Information on Nostr

[Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many]

I've encountered Nostr before and am sad I am not using it myself. I
think I went crazy before I encountered it.

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

a truly censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter that has a chance of working

# nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

The simplest open protocol that is able to create a
censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all.

It doesn't rely on any trusted central server, hence it is resilient;
it is based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is
tamperproof; it does not rely on P2P techniques, and therefore it
works.

This is a work in progress. [Join the Telegram
group!](https://t.me/nostr_protocol)

## Very short summary of how it works, if you don't plan to read anything else:

Everybody runs a client. It can be a native client, a web client, etc.
To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send
it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself).
To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know
anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is
very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from
some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted.
Signatures are verified on the client side.

[How to start using
Nostr](https://github.com/vishalxl/nostr_console/discussions/31)

[Nostr client feature
comparison](https://github.com/vishalxl/Nostr-Clients-Features-List/blob/main/Readme.md)

[List of projects built on Nostr](https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr)

## This is needed because other solutions are broken:

### The problem with Twitter

- Twitter has ads;
- Twitter uses bizarre techniques to keep you addicted;
- Twitter doesn't show an actual historical feed from people you follow;
- Twitter bans people;
- Twitter shadowbans people;
- Twitter has a lot of spam.

### The problem with Mastodon and similar programs

- User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;
- Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also
block other servers;
- Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be
accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial
environment (all followers are lost);
- There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore, they tend
to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name
attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of
a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like
Twitter, and they can't migrate out;
- Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned
after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;
- It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every
server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other
servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to
exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more
places more often;
- For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts
realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from
server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the
video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to,
which is similar to the Nostr approach.

### The problem with SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt)

- It doesn't have many problems. I think it's great. I was going to
use it as a basis for this, but
- its protocol is too complicated because it wasn't thought about
being an open protocol at all. It was just written in JavaScript in
probably a quick way to solve a specific problem and grew from that,
therefore it has weird and unnecessary quirks like signing a JSON
string which must strictly follow the rules of [_ECMA-262 6th
Edition_](https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/#sec-json.stringify);
- It insists on having a chain of updates from a single user, which
feels unnecessary to me and something that adds bloat and rigidity to
the thing — each server/user needs to store all the chain of posts to
be sure the new one is valid. Why? (Maybe they have a good reason);
- It is not as simple as Nostr, as it was primarily made for P2P
syncing, with "pubs" being an afterthought;
- Still, it may be worth considering using SSB instead of this custom
protocol and just adapting it to the client-relay server model,
because reusing a standard is always better than trying to get people
in a new one.

### The problem with other solutions that require everybody to run
their own server

- They require everybody to run their own server;
- Sometimes people can still be censored in these because domain names
can be censored.

## How does Nostr work?

- There are two components: __clients__ and __relays__. Each user runs
a client. Anyone can run a relay.
- Every user is identified by a public key. Every post is signed.
Every client validates these signatures.
- Clients fetch data from relays of their choice and publish data to
other relays of their choice. A relay doesn't talk to another relay,
only directly to users.
- For example, to "follow" someone a user just instructs their client
to query the relays it knows for posts from that public key.
- On startup, a client queries data from all relays it knows for all
users it follows (for example, all updates from the last day), then
displays that data to the user chronologically.
- A "post" can contain any kind of structured data, but the most used
ones are going to find their way into the standard so all clients and
relays can handle them seamlessly.

## How does it solve the problems the networks above can't?

- **Users getting banned and servers being closed**
  - A relay can block a user from publishing anything there, but that
has no effect on them as they can still publish to other relays. Since
users are identified by a public key, they don't lose their identities
and their follower base when they get banned.
  - Instead of requiring users to manually type new relay addresses
(although this should also be supported), whenever someone you're
following posts a server recommendation, the client should
automatically add that to the list of relays it will query.
  - If someone is using a relay to publish their data but wants to
migrate to another one, they can publish a server recommendation to
that previous relay and go;
  - If someone gets banned from many relays such that they can't get
their server recommendations broadcasted, they may still let some
close friends know through other means with which relay they are
publishing now. Then, these close friends can publish server
recommendations to that new server, and slowly, the old follower base
of the banned user will begin finding their posts again from the new
relay.
  - All of the above is valid too for when a relay ceases its operations.

- **Censorship-resistance**
  - Each user can publish their updates to any number of relays.
  - A relay can charge a fee (the negotiation of that fee is outside
of the protocol for now) from users to publish there, which ensures
censorship-resistance (there will always be some Russian server
willing to take your money in exchange for serving your posts).

- **Spam**
  - If spam is a concern for a relay, it can require payment for
publication or some other form of authentication, such as an email
address or phone, and associate these internally with a pubkey that
then gets to publish to that relay — or other anti-spam techniques,
like hashcash or captchas. If a relay is being used as a spam vector,
it can easily be unlisted by clients, which can continue to fetch
updates from other relays.

- **Data storage**
  - For the network to stay healthy, there is no need for hundreds of
active relays. In fact, it can work just fine with just a handful,
given the fact that new relays can be created and spread through the
network easily in case the existing relays start misbehaving.
Therefore, the amount of data storage required, in general, is
relatively less than Mastodon or similar software.
  - Or considering a different outcome: one in which there exist
hundreds of niche relays run by amateurs, each relaying updates from a
small group of users. The architecture scales just as well: data is
sent from users to a single server, and from that server directly to
the users who will consume that. It doesn't have to be stored by
anyone else. In this situation, it is not a big burden for any single
server to process updates from others, and having amateur servers is
not a problem.

- **Video and other heavy content**
  - It's easy for a relay to reject large content, or to charge for
accepting and hosting large content. When information and incentives
are clear, it's easy for the market forces to solve the problem.

- **Techniques to trick the user**
  - Each client can decide how to best show posts to users, so there
is always the option of just consuming what you want in the manner you
want — from using an AI to decide the order of the updates you'll see
to just reading them in chronological order.

## FAQ

- **This is very simple. Why hasn't anyone done it before?**

  I don't know, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that people
making social networks are either companies wanting to make money or
P2P activists who want to make a thing completely without servers.
They both fail to see the specific mix of both worlds that Nostr uses.

- **How do I find people to follow?**

  First, you must know them and get their public key somehow, either
by asking or by seeing it referenced somewhere. Once you're inside a
Nostr social network you'll be able to see them interacting with other
people and then you can also start following and interacting with
these others.

- **How do I find relays? What happens if I'm not connected to the
same relays someone else is?**

  You won't be able to communicate with that person. But there are
hints on events that can be used so that your client software (or you,
manually) knows how to connect to the other person's relay and
interact with them. There are other ideas on how to solve this too in
the future but we can't ever promise perfect reachability, no protocol
can.

- **Can I know how many people are following me?**

  No, but you can get some estimates if relays cooperate in an
extra-protocol way.

- **What incentive is there for people to run relays?**

  The question is misleading. It assumes that relays are free dumb
pipes that exist such that people can move data around through them.
In this case yes, the incentives would not exist. This in fact could
be said of DHT nodes in all other p2p network stacks: what incentive
is there for people to run DHT nodes?

- **Nostr enables you to move between server relays or use multiple
relays but if these relays are just on AWS or Azure what’s the
difference?**

  There are literally thousands of VPS providers scattered all around
the globe today, there is not only AWS or Azure. AWS or Azure are
exactly the providers used by single centralized service providers
that need a lot of scale, and even then not just these two. For
smaller relay servers any VPS will do the job very well.

## Protocol specification

See the [NIPs](https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips) and especially
[NIP-01](https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md) for
a reasonably-detailed explanation of the protocol spec (hint: it is
very short and simple).

## Software

There is a list of most software being built using Nostr on
https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr that seemed to be almost
complete last time I looked.

## License

Public domain.