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!
How does damus relate to nostr? Your landing page does not explain this at all. Is this because already the concepts of (distinguishing) client and network would be considered too technical for your target audience?
Nothing about the Nostr protocol struck me as particularly interesting. Spam control, moderation and anonymity are not really dealt with. Why the hype?
All these projects don't understand that it's not the principle of free communication or the idea of sharing content that made networks like twitter and facebook so successful. It was an army of engineers and designers working closely together with marketing people and even psychologists to maximise user engagement and retention. Heck, you could just endlessly recycle the same algorithmic content mixed with camouflaged marketing influencers sans any real stuff and people will suck it up like crazy (looking at you, tiktok). One of the key things nostr criticises (addictiveness) is what will keep it from succeeding on any broader scale.
There's little spam at the moment. There will be. But at that time the relays (pieces of server software that relay nostr messages) can step in and implement spam control via whatever they see fit. Perhaps some smart filtering, perhaps pay a few sats to have a message relayed or perhaps some real name policy. Clients can pick a (set of) relay(s) which fit their preference best. Or not, and accept the default.
The protocol is surprisingly simple to read [1], many relays and clients exist already.
I exchanged messages with a friend of mine who was using a very different client and it just worked!
Personally I like the fact that you can 'like' posts by sending a couple of sats via Lightning. I think it is a great motivator to write thoughtful, quality content.
Currently nostr is radical, weird and unpolished. The Amethyst client is slow at times. But the pace of development is incredible.
The responses are quite funny "yeah we don't need to have moderation or spam control as opposed to literally any other successful social network". I don't really get excited when that's the default response, because it means they don't get that that's basically the point of a social network.
Coming up with a protocol is not that hard. The technical side is fun to work with, but I guess technologists don't realize that the human side is way harder to do.
Spam control = relay configuration
Moderation = client side moderation features, most allow muting and blur images from unknown accounts prior to opening. If you don’t like the way a client moderates, move to another
Anonymity = not sure how it’s not anonymous. There’s no sign up, no email, no password. It’s just keypairs being generated. Use a vpn.
How did you use it? The default setting is anonymous unless you reveal who you are.
After I muted a small number of people and used some paid relays I don’t see spam or bad content.
Coolest feature is that you can switch clients while keeping the same relays and all your data stays with you.
Plus a bunch of clients have this auto translate feature so people are talking to each other regardless of the language they speak. I started following some people in other languages - very unique social media experience.
I feel the same way. It seems like it doesn’t even try to solve most of the hardest problems for decentralization. I too find it weird, but it is fun to play with.
It's simple, you can develop a client or relay without too much effort, and has an active dev community. It's also FUN. It keeps me going back on a way that Mastodon never did. Not to mention client interoperability is dead easy. It kinda just works which is really nice.
I don't see much spam. It's far, far less than Twitter. I can mute people I don't want to see. And I can be anonymous if I want. What exactly did you mean?
Nostr is decentralized. I think a big part of the idea is that relays just dont carry spam/bad actors. The protocol doesn't, as of yet, have need to handle most of your "it doesn't handle complex social issues X Y or Z" nags because it so far handles these problems socially, not technically, and that's been working for now.
Nostr is all based on anonymous cryptographic identifiers, so it seems like you have some special definition of anonymity that you are looking for, as it seems nothing if not anonymous. Having a stable identifier allows relays to know who to send versus who not to send, and allows connecting data together. Users are free to sock puppet up to their hearts content, if they wish to further diffuse traffic.
The appeal? The appeal here is that this is an incredibly malleable & comprehensible low level tool for messaging. Competitors like AtProto or ActivityPub involve complex protocols to exchange/syndicate data around, as much as the payload of the messages themselves. They are high level visions for what a network is. By compare, Nostr's low level approach is organic & searching not a refined final product, but a thriving ecosystem of expanding ideas.
Nostr has extreme elegance as a protocol by being focused primarily on messages themselves, which start as very simple & understandable self signing devices. The transport & exchange of messages is almost incidental, and indeed, Nostr over shoebox or carrier pigeon is possible. This allows a lot more flexibility with how the network can form distributed connections, allows great offline capabilities, allows creative relays & creative/selective distribution mechanisms to form.
Nostr is an excellent base layer. The base specs are quite short & direct. It's a protocol one can happily implement in a weekend.
Nostr has incredibly wild applications, because it is a simple extensible base. There's a wide variety of interesting capabilities that have already need accepted as Nostr Implementation Possibilities, NIPS, that grow & build on one another. Nostr base protocol is just a start, just the seed of an idea, one that's meant to be iterated on & expanded, and it's so easy & direct to do so. This is the biggest advantage by far; I cannot stress this enough. Not trying to do absolutely everything & making a modular simple protocol to start building & iterating from is all the wins, is the Bazaar to the ambitious Cathedrals.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
Nostr is by far the most malleable, most open set of possibilities, the most grow able, of the social networks we have. Everything else seems to have been designed to arrive somewhat fully formed, ready to go, but Nostr's strength is that it doesn't purport to know every use case & to have a total picture of what it is. It's a much simpler idea, with much more focus on finding out the uses.
Nostr user here, absolutely love everything I am seeing. I think Nostr is deeply misunderstood by onlookers and I'd like to share a few things that may help clear things up:
1. Nostr is not a social network - it'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/apps. This alone is a huge development that I don't think too many are grasping just yet.
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.
> 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/apps.
Beyond the marketing barf, what makes this a "discovery powerhouse"?
From the description, it doesn't sound any different from Mastodon, or having an email newsletter, or publishing your own website.
On the last HN thread about Nostr I'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.
Since that I got an invite (thank you, Sam!) and I'm even more bullish now (though I'm not much of a social media poster myself).
Compared to Nostr it seems like there's a first-party "base" 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/moderation/feed/... later based on merit, not lock-in.
It seems like in the recent days/weeks a lot of non-technical various public figures have onboarded Bluesky, thanks to this ease of getting started. Folks that I wouldn't expect there for a while yet.
To any Nostr users - how's that developing there? Based on my cursory look onboarding looks quite a bit more daunting.
Anyway, the Twitter blue checkmark seems to be a blessing for decentralized social networks.
EDIT: Since I already got an email about it 5 mins after writing this - No, I don't have any invite codes, sorry.
Download amethyst on Android or Damus on IOS. You're onboarded. Set up a lightning wallet to receive tips for valuable content. No wait list for this decentralized protocol. No native app, no dev team, no terms of service.
The AT protocol is interesting to me, but I actually don't like Twitter's UX. The organization has always seemed off to me -- when Bluesky starts taking more people from the wait-list, I suppose I'll see if it's any better, but I'm glad it's only a 'reference' or initial front-end, and more will come.
Seems like bluesky will be where people move from twitter. I was kind of hoping mastodon would be it and my mastodon feed is actually pretty good. But everyone seems to be moving to bluesky as soon as they get an invite.
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.
As with all tech protocols, there's potential for more sophisticated things to be built on top of them, but I didn't get a clear sense that Nostr people are interested or serious about product engineering to make this a "Twitter killer" or some other popular buzzword.
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 "financial incentives" vs "identity gatekeeping". For those that believe in the power of the free market to regulate tricky social problems, I think Nostr has a lot of promise.
Calling Nostr a social network to me seems like a category error. It's a messaging protocol. People might build a social network on top of it, but it's not necessarily going to have any of the properties Nostr has, the same way Facebook is built on top of html.
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'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/whatever and not have to mess around with other people'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.
Nostr will be more like Mastodon was before Elon ... a smallish place for enthusiasts of decentralization, albeit following a different protocol than Mastodon, of course.
Bluesky is already the new Twitter, you can tell. The cool kids all want to be on Bluesky. In effect, the very low rate drip of invites approach they are following, coupled with a virtual megaton of almost entirely gushing, breathless positive stories from the tech press are generating a high pent-up demand and a sense of virality even while it has a tiny userbase. The people running it are very clever, and are clearly doing everything they can to become the alternative for disgruntled Twitter users that Mastodon, Nostr and others are not (and arguably never were trying to be ... Bluesky is, by contrast, trying like heck to be exactly that).
Does this mean Twitter dies? No, I don't think so. What I think it means, though, is that, like the MSM, we will have likely two microblogging platforms that are broken into socio-ideological camps, like we have with most of the other media. It's new for social media, of course (not that there haven't been wing platforms before, but they have been small), but not new for media in general or the internet in general. And one could say that it's actually somewhat surprising that it took so long for this kind of split to happen in social media as well, but it kind of "feels right" that it's happening, given the very divergent ways that people have reacted to Twitter over the past year. It seems "right" that there should be separate services for people based on the kind of ideology and views they prefer, since this is how pretty much everyone rolls in every other aspect of the media already anyway.
In the same way your average person doesn't care about privacy, they don't care about Elon Musk's shenanigans. Twitter is not failing in the way his detractors continue to hope.
Bluesky will never gain any more traction than Rumble, Truth, Gab, or Mastadon. It will fade into obscurity before even launching just like Clubhouse. Because offering the same exact service, with seemingly no visible changes, does not matter to most people.
Today, we have a lot more bandwidth at home. I always wondered if having a "social network" device at home would make sense in the future.
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.
There's obviously downsides to it, but I think I would buy such a device.
Saw a post about Nostr on here a week or so ago and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I don't think it's likely to become the next platform (and the crypto stuff probably doesn't help), but I just find enjoyment with the minimal spec and how simple it all is.
I don't understand how moderation or handling the large transfers of duplicate data between relays and clients will work.
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?
A culture of tipping for content you find valuable at the click of a button that works for people to cash out regardless of their jurisdiction is yucky to you? I guess, i see it as one of it's biggest selling points, however you can turn it off in some clients
Lots of misconceptions here. If you're interested in learning more I'd highly recommend reading up a bit, https://nostr.how (disclaimer, I'm the maintainer of that site).
jb55|2 years ago
[1] https://damus.io
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B|2 years ago
m4lvin|2 years ago
irusensei|2 years ago
stiltzkin|2 years ago
pharmakom|2 years ago
sigmoid10|2 years ago
haarts|2 years ago
The protocol is surprisingly simple to read [1], many relays and clients exist already.
I exchanged messages with a friend of mine who was using a very different client and it just worked!
Personally I like the fact that you can 'like' posts by sending a couple of sats via Lightning. I think it is a great motivator to write thoughtful, quality content.
Currently nostr is radical, weird and unpolished. The Amethyst client is slow at times. But the pace of development is incredible.
[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
drowsspa|2 years ago
Coming up with a protocol is not that hard. The technical side is fun to work with, but I guess technologists don't realize that the human side is way harder to do.
jonesjohns|2 years ago
dtdannen|2 years ago
After I muted a small number of people and used some paid relays I don’t see spam or bad content.
Coolest feature is that you can switch clients while keeping the same relays and all your data stays with you.
Plus a bunch of clients have this auto translate feature so people are talking to each other regardless of the language they speak. I started following some people in other languages - very unique social media experience.
robcohen|2 years ago
javier123454321|2 years ago
irusensei|2 years ago
Why would you need to deal with anonymity?
ravenbitcoin|2 years ago
rektide|2 years ago
Nostr is all based on anonymous cryptographic identifiers, so it seems like you have some special definition of anonymity that you are looking for, as it seems nothing if not anonymous. Having a stable identifier allows relays to know who to send versus who not to send, and allows connecting data together. Users are free to sock puppet up to their hearts content, if they wish to further diffuse traffic.
The appeal? The appeal here is that this is an incredibly malleable & comprehensible low level tool for messaging. Competitors like AtProto or ActivityPub involve complex protocols to exchange/syndicate data around, as much as the payload of the messages themselves. They are high level visions for what a network is. By compare, Nostr's low level approach is organic & searching not a refined final product, but a thriving ecosystem of expanding ideas.
Nostr has extreme elegance as a protocol by being focused primarily on messages themselves, which start as very simple & understandable self signing devices. The transport & exchange of messages is almost incidental, and indeed, Nostr over shoebox or carrier pigeon is possible. This allows a lot more flexibility with how the network can form distributed connections, allows great offline capabilities, allows creative relays & creative/selective distribution mechanisms to form.
Nostr is an excellent base layer. The base specs are quite short & direct. It's a protocol one can happily implement in a weekend.
Nostr has incredibly wild applications, because it is a simple extensible base. There's a wide variety of interesting capabilities that have already need accepted as Nostr Implementation Possibilities, NIPS, that grow & build on one another. Nostr base protocol is just a start, just the seed of an idea, one that's meant to be iterated on & expanded, and it's so easy & direct to do so. This is the biggest advantage by far; I cannot stress this enough. Not trying to do absolutely everything & making a modular simple protocol to start building & iterating from is all the wins, is the Bazaar to the ambitious Cathedrals. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
Nostr is by far the most malleable, most open set of possibilities, the most grow able, of the social networks we have. Everything else seems to have been designed to arrive somewhat fully formed, ready to go, but Nostr's strength is that it doesn't purport to know every use case & to have a total picture of what it is. It's a much simpler idea, with much more focus on finding out the uses.
newswasboring|2 years ago
rchaud|2 years ago
Jack Dorsey is a co-founder, that's it. I feel like "nostr.com" has been showing up on the HN front page, with no context, at least once every week.
sleepybrett|2 years ago
sak5sk|2 years ago
1. Nostr is not a social network - it'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/apps. This alone is a huge development that I don't think too many are grasping just yet.
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.
Some resources for people:
- https://www.heynostr.com/ - https://www.nostrapps.com/
rchaud|2 years ago
Beyond the marketing barf, what makes this a "discovery powerhouse"?
From the description, it doesn't sound any different from Mastodon, or having an email newsletter, or publishing your own website.
swypych|2 years ago
Someone should really change the marketing CTA.
"A decentralized social network with a chance of working"
I can see why people would think this.
Encrypt-Keeper|2 years ago
cube2222|2 years ago
Since that I got an invite (thank you, Sam!) and I'm even more bullish now (though I'm not much of a social media poster myself).
Compared to Nostr it seems like there's a first-party "base" 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/moderation/feed/... later based on merit, not lock-in.
It seems like in the recent days/weeks a lot of non-technical various public figures have onboarded Bluesky, thanks to this ease of getting started. Folks that I wouldn't expect there for a while yet.
To any Nostr users - how's that developing there? Based on my cursory look onboarding looks quite a bit more daunting.
Anyway, the Twitter blue checkmark seems to be a blessing for decentralized social networks.
EDIT: Since I already got an email about it 5 mins after writing this - No, I don't have any invite codes, sorry.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35692378
javier123454321|2 years ago
kylecazar|2 years ago
RobotToaster|2 years ago
_fizz_buzz_|2 years ago
sak5sk|2 years ago
stiltzkin|2 years ago
natural219|2 years ago
As with all tech protocols, there's potential for more sophisticated things to be built on top of them, but I didn't get a clear sense that Nostr people are interested or serious about product engineering to make this a "Twitter killer" or some other popular buzzword.
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 "financial incentives" vs "identity gatekeeping". For those that believe in the power of the free market to regulate tricky social problems, I think Nostr has a lot of promise.
ravenbitcoin|2 years ago
🫂
lovvtide|2 years ago
Barrin92|2 years ago
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.
rchaud|2 years ago
Entinel|2 years ago
Grendalor|2 years ago
Nostr will be more like Mastodon was before Elon ... a smallish place for enthusiasts of decentralization, albeit following a different protocol than Mastodon, of course.
Bluesky is already the new Twitter, you can tell. The cool kids all want to be on Bluesky. In effect, the very low rate drip of invites approach they are following, coupled with a virtual megaton of almost entirely gushing, breathless positive stories from the tech press are generating a high pent-up demand and a sense of virality even while it has a tiny userbase. The people running it are very clever, and are clearly doing everything they can to become the alternative for disgruntled Twitter users that Mastodon, Nostr and others are not (and arguably never were trying to be ... Bluesky is, by contrast, trying like heck to be exactly that).
Does this mean Twitter dies? No, I don't think so. What I think it means, though, is that, like the MSM, we will have likely two microblogging platforms that are broken into socio-ideological camps, like we have with most of the other media. It's new for social media, of course (not that there haven't been wing platforms before, but they have been small), but not new for media in general or the internet in general. And one could say that it's actually somewhat surprising that it took so long for this kind of split to happen in social media as well, but it kind of "feels right" that it's happening, given the very divergent ways that people have reacted to Twitter over the past year. It seems "right" that there should be separate services for people based on the kind of ideology and views they prefer, since this is how pretty much everyone rolls in every other aspect of the media already anyway.
valianteffort|2 years ago
Bluesky will never gain any more traction than Rumble, Truth, Gab, or Mastadon. It will fade into obscurity before even launching just like Clubhouse. Because offering the same exact service, with seemingly no visible changes, does not matter to most people.
p-o|2 years ago
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.
There's obviously downsides to it, but I think I would buy such a device.
password4321|2 years ago
65|2 years ago
erskingardner|2 years ago
rchaud|2 years ago
rideontime|2 years ago
benwerd|2 years ago
netbioserror|2 years ago
Turing_Machine|2 years ago
Normies use keypairs every time they connect to an https site. They just don't know it, nor is there any reason why they should.
agg23|2 years ago
I don't understand how moderation or handling the large transfers of duplicate data between relays and clients will work.
wedesoft|2 years ago
brethna|2 years ago
themusicgod1|2 years ago
wedesoft|2 years ago
malikNF|2 years ago
Going through and implementing the nips for nostr is really fun. You can make a mvp version of a client in a afternoon.
roribolden|2 years ago
No need to dig into a black box protocol concept and implementation hiding in the corner of the ‘net
Kye|2 years ago
colesantiago|2 years ago
yuck.
javier123454321|2 years ago
themusicgod1|2 years ago
erskingardner|2 years ago
rchaud|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
lucabs|2 years ago
[deleted]