https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1459.pdf
The vulnerabilities here are pretty :yikes:
* The event protocol that drives the system doesn't authenticate public keys, so asymmetric signatures are performative: attackers that can intercept messages (Nostr servers, the presumed adversary of an E2EE messaging system) can just swap out keys and re-sign.
* Two major clients, the mobile phone Damus app and the web Iris app, don't even verify signatures to begin with.
* DMs in this system are unauthenticated CBC, so attackers can simply bitflip messages and events to say what they want.
* The apps do automatic link-preview, so they've managed to reconstitute the EFAIL attack: attackers can locate links within messages (they'll be revealed by SNI and DNS anyways) and then bitflip them to point to attacker-controlled servers, exposing both the URLs (which will often contain tokens) and, with a bit of extra work, the message itself (by tacking `?foo=` onto a URL).
* There's no key separation in the system, so you can trick users into running a subprotocol other than the messaging system, then establishing a session key, which will then be used for messaging.
These are really basic errors; this is mid-aughts-level cryptographic engineering. There are probably a variety of other reasons to use Nostr, but end-to-end security does not appear to be one of them.
I haven't read that entire paper. Mainly, I skipped to the section you mention here:
> The event protocol that drives the system doesn't authenticate public keys, so asymmetric signatures are performative: attackers that can intercept messages (Nostr servers, the presumed adversary of an E2EE messaging system) can just swap out keys and re-sign.
I think you and the authors perhaps misunderstand the Nostr protocol. Nostr is, effectively, an identity system tied to a public key. The cryptography is sound. Your identity is your public key. When you request a user's profile, or their events, you request it specifically by their public key. That is unforgeable (assuming no bugs in the implementation, like what the authors found in Damus).
This does present UX issues that can manifest as security issues, such as "how can you verify that a user with a certain public is who they say they are instead of an impostor". That is a separate issue from whether the cryptography itself is sound.
Nip04 has been deprecated, and to be clear, in practice the nip04 payload is in a signed nip01 event wrapper.
nip44 replaced nip04, which has been reviewed/audited. Does use authenticated encryption in the message payload with forward secrecy, again in practice wrapped in a nip01 event, singed by the author, usually by the same cryptographic software used to encrypt the message.
nip44 is becoming more widely used for direct messages and other "private" metadata stored on relays. It's chacha20 + hkdf.
(I have no significant knowledge of the protocol; if this is a meaningless question just say so.)
This sounds awfully much like a cryptography problem to me!
https://hellonostr.dev/en/introduction/
The encoding seems to have an unmentioned/unaddressed version number included, both in the nostr doc and the bitcoin docs.
npub1abcxyz... is npub (header) 1 (version) abcxyz... (key)
Now take a look at the doc (linked above.)
This is completely nonsense, most clients do in fact check signatures. All relays do as well.
> Two major clients, the mobile phone Damus app and the web Iris app, don't even verify signatures to begin with.
Author of Damus here. this is an analysis of an old version. This has since been fixed. In the early days we connected to a fixed relay list of trusted relays. These relays verified signatures. This was just a pragmatic tradeoff thing until we had an optimized work queue for verifying notes (this lead to nostrdb, a custom embedded nostr database built on lmdb. it's a sqlite but for nostr https://github.com/damus-io/nostrdb)
> DMs in this system are unauthenticated CBC, so attackers can simply bitflip messages and events to say what they want.
not really true since the whole note is covered by a secp256k1 signature.
> The apps do automatic link-preview, so they've managed to reconstitute the EFAIL attack: attackers can locate links within messages (they'll be revealed by SNI and DNS anyways) and then bitflip them to point to attacker-controlled servers, exposing both the URLs (which will often contain tokens) and, with a bit of extra work, the message itself (by tacking `?foo=` onto a URL).
you can turn off these, you can turn off images as well. people should run a VPN of course if they are worried about these things.
Could you explain more? What are the downsides of a signature vs. a MAC here?
This makes sense in nostr, because anyone at any point can mint new public key and start posting events and other people are free to start following them, from which point they can ensure that the new events are coming from the person holding the same private key. And this is what relays and clients do.
The fact is that clients do verify signatures from events received from servers, that is in the protocol specification and should be obvious to anyone mildly honest.
The entire assumption of the paper is that clients don't do that and it is void. Yes, they did find a couple of clients 2 years ago that didn't verify signatures -- so much for a vulnerability in the protocol. I guess they wanted Nostr to have a code police arresting client developers who didn't finish their implementation?
Aside from that the attacks they demonstrated depend on a bunch of other absurd circumstances (like you have to manually and voluntarily type the URL of the attacker server in order to be attacked) but it's not even worth talking about them since the basic assumption is so completely false already.
The encrypted messages stuff is not even a core part of Nostr anyway, Nostr is a broadcasting protocol for public or semi-public content. Encryption can be added on top and there are multiple ways and proposals for how to do it, including an implementation of MLS and other methods and I personally mostly do not care about any.
I wish the paper authors were more honest and republished their work with the title: "the dangers of trusting a cryptographic signature without verifying it", but I imagine that it would have been too obvious and worthless if it was phrased like that.
The end result is a bad experience for both user and developer. Using a single relay is centralised and defeats the point. Using multiple relays is slow and cumbersome and requires the user to know/care which relays they are connecting to.
When I played with Nostr a couple years ago the "NIPs" were already a complete mess. Later NIPs supersede earlier NIPs changing how clients are supposed to interpret messages. At least some are flagged as "unrecommended: deprecated" now.
I'm running an indexer (a relay) which federates with other relay indexers. Similar how activitypub relays work. Any client can connect to indexer to help bootstrapping and find metadata around events. There are many ways to discover stuff from clients even without being connected to the same relay.
That said, many of the "larger" relays do store events from other relays (federation if you prefer). Primal does, TheForrest does, nostr.land and so on. Nostr.land specifically has a purpose of aggregating notes from many other public relays, with spam filtering. It's a paid relay built for that purpose. Don't want that, use someone else.
Most users get to see 99% of notes from the current relay federation now, but it's also impossible to check those metrics.
Certain clients and signers store notes privately so if a relay ever decides to censor your notes you just publish to a different relay if they don't have your notes already.
Chances are if you use ANY of the popular paid relay providers, your going to get warnings on 3/4 write events that the other relays _already_ have the note published to the first. It's usually that quick...
Finally, relays "federate" by acting as clients themselves. Most relay software available already offers this as an option, may use it as a local cache for when on mobile and network/wifi is slow. Their local relay slowly pulls notes from other relays (or outbox) and caches those notes for when they load their client up. It's cache and the client dev didn't even have to write that functionality, it was transparent.
Finally, other's mentioned outbox, which has it's own set of issues as well, but it doesn't matter because a client developer can choose to give the user the option if they want. Going from federated, to peer-to-peer which was the intention.
Most NIP are fine and continuously improved.
This is trivial to solve when there is there a periodic release of the NIP as done in other specs. So far there hasn't been much need for that formality, most developers understand quickly how to create tools on top of it.
The protocol's real value lies in other use cases.
Some apps indeed use this method of selecting a static set of relays, and if that was the protocol you would be correct about centralization or bloat, but this is legacy from a naïve unfinished early implementation, most apps do the correct thing now and the rest is transitioning.
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.
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.
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.
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"
Did/does Nostr have some cryptocurrency connection or am I thinking of something else?
Not only classical P2P software did exactly this, it worked/works beautifully. The only reason classical P2P software did not work and did not replace WWW as application was because of piracy prosecutions that makes users responsible for hosting data with unknown content that would be later revealed to users to have been pirated content that the user would be criminally responsible a la illegal substances through airport checkpoints.
That's bad - both the fact that users' passive actions are incriminating, and substances too. So the next-gen P2P would have to have plausible logging content filters such as AI-based CP and Hollywood detectors that would stop relaying of such content so that users can defend themselves in criminal courts. Or the systems could also be in-circle specific so nothing of value is lost if everyone in a terrorist group would be prosecuted together, though I imagine that could hamper network growth.
But fundamentally, I think the model has to be that all clients are also servers. That's the best way to decentralize a social media.
* is there even a need for it? I would say that most people are quite happy with centralized platforms; I don't see it changing anytime soon (why?)
* wouldn't we end up in the centralized world anyways? Even though there could be multiple NOSTR clients and relays, we all know how network effect works - people will flock to a single or a few best ones; does it really change the situation that we have today - a few centralized platforms?
* I don't see clear incentives in this protocol that would improve current social media landscape - granted that I don't particularly like current ads/sell your attention model
I am not sure that having a protocol like this is better that having a few centralized platforms - today's situation. Not to even mention technical challenges and worse user experience that NOSTR brings
In NOSTR, even though yes there is more than one relay, but you still need their permission to publish; and yes, you can run your own relay - but you might host your own website too - no need for new apps and protocols to do this
In your example you can think about nostr as a protocol on top of "your own websites" that allows all people with "your own website" to effectively communicate and live interact with each other. And creating "your own website" is just a matter of clicking a button in any nostr app that generates private key and public key pair.
I hope this demonstrates how a distributed social protocol can solve many use cases and the advantage to the end-user:
- do not get rugpulled by (VC backed) companies that own your data
- receive zaps/money by contributing
- data is truely available to everyone (but signed by author)
* relays can just go away - you don't have your data then
* there is both user-friendly and secure way of managing your private keys; additionally, once your keys are gone, your identity is gone - there is no "I forgot my password" procedure
We've been hosting some bounties like this one here: https://app.lightningbounties.com/issue/615dc5f7-ed91-4ecd-8...
The real lesson is that most people don't care enough about the underlying risks - they care about convenience.
Lightning can't work distributed, by design. It's a silly architecture. I guess the problem that the proponents of the alternative were slightly mental, sealed the fate of the BTC. It really should have increased block size, multiple times by now, and don't bother with stuff that can't work.
P.S: anon1395 is likely a new, mere troll account. Well played.
Monero has other things working for it though, like the absence of liquidity issues you might face using Lightning.
Not reliable for larger values.
And attention that Monero isn't the only privacy coin in town, but it is the one that is without doubt more attacked by governments due to its privacy. You don't see the same treatment for neither LN nor bitcoin, instead you see governments supporting it. There is a big difference.
I am involved in Lightning and run my own node - it is pretty much private enough for all sorts of micro payments for content creators. Not private enough for organized crime to move large sums, agreed.
You also forget to mention the 51% attack monero recently suffered. Lightning is bitcoin based and way more resilient to that.
I don't get it. It's like saying bank transactions are private enough for all sorts of micro payments for content creators, but not private enough for organized crime to move large sums. Technically true, but...
It's either private or not.
That 51% attack on Monero never happened, despite much noise and headlines saying initially otherwise. You can verify this for yourself.
And it - too - does not look into trampoline payments. Trampoline payments are a new feature that are not yet in a BOLT standard, but tried and tested in beta and used i.e. by Phoenix Wallet or Electrum.
Anyways thank you for mentioning Trampoline payments, I've learned something new.
So that point you raise is fake. However, if you want to pick a more realistic reason then complain about the fees which are still high when doing for example a payment of 5 cents and the fee will often also be 5 cents whereas it should be free.
Anyways, I'm not even a fan of Monero being used for that purpose. The conversation here was about privacy and the lack of it on some virtual coins.
Nostr has existed for at least 5 years. I remember people migrate there and promote it on Twitter during pandemic. Infancy?
Have there been any attempts to make more of a “network” that incentivizes operating personal websites but adds a mechanism for typical social media features like chat, a feed, etc. in a centralized way? The only thing I can think of is RSS, and that is only a way to follow content publication.
You can, in theory, generate a new key for every post if you want to. The relays don't care.
This is something Mastodon etc. lacks (accounts are tied to servers, so you can't move your self-hosted Mastodon to your self-hosted Akkomo without keeping Mastodon running, and you can't move from one instance to another if your instance admin doesn't let you).
On the other hand, the complete lack of account recovery, even for sysadmins, is something many people will have an issue with.
How did you register as BinaryIgor? You and ycombinator exchanged a pubkey. ycombinator registered theirs with a DNS register, while you threw yours away.
ycombinator has 100% ownership over your identity. There is no way to prove to me you are you without ycombinator.
Having ycombinator be your naming service is useful, and so any distributed system would be wise to re-implement an analog.
But what a supernet signing scheme offers is in addition to "forgot my password" it also has a "ycombinator disappeared / betrayed our trust" feature where your ID and messages exists outside ycombinator - as long as you remember your password.
What we're currently doing: throwing away our keys and let ycombinator resign our messages with theirs; is bad for the power balance between user and the admin.
However, the copywriting there is not in this vein at all. IMO the metaphor of personal websites is a simple, universal one that most people can understand. Nostr seems unintelligible to anyone that isn't pretty technical.
you don't even need to know how to host something on a server, the relays do that for you.
Nostr is an apolitical communication commons. A simple standard that defines a scalable architecture of clients and servers that can be used to spread information freely. Not controlled by any corporation or government, anyone can build on Nostr and anyone can use it.
We already have a mix of technologies to achieve that effect. Sort of. Simplified, you can host a personal website on shared hosting, a VPS, or wherever, at the same time chat via IRC or XMPP, and use RSS to create feeds to share tidbits about yourself. Nothing stops you from combining different programs and services to get that.
So, what are the problems you're actually trying to solve here?
Do you want to improve accessibility, that is: lower the bar for non-technical people to join feeds, publish their own thoughts, join group chats,...?
Do you want to improve discoverability across what we already have? Make it easier for everyone to serendipitous finding information? Like, search, recommendations, linking, pub/sub, and so on?
Do you want to solve sustainability? Developing models that also cover the expenses involved i.e. either covering the costs in maintaining tech, or redistributing the costs?
Do you want to solve governance, the issue of providing enough affordances to communities to moderate/govern themselves?
These are big questions, and once you try to solve them together, you'll have to make trade-offs, inevitably. Decentralizing everything sounds great, but that has an impact on discoverability, as well as accessibility. Not having another account sounds great, but that hides complex debates about online and offline, distributed identities.
Even more so, if you dig deeper, our approach these affordances is based on our values. And those can be very different depending on who you talk to. That's where things enter the murky, ambiguous teritory of sociology, culture, and so on where few absolute truths are offered.
That doesn't mean we should just accept throw up hands and accept the status quo, though. Talking in terms of a single "network" or a single "protocol" is too crude to approach these questions. The intrinsic value the Internet offers us, can be found in a handful foundational design principles like standardization, composition, openness,... which allow us to create many networks that host many diverse communities. Each to their own isn't a bad thing as it's too naive to think that there's a catch-all solution that caters to everyone's needs. Balkanization, such as it is, becomes really problematic if it erodes common beliefs we hold about a free, open and accessible digital global network.
Many "technical" people who are active in these niches like Mastodon, Nostr, the Fediverse, or even the Smolweb, do so because they are steeped in a particular (counter)culture that espouses the same values that also led to the birth of the early Internet. Cyberspace really is a marketplace of ideas first. Technologies are an expression of that.
It's more that I like personal websites, from both an ownership and creative perspective. And so I wish there were more approaches which attempted to incentivize that model without creating a complicated new protocol, platform, etc. That might involve making it easier to create and self-host websites, an opt-in directory of personal sites with chat + forums attached, or something else like that.
Some modern day examples include: https://tilde.town/, https://tilde.club/ and https://sdf.org/.
But shell access doesn't appeal to non-tech users. It's the difference between engineering the electricity in your own house to become self-sufficient, and just expecting to magically get power when you plug a device in the socket.
Can't monetize that.
Some people say that labeling yourself apolitical is 1, a polticial statement 2, a privilege itself which puts you into a certain socio-political position
> It is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation. Thucydides quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration as saying: "[we] regard... him who takes no part in these [public] duties not as unambitious but as useless" ... However, neither he nor any other ancient author uses the word "idiot" to describe non-participants, or in a derogatory sense; its most common use was simply a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, professional, or expert. The derogatory sense came centuries later, and was unrelated to the political meaning.
...which is a very much a political statement.
But the point is, nostr does not intent to judge that. It happens automatically while communicating. Nostr is just the means to communicate.
And others say that we should use our positions of privilege to help others, which seems to apply in this case.
Oh look I found the politics.
No one sells "apolitical hammers" or "apolitical drills." If one has to specify that software is apolitical, it isn't.
No software exists in a vacuum, even the license terms are a political statement. Certainly nostr was created as an expression of fiatjaf's specific political ideals, and those ideals will tend to attract certain political demographics, and repel others.
That conclusion doesn't track. In a time when a lot of software has become politically charged, it's perfectly reasonable to specify when that isn't the case.
> No software exists in a vacuum, even the license terms are a political statement.
Software doesn't exist in a vacuum, but not all licenses are the same. There are many licenses that don't place any restrictions on how the software is used. There are others whose authors relinquish all control or ownership. You may see these as political statements, but that would be corrupting their meaning. It's like claiming that atheism is a religion...
Whatever beliefs the authors have does not taint the software at all, unless the software itself is political or they make some political commentary. Communities created around software are political, as societies always are, but the software itself is inert.
The bottom line is that the Nostr project welcomes anyone, regardless of their politics. That is worth mentioning. If it attracts a certain type of political ideology, that has to do with the people who find the software appealing, not with the software itself.
Or they find that this is the only place their politics are accepted. A nazi bar is not better than any other bar.
Are there any major figures of interest primarily participating on any Nostr platform? Or is there any kind of uniquely interesting content that is being primarily produced and shared on Nostr?
https://bitchat.free now uses nostr for non-mesh contacts somehow, but I see no-one there either.
Network effects are everything. The tech can be good but the product may not be - solely because of the network effect. Still - pretty good tech!
Last year one of users on mastodon I was casually talking to decided to move to Nostr - he claimed in his last posts that some features like pools and voting are locked behind payments there. Can someone shed some light on that? I couldn't find any info if that platform does contain paid features.
The "algorithm" in any social media is a blessing and a curse. Nostr shifts the responsibility of what to show to the clients.
In the past, the way that I would typically get to know people online was either through niche topic-specific forums or IRC channels. Then eventually if we got to know each other well enough, we would connect on other platforms. The modern version of this seems to be Discord. These platforms are all topic focused, rather than being user-first.
Discoverability is important! And one of the limitations of search or tag based discoverability is that you're limited to finding things which you already know about. But it doesn't help you find new things that you don't know about! This doesn't mean that algorithmic discoverability is the only option, for example: you could find some way to map the user's interest spaces and search for unexplored or undiscovered nodes.
We've been talking a lot about this problem in nostr which can't be summarised in a quick HN comment but gathered some threads if you're really interested
https://asknostr.site/question/note1es989rjaccw82gpp705u462y... https://asknostr.site/question/note12dp9ewpngxejq8w9s6699k5z... https://asknostr.site/question/note1cp5cw366g7q9c2txvtrws0h7... https://asknostr.site/question/note1zqjk556quu6rvyetzvhdv7p3... https://asknostr.site/question/note1ss842g38wafwcfexd78gx0sc...
My guess is that the better the network becomes the more that specific content will take a backseat
AFIK Freenet is the only truly resilient anonymous network that lasted +20 years without literally a single successful attack by the state actor.
It's like RAID over the internet over encryption with global replication of data. Amazing project for PHD thesis lol
Imagine it this way, freenet needs electricity and servers to keep running. NOSTR messages can be printed in paper (handwritten even) and you'd still be able to verify it belongs to a specific person.
Basically freenet builds a network for communication (roads) but NOSTR is only about messages (cars) and doesn't really care about which road is using.
There is no centralization because there is no coordination. There is not even knowledge of what can be happening elsewhere because these messages might not even be using internet to be shared (e.g. radio or paper messages)
On the other side this is what makes it so powerful. You can download the full set of text messages from someone into your disk, that disk be found centuries later and digital archaeologists could easily read the contents because it is plain text.
So it isn't competing against freenet, it will use it very happily when available as option.
Nostr users, how does this differ in your experience from Mastodon? At first glance it seems like the same idea but with the extra ingredient of blockchain, I'm not sure what this adds though, anonymity?
You start by creating a pair of public/private keys. That is your "account" but is independent from everything else (e.g. not tied to any specific tool nor web service).
Then you create texts (notes) which are digitally signed with your private key. Using the public key anyone can verify it was you writing it and nobody else.
There is no blockchain in the process, these simple text messages get sent to a multiple number of relays (you can even host them yourself) and other people can read them very freely.
The main difference to mastodon is that exists no central server where someone registers an account and has the power to kick you out from the site (deplatform). This also solves the problem with the mastodon servers decides to stop the service and suddenly everything is gone.
On NOSTR your texts are your texts, and there are multiple copies everywhere (more than 1000 free relays at the momment).
So with Nostr - it's decentralised to the point that I'm (me the user) the individual point that's sending et, rather than Mastodon which is decentralised less such that there's multiple servers with many users.
So you can always download and read them easily. I'm an old person from the forum days and was really annoying that whenever a forum would go down, all the useful posts and info shared over the years would disappear too. With this kind of mechanism, it is easier to rescue that data.
NOSTR isn't just about twitter-clones, it can basically be used to replicate blogs, forum and chat apps that exchange messges.
On Nostr the server is just a dumb relay, it controls and owns nothing. User identities are proper public key pairs. If a relay goes evil, you can just use another one or use multiple at once to begin with, since the location of the messages is irrelevant, everything is held together by public keys.
Though, they did happily filter Macau casino spams flooding the system, so I wouldn't be so sure. Workload of posting to and receiving from dozen servers was also not trivial when I was trying it out, and architecture changes to reduce duplicates and/or syncing databases across hosts were actively discussed. I guess those works were never completed judging by comments here?
On Nostr your account is your signature so there is no such thing as creating an account on someone else's database. You push to multiple relays where people can follow you so even if relay operators ban you there will always be some relay willing to host your stuff.
Others already pointed out there is no blockchain involved other than using the same secp256k1 as Bitcoin for signatures.
The answer is trusted relays and Web of Trust
Long-time nostr user. My feeds are all spam free. Not to say there aren't any other problems :-)
But when it's just a new account with a few LLM-generated replies - how would trusted relay automatically detect the malicious intent?
So, for center-right users.
In the end the content I was seeing there was almost exclusively about Nostr and Crypto so it wasn't that interested to keep using it.
Example: Click "Join Nostr" on the nostr.com landing page and the first thing you see is "private" and "public" keys. Click next, you land on 4 example nostr clients. One is broken, the other one is filled with japanese content, the other one is a GitHub repository etc.
It's a cool project from a technical pov as the system is quite simple but you can not expect regular content to start popping up if the experience is only tailored towards motivated tech nerds.
I tried to improve that by making it easy to syndicate the content of Kirby (A blogging framework) to Nostr (https://github.com/dewey/kirby-posse/pull/9) but ran into many issues with how the various clients support and show images and lost interest along the way.
There’s also work on a Web of Trust in some clients that filters notes from people that don’t meet the WOT score. It’s essentially a weighted score based on who you follow and who they follow
Effectively, everything else is left to be implemented.
That probably explains try-everything-see-what-works approach to client apps?
People could spend $1, or $5, or $50 of compute for an identity, and others could use the cost of the identity as a filter. Having a $5 ID put on a blacklist would make poor behavior of any sort more costly.
Identity on nostr is just a public/private keypair.
You can enhance that identity by sending a kind0 (metadata) note with your name, bio, pictures. So i guess you're suggestion to add PoW for kind0 events which is covered by NIP13 too.
But although there's the technical components available to easily build such a thing, you're not aware of such a standard having been discussed, much less defined?
EDIT: To be clear, the idea for this would be a equivalent of the "blue check mark", but 1) you pay it yourself and 2) you can make it as cheap or expensive as you want.
One could argue that this is a deeply political thing, just not one that the usual suspects would care for. +1.
https://asknostr.site/question/note1534t79a5nk8ajcx8xqlsa3pr...
But it's still early and not all clients support it.
Then there is https://www.amethyst.social/ which is excellent because it brings out more of the potential of the platform.
Jumble.social is a good web client.
You and your 3 friends tend to do the same every time NOSTR is mentioned just because you use another platform. Please be honest and admit the affiliation.
Lots of people also like Primal. It's well polished and replicates Twitter/X reasonably well.
One of the most depressing things about the decentralised protocol space is the adversarial attitude to other projects - whether that's Nostr v. ActivityPub v. ATproto v Nostr, XMPP v. Matrix v. IRCv3 v. Deltachat, etc.
Imagine if the energy spent on positioning yourself relative to other open-source projects (who should be fellow travellers, if anything) was instead invested into competing with the centralised proprietary incumbents instead.
The same applies to open source as a whole, but it's depressing to see the same vibes leach into the literal tagline of the project.
GTalk first de-federated (weakening XMPP as a whole), then killed XMPP support completely. Reader effectively killed RSS for casual users. Email has been swallowed whole by the oligopoly of GMail+Yahoo+Outlook+iCloud+etc; spam is a real problem, so if you're self-hosting your email, you kinda expect to be blocked by default by the large networks.
Existing, corporate-backed efforts are "open-washing" their services.
Signal is supposed to be using an open protocol, but IIRC won't even let you join their network if you use an alt client.
Following Twitter's demise, Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet?
Actually open networks? Mastodon took off like crazy, but everyone tried to register on the "main", biggest instance - we got bamboozled so hard, we can't even comprehend what "decentralized" is actually supposed to mean.
ActivityPub as a protocol? Ted Unangst decided to build his own client from the spec, and was constantly running into Mastodonisms. <https://flak.tedunangst.com/search?q=activitypub>
Matrix? It has effectively one client (Element) that isn't a security disaster. <https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...>
Anything left, worth of anyone's attention?
Related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291
>Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech"
Under a tag that says “pro-censorship”.
I think I could maybe (?) imagine what they’re trying to say there, but “a lack of censorship is political and the presence of censorship is apolitical” sounds like something a person would say after a humongous bong rip of salvia or sustaining a life-threatening amount of blood loss
"An open protocol with a chance of working" = ?huh? "Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech"" = ???huh? "BEEP BOOP" ???wtf??
Please don't explain technical things as if you were talking to children. Explain them as if you were talking to a colleague sitting next to you. Talk to them as a person and as a professional.
That helped me understand the protocol better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w
This also helps understand the whole basic concept: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
If you are familiar with the IRC chat system, it is similar to IRC but with JSON messages and the ability to store & resend messages on the servers. Servers have to connect to each other and are free to each have their own policies.
You write an email (note/message) but instead of sending it to one server, you can send it to multiple servers of your choice. Each message is digitally signed with your keys and a time stamp, so you can verify that the identity is truly yours no matter where the message came from.
In my opinion is the most innovative way of communicating that I've seen in the last 20 years. There is no concept of server nor permanent location.
A relay can refuse to receive your messages, but they can't block your account because you can always write new notes, sign them and send to wherever people want to read your texts.
Imagine the case with Trump when he got blocked from Twitter. With a click of a button they have deplatformed him, with NOSTR he would have just continued writing and people would simply tune to another relay to keep reading his texts.
On top of that are other good developments. For example, file sharing also became decentralized. So files, images and other media can be sent to the relays and you mention them from the notes based on the file hash which is good save content when someone else hosting your texts and media decides to stop hosting.
Maybe you could explain what they're lacking?
As a user I don't want to see it and the submitter should be found and jailed for distributing it. Right now, it's hard to know where it even comes from since it can come from any of the relay you are connected to. Most apps do not show which relay the content originates from and honestly, what can you do?
I guess one solution is to only use paid relayes or heavily restricted ones that require invitation. But if that is the case, it kind of defeats the purpose of Nostr to begin with IMO.
I'm a long time user of NOSTR. When you enter the network through any of the main clients you will only see curated topics (trending). The WoT assures that the best content comes up.
If you feel that is wrong, please describe the steps to replicate such situation.
Step 1: In 2023, notice a crypto spam post on Mastodon with a weird account name.
Step 2: Look up what could have made that post, which was bridged from some other service.
Step 3: Set up a key, grab a client (I used a web client that deployed to Netlify's free tier).
Step 4: Follow some howtos, add relays, follow some accounts that repeat other accounts, try to figure out how discovery works.
Step 5: Start seeing really disturbing content.
Step 6: Delete all this stuff, and write it off in the same bucket as Freenet.
Step 7: Wait some years.
Step 8: Get called a liar on a web forum.
The easiest way to try NOSTR is using any of the common web platforms like https://primal.net or https://yakihonne.com/
Heck, you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years.
It is very unbelievable that you followed such a complicated process, even went to effort of deploying to a server (what?!?) and then somehow you see disturbing content without looking explicitly for it.
In case you are sincere, try it again using any of the common methods.
I did find the client I used; it was called "branle". I'm not in the habit of installing random shit on my iphone, thanks. Deploying things to Netlify is super easy, especially when the software is designed for it explicitly.
I will not be trying again, because as I said elsewhere in the thread, I don't actually care about nostr. Bluesky is working fine for me these days, and in the event that stops being the case, I won't be revisiting the one I already wrote off.
> you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years
Since feb 2023, apparently;)
I'm a user since January 2023, there were plenty of well-known web clients already available back at that time (e.g. coracle, amethyst, etc). You enter the clients, there is a WoT by default and shows the most proeminent conversations typically.
My experience was never as the one he describes. Not even at the beginning, as you can see for many others here on this same publication. Those few (3?) cases mentioning otherwise will never provide real details for their claims.
It's funny when people first say "nostr is just a protocol and completely not subject to censorship" then "there is no way a new user would encounter bad stuff on nostr". pick one?
The leftist media hates this website because they are doing an effective job. They are calling them all kinds of things.
When people are effective in tracking or publishing about pedos, there are always a lot of people saying you are the problem, not the pedos. I wonder why. There are a lot of pedos out there (just look at dumpens work it's kinda obvious) and they are of course using services that are anonymized and decentralized like any other.
Usually they are also very active online and attack people that try to cut their illegal actions online. Just look at my original post, it is downvoted. I just wanted some kind of action towards cutting pedo content and it is frowned upon by these people.
It is a grave and unfair accusation to associate NOSTR with such nefarious activities, that was the reason why so many protested against that labelling.
I don't know how the app I used works. I simply used the "Snort" app, connected to a few relays and did not use it for a couple of months. Then I came back and instantly saw CP freely shared. Instantly removed the app from the phone.
You can't say that it don't exist when people like me have seen it with their own set of eyes. This only makes protocols/projects like nostr set to fail, since regular people won't fucking care and just think of the nostr as something pedophiles are using, which they would not be incorrect in thinking at this moment.
I was betting on nostr in the beginning, I was running my own relay and started on a nostr client. But I gave up since clients came popping up everywhere so I didn't really have time to compete.
This happens because Japan always has disproportionately massive online presence with significantly better democratized attention engineering, and so content selections naturally mimic a crossing at Akihabara(despite it almost has been entirely superseded by Chinese tech cultural centers such as Shenzhen), not the Times Square(in NYC), which infuriates a lot of somewhat vocal people.
And, the reason why I must bring this up is that it is not merely it is inaccurate labeling, but it is also counter productive to not face it straight on. Such as, people would move away from pornography, making it less actually pornographic, which is more child-pornographic by the standards of people using this term in this manner, because that is what are considered LESS sexualized contents by its producers, which by the way exist in orders of millions in Japan and leaking out fast into Asia at large.
TLDR. Hating anime, fine. Just don't call it CP. Your words sound opposite of intent. That's what brought us here. So stop.
2. I have been to Japan several times, I know the difference between anime/hentai/lolita and stuff like that. This is not what I was experiencing.
3. I have nothing against pornography in general.
The issue is that when people bring up shit like this, we are not taken seriously and this hurts projects like nostr. It will never reach momentum if no steps are taken to prevent illegal material and dark shit like CP.
Calling me a liar makes me believe that you are intentionally are downplaying the experiences I and others have, which is helping pedophiles and similar people share their illegal content freely and without consequences. Why I do not know and you should seriously think about it and stop.
- the larger group says they see NONE of $thing,
- both are looking at the EXACT same thing.
-> The disagreement is in the definition of $thing.
It can't get clearer. How else would you explain it? Either you're lying(I guess not), or your definition is way off, or those secret underground organizations made some mistake and their secret Facebook group illegal content leaked out(no such thing on Nostr). By far the most likely scenario is that you're grouping from traffic cones to boxes of oranges to parrots in a forest into the exact same category of offensive contents by standards that nobody else could even understand.
The content (images, videos) itself is often quickly removed by blossom/media relay runners, especially if people report it and once they're cleared the spam notes are basically worthless to anyone because they're just dead links and spammy/abusive hashtags. Due to the hashtags is still quite easy to purge them.
I run my own relay and self reported it whenever one of these notes or uploads hit my systems. I built a quick shell script using AI to take care of almost all of that.
You're lying about me lying.
Is there a fundamental reason this wouldn't be true? Isn't it a place where people can anonymously share multimedia with minimal moderation?
In my experience even the most toy application exposed to the wider internet will face this issue.
I can't think of any clients which surface weird stuff (I've never seen any on nostr). I think to reach this situation a user must follow weird accounts and thus get their content - but then I can't see that as being nostr related, since someone could do that on the internet or other networks.
These people come back fuming hot with more derogatory, still indirect, descriptions, and cycle repeats. This has been a "problem" for social media for almost as long as I've been online.
The best thing is asking them to provide steps for replicating their claims, which they won't since it is the not the common user experience at all.
It's odd that they see "tons of" things that they can't describe beyond it belongs in the category, as if, just as if, actually characterizing it beyond making trust me remarks would lead to formation of broad consensus against them rather than against the contents.
What doesn't make sense is when the other party starts making stories just to tarnish other competing technologies. Just now the OP was asked to provide details to replicate his findings and those were indeed very "fuzzy" to say the least.
Nope. Most are born out of people not understanding how existing systems work and/or looking to get rich quick.
> an ever evolving technology fueled by those same critics.
No, it's mostly a self-perpetuating self-congratulatory hype machine busily re-inventing the systems they criticise
> What doesn't make sense is when the other party starts making stories just to tarnish other competing technologies.
What does make sense is the extremely fragile ego of crypto bros who can't stand any criticism towards their scams and hype, or the mention of any possible issues.
Crypto wasn't created as a "get rich quick". I say this because I was there since the early days and participated quite a bit on the related BBS. Back then you'd already make good money building bots for day trading on stocks, crypto was really about a type of currency that no government could touch.
Nowadays the large majority of users are desperate to make some money through pyramid schemes and pure speculation to "get rich quick" albeit they usually end up losing money. The small minority is doing what they've always done: looking at systems, criticizing systems and building their own solutions to those systems.
There is really good stuff being built. Not many do it, granted.
There is a very insightful thread on nostr about it -> https://asknostr.site/question/note1lhvk3kkmaev6qzlpzzns69vw...
The top voted answer was
> Relays have to become more whitelisted and less open, and clients have to implement outbox model and stop relying on 2 or 3 big relays, then we can just stop worrying about this.
Question. Do you prefer open or closed networks? I'm sure you are aware that the internet is an open network.
Its on the individual to block that kind of stuff.
These protocols seem to think that people actually want an alternative to what Instagram, Facebook, X etc. give them. They don't, we all just want the comfort of our own little bubble and a constant feeling of perceived fame. The rest, and all the talk about the protocol that underlines this is just fluff for nerds that will have zero impact in a society dominated by tech capital.
Do you wanna change social media? Try and find and effective way to bring them down.
> The most interesting feature of Mastodon is that by its nature it creates communities with shared values that grow in each of its servers. Or, should I say, that should be a feature if it actually worked like that. In fact these are not really communities, but a mashup of users that may share some interests among each other, but also have other interests and those other interests end up polluting the supposed "community" with things that do not interest the other users.
ie. they're complaining that federated communities are too diverse and multi-faceted, instead of being divided into nice little laser-focused grids of shared interests
I think the point of the quote is that Mastodon tries to be both a topic-centered community platform as well as a "everything goes" public social network like Twitter/X but the federation aspect is not true decentralization because you can easily lose your social graph/reach if some instance admin doesn't like you or your own instance gets #fediblocked.
Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?
But...Nostr (and other decentralised social media protocols) can offer things the existing platforms can not do: interoperability.
Imagine the people you follow to be the same from FB, to strava, to spotify... Imagine the content (signed notes) you make are available on different clients/platforms
That UX, perhaps for use-cases and projects we can't imagine today will be so much better than what we have today. I've tasted a little bit of just that switching between my Nostr twitter-like client (Primal/Yakihonne) and the Podcast app (foundtain.fm). It blew my mind.
This opens use cases the existing platforms can only dream about.
That's basically the point of nostr.