Nostr Tech Weekly 11.5.2023

Happy Sunday #Nostr !

Here’s your #NostrTechWeekly newsletter brought to you by NostReport (npub19md…6vzk) written by gregwhite (npub1r3f…7ex2)

The #NostrTechWeekly is a weekly newsletter focused on the more technical happenings in the nostr-verse.

Before we dive in I want to congratulate the winners of the NostrAsia hackathon: eNuts, Shopstr, Zappdit, and the runner up Nosskey. Thanks for hacking away and building for the community. 😊

Let’s dive in!

Recent Upgrades to Nostr (AKA NIPs)

1) (Proposed) Updates to NIP 72: Moderated Communities

As mentioned in previous weeks, moderated communities as currently outlined in NIP 72 publish kind 1 events (tweet-like text notes), and they show up without context in clients like Damus, Amethyst, Snort, etc.

One solution to the lack of context is to make activities in moderated communities use event kinds other than 1 so that you have to be in a client specialized for moderated communities to see those activities.

There have been a few attempts to update NIP 72 to accomplish that goal, and this is the latest iteration. Unique to this proposal is the idea of community scoped user data, not just posts. For example you could follow people within the community within the scope of the community but not add them to your general following list for your whole Nostr account. They’d show up in your feed in the moderated community but not in your general feed.

There’s a lot of potential in moderated communities to become a core pillar of Nostr usage as the network scales, especially since the censorship and API management regimes of Reddit have gotten more restrictive. People want better and Nostr can be that solution.

Author: fiatjaf (npub180c…h6w6)

2) (Proposed) NIP 49: Nostr Wallet Auth

Having a Lightning Wallet connected to Nostr is a powerful tool for content monetization and nostr-based marketplaces. There’s a lot of great work done on Nostr Wallet Connect, but it all “hinges on having the user copy-paste a wallet connection URI into the app they wish to connect with. This can be a UX hurdle and often has the user handling sensitive information that they may not understand.”

“This NIP proposes a new protocol that solves these problems by having the wallet and app generate a NWC connection URI together. This URI is then used to connect the wallet and app.”

Making it easier for new users (especially those that are less technical) to participate in the new economy is fundamental to making Nostr the best place for content creators to make a living without middlemen and heavy handed platforms. 💪

Author: Carman 🏴‍☠ (npub1u8l…turz)

3) (Proposed) Updates to NIP 15: Nostr-based Marketplaces

This proposal expands the capabilities of Nostr-based Marketplaces to support auctions. Think about a Nostr-based eBay where users can post an item for sale by auction using a marketplace Nostr client.

The auction going live is a Nostr event, and users can publish bids as Nostr events, and when the auction is closed it’ll be determined by the bid event with the highest offering. Which anyone can verify. This is a very interesting way to make marketplaces more censorship resistant.

Author: ibz

Notable Projects

Much physical commerce is discovered by consumers via map apps. You go on Google or Apple Maps to find an art supply store near you, or coffee shops that are open at 2pm when you’re in a new city. These centralized solutions have dominated, but no more! Enter Yondar.

Yondar is a Nostr client that allows users to publish places on a map. This could be places of business or events, really anything that has a location.

True to Nostr form, people can also socially interact with these places: do a kind 1 comment in response to an upcoming event published on Yondar. Or someone could create a Nostr client for restaurant reviews and publish one of those in response to a place published via Yondar. The possibilities are endless 🤯.

Author(s): npub1arkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqrrh43w

WavLake 🎵

WavLake is a music player for web and mobile. It’s part Spotify music player and music discovery tool, part music monetization platform. They host the actual music files in their own cloud hosted system, but they publish Nostr events to represent the content that’s stored by WavLake, so other clients could help people discover music hosted and published via WavLake.

If musicians can get paid more for their music via solutions like WavLake, they will start using Nostr purely for selfish monetary reasons. This could be the start of purple-pilling that particular artistic community.

P.S. I listened to WavLake Radio while writing this, it was nice writing music.

Authors: based on the linked Github repo it’s JoshR (npub1j0s…g9a7) and blastshielddown

Rabble (npub1wmr…g240) gave a presentation at NostrAsia about making Nostr more accessible for normies. One of the items that was announced was the implementation of opt-in content moderation in his Nostr client nos.social.

They now support content warnings set by users publishing content, reporting content with various tags, as well as the ability for users to opt-in to moderation that changes their feed based on what they want to filter out.

People that don’t want moderation don’t need to use it, but I applaud nos.social’s work to develop these tools and patterns so that people have the choice to moderate their own feed.

Latest conversations: Interoperability

NostrAsia really highlighted the superpowers of Nostr and one of the foremost is interoperability. PABLOF7z (npub1l2v…ajft) gave a great talk about this topic and explained NIP 31 and NIP 89.

In summary, imagine there’s a Nostr client for movie reviews and they publish the review in a specific structure with Kind 12345678. Most Nostr clients will see that event but won’t know how to display that content or help users interact with it.

If clients adopt NIPs 31 and 89 then Nostr events will have an “alt” tag and a way to find a suggested app to handle that type of Nostr content. The alt tag helps clients display something to the user and the suggested app handler helps the client indicate to the user how to interact with that content more natively.

Maximum interoperability is useful in allowing Nostr to grow without centralizing. We can all experiment and build and all efforts still support the usage of the Nostr ecosystem in general.

Kind 1 clients as gateways to the Nostr app ecosystem

This interoperable future points to a framework where Kind 1 clients (Damus, Amethyst, Snort, Primal, etc) are the entrypoint or gateway to the Nostr ecosystem. Kind 1 clients are the core social use case and the foundation of most social interaction and could be amazing standalone apps and businesses, but Nostr makes them something more.

People will post Kind 1 notes referencing all kinds of Nostr events: music published via WavLake or Stemstr, places shared via Yondar, recipes created on Nostr.Cooking, etc. Clients will display some context on what the comment is on (music, place, video, recipe, etc) and then help the user find the right plugin/app/website to use to interact with that content natively.

This makes the Kind 1 clients the purple pill. This is only possible because of the unique interoperability capabilities of Nostr.

Interoperability with non-Nostr services

Even more amazing about Nostr is that it’s fairly easy to make the network interoperable with services outside the Nostr-verse. We already have pretty good bridges to ActivityPub-based systems like Mastadon as well as Twitter (with Exit). That reduces the switching cost for people that want to explore Nostr and eventually make the switch.

Even within Nostr-verse we have services like nostr.build that provide services in a way that doesn’t lock users in. Nostr.build provides file hosting services and because they follow NIP 96, there’s a standard way for clients to interact with nostr.build as a user’s preferred file storage provider for pictures and videos. It is easy for users to switch providers and clients can easily pick up the change. Efforts like NIP 96 makes file storage much more interoperable across the Nostr-verse without centralization.

Continuing to build solutions that allow users to have freedom AND a great experience will make Nostr the best game in town.

Don’t reinvent the wheel: use ISO when possible

I’m not sure if every developer knows this, but there’s an International Standards Organization (ISO) that has done a ton of work to promote standards of all kinds. The most common one developers have all used is the ISO datetime format. No matter what language or database you’re using, you’re likely representing timezone aware datetimes in the ISO format so that you can pass that data around safely.

ISO has codified standards for everything : how to store medical history, how to interact with USB, even stuff as obscure as how to represent data around holograms

Nostr is doing a lot of work to define structure to data that will be stored as Nostr events. We’re essentially inventing standards for social-related data of all kinds.

There are some things we’re building support for in Nostr, and I will encourage folks to see if there’s an ISO standard to follow first. It may save you a ton of time and brain power. On top of that, adopting ISO standards makes Nostr more compatible with future development that we can’t even imagine yet.

Rita Cartoon

Invest in interoperability to support the cause

The Nostr-verse is under construction and the best time to plan for interoperability is before the building is done. Devs have done a great job retaining interoperability as a cambrian explosion of Nostr development has taken place. I hope we can continue to invest in interoperability because it may just be the thing that makes Nostr able to take on the giants of Big Tech when the time is right.

Until next time 🫡

If you want to see something highlighted, if we missed anything, or if you’re building something we didn’t post about, let us know. DMs welcome at NostReport (npub19md…6vzk)

Stay Classy, Nostr.