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Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

Why can't these projects separate the use-cases from philosophies and from implementation when presenting them?

At first glance I don't understand what this is. Is it a social network? A protocol? "Pro-censorship? I need to read some blog article...

It's been like this with scuttlebutt/gossip, and rest of the alternative internet/fediverse with mastodont and activitypub and diaspora. Instead of asking questions like "How is this different than email? How does it compare to twitter?", I have to start with "What am I looking at? A technical implementation or a product? Is it a website or an app? What am I supposed to do with this?

There's also Urbit, which I'm sure not a single one of you can explain exactly what it is.

It's not as bad as "Web3", I'll give it that.

Bluesky got it right. So did gemini to some extent.

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Nostr is essentially a compromise between p2p and traditional web architectures. It cuts with the grain of the internet by using web servers, while reducing the dependence users have on servers by using keys for identity and digital signatures for authenticating data.

The effect is that users have "credible exit" (among other things), which has been discussed for years. This doesn't really create any new "use cases", which is why the use case is often described as "whatever, it's the new internet".

What it does do is introduce a very different set of trade-offs which favor user control over platform control (with the attendant UX trade-offs (or at least a different set of UX idioms)).

The reason the focus is on social is because that represents the majority of applications that do exist, the original motivation for building the protocol, and a value proposition (censorship resistance) that lots of people can relate to.

I don't want to be mean, but this post has exactly the problem the person you're replying to was complaining about. The person you're replying to, I think, would like an explanation that reads more like "It's like Twitter, but not tied to a mega-corp, just for you and your pals". I don't know if that description actually fits Nostr though because, like the person you're replying to, I have a pretty hard time understanding what Nostr actually _is_.

My point is that question is sort of a category error. It's like asking what type of business the internet is for, or what the use case of smart phones is.

Here are a few things built on nostr, with specific use cases:

primal.net is a twitter-like client with bitcoin micropayments and long-form articles (also see coracle.social, nosotros.app, jumble.social, Amethyst, Damus, yakihonne.com and many others); zap.stream is a twitch-like client for live streaming; flotilla.social and chachi.chat are group chat clients; dtan.xyz is a client for torrenting on nostr; satlantis.io is sort of a travel ratings thing; zap.cooking is a recipe website; yakbak.app is for voice messages; nutstash.app is a cashu wallet built on nostr; cashumints.space lists cashu mints that advertise themselves on nostr.

What's neat is that all these clients can do things the way they want to, but remain interoperable, which means that new developers can create an app and immediately have access to all existing nostr users and their social graph.

The question isnt a category error and deserves a direct answer.

If I follow what you're saying the answer could have been: "it's a framework/set of protocols for building a Twitter that can show all the stuff on other compatible Google+/Facebooks"

If you have a preference for this style of definition, then we could say that

Nostr is a protocol that's well suited for creating decentralized applications that need publicly verifiable identity, censorship resistance and event based communication.

For example, https://zapstore.dev/app is an Android AppStore that uses nostr to provide a decentralized way to verify the developers and remove "fake" apps.

"nostr is a simple distributed protocol to build internet applications for social networking, communication and media.

It requires lightweight relay servers, as opposed to large federated servers like in mastodon or email, or fully p2p like scuttlebutt.

It can be used to some extent via a browser using web clients, but it's best used alongside extensions for authentication and key management"

That is what I'm looking for. I'm not sure it's a good description, but I wish something like this was front and center

Going back to the site, I see what you mean. Very fair criticism. The site appeals to a bunch of implicit ideals without defining its terms.

> appeals to a bunch of implicit ideals without defining its terms.

That's such a good way to summarize it!

>It requires lightweight relay servers, as opposed to large federated servers like in mastodon or email, or fully p2p like scuttlebutt.

Are there any good light weight relay servers you can recommend? I went to the site and the git repo, and https://njump.me

Are there any I assume open source ones?

>It can be used to some extent via a browser using web clients, but it's best used alongside extensions for authentication and key management

Just wonder can the key just sit in the IndexDB? And it is decrypted on the client side (when user enters password to decrypt the key) to sign a message to send to peers or relay, they can verify your identity by checking against the corresponding public key.

Nobody's stopping you from making that site, you know?

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