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Comment by legutierr | Hacker News Reader

Nostr is perhaps the most interesting of the list. Fully decentralized; messages are cryptographically signed; users are identified by their private keys; following is done on the client side, with no stateful server-side component; messages broadcast via stateless relays.

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

https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email, in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.

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Nostr is awesome from a technical POV. And they have something that very few projects today get - which is reduced scope.

Their critique of both centralized and dweb alternatives are mostly spot on. The elephant in the room though is whether people-oriented broadcast social media (those with a strong emphasis on one-directional “followers” and personalities) can ever be good. If Nostr was content oriented like Reddit or HN, I would have already started using it. The good news is that it can probably be retrofitted, or at least replicated easily, while adhering to the same technical architecture.

Nostr looks interesting, and its critique of programs similar to Mastodon[1] more or less matched my experience with Pluspora up until the point where it got shut down[2].

[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/sy7e67/pluspora_p...

Are relays stateless? When I join a nostr channel I see all previous conversations

Per my understanding, relays are stateless in the sense that they do not store any user state or message state, except what is self-contained within the relayed messages themselves. Also, messages can be relayed by any relay server and by multiple servers, and messages don't necessarily persist.

I've only started learning about it today, though, so my understanding is limited!

Is that the Morris worm sendmail with its Turing Complete address rewriting language that I'm seeing in the same sentence with the word "barebones"? ;-)

Very interesting, thank you.

To what degree is it decentralized?

Per my understanding: most important functionality is implemented in the client; clients can connect to any relay server, and any number of relay servers; messages can be relayed by any number of relay servers; and anyone can spool up a new relay server at any time.

Ok. I will definitely have a look.

My decision so far was to go and run a one-person Mastodon instance but this sounds intriguing.

I was able to get nostr-rs-relay[0] running in <5 minutes on fly.io. Got all my client apps and those of ~5 friends writing to and posting from it. Hasn't crashed yet.

[0] https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay

Neat!

Recommended by Jack too:

https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768

I'll make sure it is sell-out proof then :)

im getting a tweet not found. was that tweet from jack deleted?

No, some nitter problem:

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1603945963944480768

This is probably the reason Nostr makes an appearance in the policy then.

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