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- Hacker News
- for those simply looking to try nostr for the first time, https://iris.to is a great way to get started.by donpdonp
- Took a look and when I got there, the first post was about bitcoin, the second was an add for a cryptocurrency app, the next one was about nostr and bitcoin. The fourth was actually unrelated to either ! But then it was crypto or nostr again. Terrible way to make a first impression (unless you are into crypto I suppose).by maeln
- Funny timing on this - I just came across my backed up keys recently and signed back into it. Poking around over the last 24 hours has left me underwhelmed in terms of actual interesting content (I'm not a cryptobro) nor overly innovative things built on top of the protocol.
Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...
by monkeywork - Social media is one of its most underwhelming usecases, there's loads of productivity apps building on it like if you look that formstr ecosystem (about.formstr.app) and gaming ecosystem as well, it's really just a new communication mediumby abhayraizada
- I build edtechs apps with it. Lets me develop tech like the ability to create scholarships with learning, cross-platform badges/achievements and cool stuff like that.
- It's a very rich protocol with many advanced features but here are the basics:
1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM) 2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos 3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff 4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read 5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues 6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group 7. Like twitch with live video streams 8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)
by davotoula - Nostr is a very interesting protocol with many potential use cases.
Just recently, a Discord-like alternative built on Nostr [1] was released [2].
by reisen_ss - > I want to claim that Nostr has discovered a new fundamental architecture for distributed protocols. Not federated, not P2P.
What exactly is the fundamentally new architecture in Nostr?
by nairboon - he didn't finish the sentence on substack either, however I think it's a large connection with multiple servers via websocketby lost_1256
- The novelty is that user accounts and UGC (user generated content) are both verifiable and independent from servers.by nunobrito
- Found this intro informative:by Bluestein
- This is goodby sebastix
- For me, the great idea behind Nostr is that identity is a self-generated key pair, which can then be used wherever you want (and the economic model, with much potentials). In terms of decentralisation, however, I'm not convinced; I find the model of the late ZeroNet, the KAD network and others, essentially DHT, far superior, because it allows content to stay alive as long as there's interest in it, and every member of the network donates a certain amount of storage and bandwidth (adjustable at will) without being able to choose which specific scrap of content to host.
In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.
The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:
- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)
- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)
- short posts like Twitter/X
- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit
- very long, blog-style posts
- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar
We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.
by kkfx - The discussion in this thread doesn't seem to be a level of quality I would expect from Hacker News. Many people attacking a protocol because they don't like how it's being used. It's sad, I was hoping to see something more constructive.by exabyte
- The homepage could be a description of ATProto. Except lots of people around me already use ATproto, and a successful European instance has just been launched, Eurosky, focusing on expanding the protocol with apps doing other things than micro-messages (Bluesky).
Why should I care ? Honest question.
by maelito - to tell the world GMby lost_1256
- Because Eurosky can ban you.by lez
- by jasonvorhe
- Because you can build on Nostr without anybody's permission or API keys for any server or anything like that.by chr15m
- The nice thing about open, federated protocols is that it is relatively easy to connect them together. There actually is a Mastodon to Bluesky bridge already for example. These protocols should compete on merit. There's no good fundamental reason for them to not federate each other's content. But there are lots of non technical reasons. For example mastodon users particularly are quite picky about how their content is filtered and used. Even implementing a search engine is something that gets a lot of pushback.
The reason people might care is taking ownership of how they filter and curate their feed. Instead of outsourcing that to some algorithm owned by a company, having a federated network allows you to pick and choose or even implement your own filtering if you self host. It also gets advertising as the primary revenue mechanism out of the way and that removes a conflict of interest between what users want to see and what advertisers want them to see.
Of course the drooling masses on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. seem to be perfectly happy to have their endocrine system manipulated by self tuning algorithms. But there are some legitimate concerns about whether that's actually healthy for them. Federated social networks provide an alternative to this.
- ATproto is defacto not decentralized and the protocol is about 50x more complicated to get working than NOSTR.
Whereas in ATproto you have to find a place to register an account, say a domain for yourself or use someone else's domain, in NOSTR creating an account is nothing more than a public/private key that is generated on the fly.
Then is the storage of information. Whereas in ATproto information is stored in plenty of different formats and specific folder configurations which are easy to miss, in NOSTR is all JSON from a single base template file.
Third is the absence of global moderation and islands. Whereas in ATproto only a few (I think 3 main providers) exist, you can be kicked out from them and effectively stop reaching your audience. In NOSTR if a relay stops receiving your texts it is a bummer but there are hundreds of other volunteer-based servers to where you can send your texts, so it is very difficult to block people from reading texts of the authors they are interested.
Simplicity is the key. NOSTR is the first and only network that I've seen so far where content/authors are truly disconnected from the servers hosting their data.
by nunobrito - I really like nostr because it gives you freedom of association. You can unfollow other users and, if you run a relay, you can refuse to accept content from users you don't like, but you can't ban other relays (like mastodon does) and you can't refuse content based on relays other users use, because you don't know. In other words, you only can ignore people you don't like but you can't meaningfully deplatform them or prevent them from looking at or following your content. That's how it should be and, incidentally, that's what makes people in favour of deplatforming furious, which can only be a good thing :)
Unfortunately nostr has little network effect because the current ecosystem was stood up by bitcoin enthusiasts, and there's no much generalist discourse on it. Luckily, it's a simple protocol and it's really hard to kill protocols in the first place. Maybe the next censorship debacle on the current alternative social media platforms will give it a boost, or maybe it will remain a small niche group of ecosystems for specialized users? Who knows, but I'm glad it exists.
by curtisblaine - The thing with Nostr is that the protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.
What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers.
There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.
by treyd - Well put, that's exactly what I think of Nostr as well.by therein
- False. The protocol doesn’t forbid it. Theres actually a negentropy NIP for relay sync.
Did you read the actual protocol or are you just making things up on HN?
by Cameri - > spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.
And how do you exactly envision enforcement? Ohhhh, you copied some bits, you going to jail!!
by siwatanejo - > sticky defaults... makes client authors the kingmakers.
Isn't this true of any protocol (to a greater or lesser degree)?
by notarobot123 - But part of the protocol is that user profiles also list the relays where to find their content (where their posts go to) and a second user connects to those relays to fetch their content directly?by davotoula
- it doesn't explicitly forbdit it. It just doesn't spec it out, because it doesn't need it for the protocol to work. There are already many relays and clients that do just this.by abhayraizada
- there are relays built exactly for this, for rebroadcasting. You can do whatever you want in nostr btw.
this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with.
there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.
by t1E9mE7JTRjf