What does HackerNews think of nostr?
a truly censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter that has a chance of working
Nostr isn't a federated platform like Mastodon or Lemmy, it's more similar to the AT protocol created by Bluesky, whilst being far simpler to understand and write apps using it. The nostr protocol is defined by a series of NIPs (Nostr implementation possibilites https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips), the most basic of which can be implemented in a client or a relay in 50-100 lines of code in any modern programming language.
Each user runs a client, anyone can write a relay or run any of hundreds of existing implementations, both clients and relays can choose to support a number of NIPs. Users have a public-private keypair, and distribute notes to relays signed with their private key, which are verified by relays. Clients subscribe via websockets to any number of relays (I usually have 20-30), and receive notes from all users on those relays' databases, or filtered by the public keys of the users you're following. Relays for the most part don't communicate with each other. If you're ever blocked or banned from a relay, you'll still be able to have your notes seen as long as you have at least one relay in common with anyone who wants to see them. I run my own as well for extra resiliency.
At the moment there's ~50 standardised NIPs, which add features like likes, zaps (bitcoin tips for notes), user status, post expiration, mentions, search, DMs, and public chats. Nearly all of these are supported by popular clients and relays. While nostr is primarily used for social media at the moment, it's already possible to build upon as a protocol for pretty much any online service.
The total active user count on most public relays I'd estimate is somewhere around 500k to a million, though the nature of the protocol makes it impossible to estimate its true size. The perceived community on most relays before following anyone frankly can get pretty cancerous, mainly due to a lot of clients sorting notes by new by default, so I can only hope to high heaven it'll improve as it grows.
Though like any new non-centralised platform, it's more difficult to get started on for most non-technical users as they have to pick one of hundreds of clients to install, and requires caution to never leak your private key and be very wary of which clients you trust it with.
Perhaps the next challenge would be human verification, even with this protocol we’d need something to index public people by to handle discovery.
Even before LLM’s became as mainstream as they are, most social media platforms were riddled with spam: affiliate marketing, drop shipping crap, and people who are running some sort of con.
1 - https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr already has 8k stars on github
Mastodon really is the best alternative at the moment, and it doesn't have to be difficult (although the most difficult option - self hosting your own identity server - is also the most secure.) You can find hosting solutions or even do what I (the laziest person) did and just run multiple accounts through each instance's public website and use browser bookmarks and/or a third party client. Not much more difficult than joining subreddits, but more annoying in that there is no actual shared identity between accounts. Plenty of political activists and media services are already on the platform.
But since you asked, I found some, with what seemed to be the biggest or most recent HN discussiona I could find. Absolutely no guarantees on my part regarding utility, practicality, security or whatever, though.
Nostr protocol: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33323815
Counter Social: https://counter.social/index.html
https://gizmodo.com/jester-hacker-trying-to-fix-social-media...
(^weirdly no HN traction on this one tha I could find)
Cohost: https://cohost.org/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33920553
Post.news
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33655193
Gettr: https://gettr.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27702867
Gab: https://gab.com/
Parler: https://parler.com/
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=parler
Diaspora: https://diasporafoundation.org/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18361631
(^ HN apparently hasn't had a meaningful discussion about Diaspora in years, which doesn't bode well)
Manyverse: https://www.manyver.se/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607995
WT Social: https://wt.social/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31706842
(I think this is dead)
Messages are cryptographically signed, and users are identified by their public key. Users typically follow other users like they would on Twitter, but the client manages everything, so there is no dependency on any relay.
Messages are typically posted to many relays at once and clients typically read from many relays at once. Jack Dorsey's message is being displayed here because it was copied to a relay that this website has access to. The same message is accessible elsewhere.
"Global" means that you download all the public messages that a relay has, instead of just downloading messages posted by people you follow.
> If nobody wants to hear you spewing your stuff then you'll soon be screaming into the void but what you post will still be viewable on the web and to those that subscribe to you.
People who are de-platformed are almost always people who others WANT to hear. Think of all the famous people deplatformed from big tech social media...10s of millions of followers each. It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them.
> So I don't get what Nostr is trying to do.
It took me a while to get my head around it as well. The intro and faq on the github repo really helped me.
1. What is Nostr?
> Nostr is short for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays". Nostr is the simplest open protocol that can create a censorship-resistant global “social” network once and for all. See also https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
2. How do I start using Nostr?
> Since it's an open protocol, everyone could (and quite a few people and teams do) build their own client for using Nostr.
> If you want to try it out on an iPhone, iPad or macOS, try Damus. It's a Twitter-style iOS client. Link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/CLwjLxWl
> Or simply log-in via one of several frontends what work in a browser, such as: https://hamstr.to/home
3. Nostr is new and small, does anybody really use it?
> From December 13th to January 10th, the number of public key identities interacting with Nostr jumped from ~700 to ~250,000 Yes, you read that right, the number of identities increased >30,000%. You can check for yourself current statistics on usage here: https://nostr.io/stats
4. How does it differ from ActivityPub?
> ActivityPub, and especially Mastodon, have been in the news a lot lately as possible replacements for, among other things, Twitter. The problem with ActivityPub is that you need to have an account on a instance that can censor contend and even block a user. When you are kicked off an ActivityPub instance, all your data is gone as well. Nostr is much simpeler: every post you make is encrypted via public key cryptography. You can either run your own relay or hook into one of several existing once. Even if a relay were to block you, it's trivially easy to switch to another one. Since you can post messages via multiple relays in one go, you might not even realise one has gone off-line or started blocking you.
For a comparison with ActivityPub, Twitter, Secure ScuttleButt, see also: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#this-is-needed-becau...
It's basically a public key addressed messaging protocol that uses relays to complete transport.
It seems that would depend on, or change according to, each individual relay.
>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.[0]
Nostr will be widespread in near future, the next year or two.
I find Nostr much more exciting than federated sites, b/c it uses decentralized ids. You never have to worry about losing your social graph due to a federated server admin shutting down their server or banning you.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-dorsey-gives-decentraliz...
A reason to check it out again: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
Nostr is a more sane version of activitypub where your identity is just a public key and not dependant on any server, no signup required. Due to this it also natively support BTC payments and micropayments through the lightning network
From their Github repo[0]:
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, therefore it works.
"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."
Jack stumbled upon it yesterday and created an account, so there have been a flood of new users already in the last 16 hours.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
I recommend https://astral.ninja as a first time user as it's easy to generate a key pair, which you can then use as you try the many other clients.
This is a very new protocol, so the clients are still dev level and not production level, but development has been very rapid on this protocol.
One thing that stands out to me as a privacy advocate, is that unlike Twitter or Mastadon, the admins (relay operators in the case of nostr) can't read your DMs, so nostr is already ahead of both of these technologies in that regard.
Because of that I think a standard that allows people to publish their own (cryptographically signed) things on a variety of publicly accessible servers (that could be restricted or not, have their own moderation policies or not, be paid or not or have other model) is the way forward: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
What decentralized protocols try to solve, and what the centralized web has failed us with, is data ownership. Users should have full control over the data they produce, and be free to migrate it to any other node without losing access to the service they're interested in.
I think Nostr looks very promising in that sense: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
Mind you, I don't think social media is worth reinventing. Connecting everyone on the planet is wrong on a societal level. But P2P services are a good fit for building smaller communities, which is a crucial missing component of the design of the WWW. I'm still hopeful that something built for the masses can take over the current mess we're in.
I am also closely following https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr to see how they go along, because I am growing weary of the "tech elite" that is moving to Mastodon and is pushing for "moderation by committee". I've gotten myself with discussions already with people who actually want server operators that want only to open federation for those that abide by some "Covenant". This seems rooted in good intentions, but it reeks of something that might lead to a corporate copout of a network which is supposed to be open.
See FAQ, second question.
As of now, a lot of privacy is lost when you actually look at Nostr events. There are servers that check to see if a user has paid before they execute the request too[2].
Jack Dorsey (ex-Twitter CEO) is also working on a protocol with similar properties [2]
Neither can really replace Twitter right now, but they're interesting alternatives coming down the pipeline.
[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr [2] https://blueskyweb.org/
Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO.
- Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance.
- Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator.
- People don't want to self-host.
The core problem of a lot of social networks comes down to name aliasing, and who controls the name registry. In the case of nostr[1] this is not a problem because everything is using public keys. Another protocol is Farcaster[2] which plans to use a smart contract to maintain a name registry without requiring a single controller.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
It solves this problem of being tied to a domain.
Look at nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
There's also Revolver https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/revolver-kickoff.h... it is in development and very interesting, will be available to the public for testing Soon™ from what I gather.
Happy to answer any questions :)
there is a reddit clone and a twitter clone implemented with this protocol as well https://nvote.co/ and https://nostr.com/