Replicated on WordPress and Nostr.

Hey everyone, Bit here. I've been hanging around a social network and communication protocol called Nostr for a little while now, and I thought I would write a blog post about it to demystify its existence. My goodness I hope I don't lose people over this one.

What are you talking about?

Nostr is an acronym for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays", and is a protocol where JSON objects called "events" are cryptographically signed and published to decentralized nodes called "relays". Each event has a kind number which determines how clients process them, meaning that developers can make their own kinds of events to make more kinds of content possible.

Anyone can sign up, no email or other information required. Only thing you have to do is save the "nsec..." string in a safe place since that's the key to your account.

The sentiment reminds me of Rumble

I am also a user of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. One project that leverages the AT Protocol as well as another network called the Fediverse is "WAFRN", a somewhat small open-source project designed to have a web UI that replicates Tumblr. When going around users of that network I saw a thread where WAFRN's maintainer Gabboman made comments about Nostr being "full of Nazis" (the political left likes to refer to the right that way).

"not adding nostr support to it because its full of nazis but glad you enjoy it :D"
from gabboman the wafrn dev - view post

This sentiment held by Gabboman and probably many others on mainstream apps such as Bluesky and even less than mainstream apps like Mastodon seems to be very similar to the sentiment around Rumble, a video platform that prides itself on freedom despite it being centralized. Rumble has been criticized a lot for its high population of far-right political content/creators. I upload to 3 video platforms (YouTube, Odysee, and Rumble), but I tend to link to Odysee most prominently because it seems to have freedom in mind but seems more neutral in its marketing and creator demographic than Rumble.

Anyway, we're getting off-topic.

To be fair, it is a Bitcoin echo chamber

I believe Nostr was developed by some users within the Bitcoin community, and as such one major feature of many Nostr clients is "zapping", which means you can send small Bitcoin tips to creators you like. In another reference to the WAFRN maintainers, Alexia made a comment about Nostr in her blog post "AI Proto" (talking about how prevalent Claude Code and such is in the ATProto community).

"It's a bit like Nostr, which has tight integration with Bitcoin and Lightning, and as such invited a bunch of (bigoted) cryptobros in."
Alexia (on Leaflet) - see original

I can confirm that a lot of conversation on Nostr is centered around Bitcoin as well as development on the Nostr protocol itself. I don't claim to be a "cryptobro", I talk about cryptocurrency (and nostr) sometimes but not ALL THE TIME like some of the quoted "cryptobros" do. I do see some other posts, even from people who are developing/maintaining Nostr clients (such as Paul Keating, head of Primal, talking about other stuff he does such as surfing).

The versatility of ATProto without the (partial) centralization

Now let's get out of the negative sentiments. Let's talk about how Nostr innovates compared to other protocols such as ATProto (Bluesky) and the Fediverse

The partial centralization of ATProto

The AT Protocol that backs Bluesky and other ATmosphere apps such as Leaflet (blogging) and Tangled (GitHub alternative) is decentralized, but it operates in layers. The layer with the most frequent alternate hosts is the PDS (Personal Data Server) layer, where people's posts are actually stored. However, ATProto also has the AppView and Relay layers, which aggregate posts. The only group I've seen hosting another AppView is Blacksky Algorithms, a somewhat large group of Black people developing on the AT Protocol.

With Nostr, the protocol is fully decentralized, with the only servers involved in serving posts to users being the independent relay network. This means that there's no individual you have to trust, at least if you self-host a relay. Also you can't have a corporation block you from being seen. If one relay won't take your posts, there's probably another that will.

All the versatility you could want

The Fediverse lacks versatility. Yes, people can make many apps that use the same ActivityPub protocol, but because ActivityPub is quite rigid there's only so much that a Mastodon user could see about stuff happening on a Lemmy (Reddit alternative) or PeerTube (YouTube alternative) instance. ATProto is better because of its "lexicon" system, where developers can define new types of public records that can be stored within people's accounts.

Nostr is also just as versatile as ATProto because you can define different kinds of data using the kind numbers attached to events. For example a Nostr client called Ditto has a virtual pet called Blobbi, and your Blobbi's data is stored by your account's relays using the kind number 31124. Microblog posts (think Twitter) are kind 1, and blog posts (like this) are kind 30023. You can even use a site like nsite.run to create nsites, whose metadata are stored events of kind 15124 (root site) or 35124 (named sites) with their data stored on Blossom file servers. I have an nsite copy of my main website hosted here. If you liked Tangled, there's also a Nostr equivalent called ngit. If you want to see the technical details for all of Nostr's known possibilities and updates, go look at the NIPs.

Bitchat, a mesh-network text chat app supported by Jack Dorsey, features a system called geohash rooms that let you chat beyond the mesh range. These rooms leverage the Nostr network for communication, although Nostr features are not prominent in the app. It even uses a different keypair for each chat, to increase anonymity.

Even more versatility than just within the network

A recent development has come out in the form of a piece of software called Nowhere. It allows you to create various types of webpages such as text messages, pastebins (called drops), stores, fundraisers, event pages, and forums. It leverages Nostr's cryptography to sign pages, allowing them to be verifiably associated with an author, with a unique fingerprint phrase for every author and page to make attempted modifications detectable. As the web domain suggests, these pages are hosted nowhere, with the unique data of the page localized entirely within the URL.

Nowhere does use some relay communication for dynamic data within sites, but when signing the site initially with a Nostr key, an event is signed but not published since that event can be used as the proof that the person that is claimed on the Nowhere page made that Nowhere page.

I don't know about many others, but there might be other possibilities that take advantage of Nostr's cryptography outside of the network itself.

How easy is it to get started?

The only things you'll need are a computer or a phone, and a secure way to store the keys. You can make your account with a starter wizard like Nstart (if you use that link to create an account you'll automatically follow me) or make it in a client such as Nostria, Primal, Iris, or Jumble. If you want to see more clients and other apps, go to https://nostrapps.com/.

If you made an account without using the Nstart link, you can find me as littlebitstudios.com in most clients, or paste my key (shown below) into the search bar of the app you're using.


npub1pra8zgw2hrckthu0xexs5k7xvz5mt6rsfk09e9egehnj7q8mpp9s8vr6v5

update Apr 29 1:16pm CST: I would recommend seeing this article by White Noise (a chat app based on Nostr identity) for a bit more explanation about key concepts of Nostr.