Could someone briefly explain what and why? I found the web site disapointingly unclear about how this works and why we need it (possibly from avoiding getting technical?).
Briefely reading through it made me feel like a problem looking for another problem, with more layers between user and originator, both at the network level and at the data level (not a fan of JSON or complexity).
If you have a clear idea of how it works or why we need it, I would love to hear it.
2024-12-22 · 1 year ago · 👍 argenkiwi
11 Comments ↓
🚀 cipres · 2024-12-22 at 22:59:
@stack Nostr is a protocol for social media applications based on public key cryptography.
Each user has a private/public keypair. Every action in nostr is represented by an event (a JSON object). Nostr relays receive events from clients and act as event stores for the network. Events are signed with the user's private key and the signature is verified by the relays.
To follow someone you just need to know his public key (npub). Once you know which relays this person is publishing to, your client will pull the events this person published from these relays. Nostr is fairly resilient because even if a relay goes down, events are still available on another relay, and life goes on.
Clients and relays communicate over websockets (example relay URL: wss://relay.damus.io). I'm not a huge fan of websockets but one advantage is that they're widely supported and it makes it trivial to write clients in browsers ...
Jack Dorsey, former CEO of twitter, uses Nostr and is an advocate for Nostr, he even donated to many nostr developers ...
@stack I think that to get a better idea you'd have to use it for a few days. Been using nostr for a few weeks and i must say that it's pretty cool indeed.
🚀 stack [OP] · 2024-12-22 at 23:23:
Forgive my negativity, but it still looks like something no one in the right mind would use.
You have to know the public key _and_ relays where to look for someone's posts? And if compromised, somehow find other relays?
Whose posts are that important?
Maybe if you are James Bond getting secret orders, but then you probably just look for coded messages on Facebook or X...
Sounds kind of nuts.
🚀 cipres · 2024-12-22 at 23:42:
@stack Nostr is rapidly growing for the same reason that Bitcoin and other crypto grew so fast: freedom. As Bitcoin removed the need for central banks, Nostr removes the need for centralized platforms where you need to login and beg to post in the hope that someone isn't about to censor you.
As long as you have your keys, you'll be able to communicate with others. That is invaluable in this era of censorship.
🚀 cipres · 2024-12-22 at 23:51:
@stack No, you only need to know the person's npub (pubkey), not the relays. Here's an npub:
npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m
Once you're following someone, your client can read his/her contacts list.
As for "whose posts are that important ?", you clearly don't know the level of censorship that happened in the last 4 years, or you wouldn't ask. Censorship of lifesaving information, information of all kinds.
🚀 cipres · 2024-12-22 at 23:56:
@HanzBrix Agreed. You don't have to know anything.
🚀 stack [OP] · 2024-12-23 at 00:09:
I am struggling to find a use case. What sensorship are we talking about? The biggest issue I've seen in the last 4 years is authoritarian propaganda and outright lies on mainstream news, at least where I live. No one is seizing private servers unless scamming or threatening people. If your Facebook or Youtube account is blocked, don't sign up for accounts with State actors posing as social networks.
Would this work for dissidents in say China, where the networks are monitored and relays would be identified immediately?
Can relays be compromised?
Is this better than Tor?
🚀 cipres · 2024-12-23 at 01:14:
@stack omg. Wow.
🚀 stack [OP] · 2024-12-23 at 02:15:
???
🦂 zzo38 · 2024-12-23 at 04:21:
I don't really like this use of JSON either (I think DER is better, although it can be used badly too), and there are some other problems with Nostr (including using Websockets I think shouldn't be needed here, and that the only character set it can use is Unicode, and seems to lack federation between servers, etc; but also other details about Nostr are not as well designed I think).
I've spent a couple hours yesterday on some Nostr sites. To me this looks like a messaging system that the crypto folk have come up with for communicating, presumably for transacting between peers. Not really a social networking system in the conventional sense.
🚀 chickadeez · 2024-12-24 at 16:48:
You can add your preferred relays to ensure your information is always accessible, and clients that support the latest NIPs will automatically fetch the most recent version of a user's posts. Additionally, users can be discovered through a .well-known file, which helps configure relays and verify usernames seamlessly, using NIP-05 :)