldn&#x27;t expect there for a while yet.<p>To any Nostr users - how&#x27;s that developing there? Based on my cursory look onboarding looks quite a bit more daunting.<p>Anyway, the Twitter blue checkmark seems to be a blessing for decentralized social networks.<p>EDIT: Since I already got an email about it 5 mins after writing this - No, I don&#x27;t have any invite codes, sorry.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35692378" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35692378</a>

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.<p>As with all tech protocols, there&#x27;s potential for more sophisticated things to be built on top of them, but I didn&#x27;t get a clear sense that Nostr people are interested or serious about product engineering to make this a &quot;Twitter killer&quot; or some other popular buzzword.<p>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 &quot;financial incentives&quot; vs &quot;identity gatekeeping&quot;. For those that believe in the power of the free market to regulate tricky social problems, I think Nostr has a lot of promise.

If you&#x27;re on Android, use Amethyst. If you&#x27;re on iOS, use Damus. If you&#x27;re on the web, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;snort.social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;snort.social</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iris.to" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iris.to</a><p>🫂

Calling Nostr a social network to me seems like a category error. It&#x27;s a messaging protocol. People might build a social network on top of it, but it&#x27;s not necessarily going to have any of the properties Nostr has, the same way Facebook is built on top of html.<p>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.

Nostr doesn&#x27;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&#x2F;whatever and not have to mess around with other people&#x27;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.

Today, we have a lot more bandwidth at home. I always wondered if having a &quot;social network&quot; device at home would make sense in the future.<p>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.<p>There&#x27;s obviously downsides to it, but I think I would buy such a device.

Does Nostr use ActivityPub or is it a proprietary implementation?

Dupe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35163590" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35163590</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34937223" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34937223</a>

For what it&#x27;s worth, Nos is a pretty great iOS app for this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nostrapps.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;nos-social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nostrapps.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;nos-social</a>

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

Saw a post about Nostr on here a week or so ago and haven&#x27;t been able to stop thinking about it. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s likely to become the next platform (and the crypto stuff probably doesn&#x27;t help), but I just find enjoyment with the minimal spec and how simple it all is.<p>I don&#x27;t understand how moderation or handling the large transfers of duplicate data between relays and clients will work.

Wrote a post om how to access Nostr using the iris.to web client in case it helps: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wedesoft.de&#x2F;software&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;nostr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wedesoft.de&#x2F;software&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;nostr&#x2F;</a>

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?

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

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

Everything I&#x27;ve heard makes it sound like it&#x27;s for people who don&#x27;t think Mastodon&#x27;s onboarding is confusing enough.

This &#x27;Nostr&#x27; thing will never take off, it has too much &#x27;cryptocurrency&#x27; laden features that nobody asked for.<p>yuck.

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

Lots of misconceptions here. If you&#x27;re interested in learning more I&#x27;d highly recommend reading up a bit, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nostr.how" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nostr.how</a> (disclaimer, I&#x27;m the maintainer of that site).