What is Nostr?
sebastix / Sebastian
npub1qe3…zefe
2024-11-01 22:32:51

1 year later, why Nostr still resonates

One year ago I wrote the article Why Nostr resonates in Dutch and English after I visited the Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023 conference and the Nostrdam event. It got published at bitcoinfocus.nl (translated in Dutch). The main reason why I wrote that piece is that I felt that my gut feeling was tellinng me that Nostr is going to change many things on the web.

After the article was published, one of the first things I did was setting up this page on my website: https://sebastix.nl/nostr-research-and-development. The page contains this section (which I updated on 31-10-2024):

One metric I would like to highlight is the number of repositories on Github. Compared to a year ago, there are already more than 1130 repositories now on Github tagged with Nostr. Let’s compare this number to other social media protocols and decentralized platforms (24-10-2024):

  • Fediverse: 522
  • ATProto: 159
  • Scuttlebot: 49
  • Farcaster: 202
  • Mastodon: 1407
  • ActivityPub: 444

Nostr is growing. FYI there are many Nostr repositories not hosted on Github, so the total number of Nostr reposities is higher. I know that many devs are using their own Git servers to host it. We’re even capable of setting up Nostr native Git repositories (for example, see https://gitworkshop.dev/repos). Eventually, Nostr will make Github (and other platforms) absolute.

Let me continue summarizing my personal Nostr highlights of last year.

Organising Nostr meetups


This is me playing around with the NostrDebug tool showing how you can query data from Nostr relays. Jurjen is standing behind me. He is one of the people I’ve met this year who I’m sure I will have a long-term friendship with.

OpenSats grant for Nostr-PHP



In December 2023 I submitted my application for a OpenSats grant for the further development of the Nostr-PHP helper library. After some months I finally got the message that my application was approved… When I got the message I was really stoked and excited. It’s a great form of appreciation for the work I had done so far and with this grant I get the opportunity to take the work to another higher level. So please check out the work done for so far:

Meeting Dries


One of my goosebumps moments I had in 2022 when I saw that the founder and tech lead of Drupal Dries Buytaert posted ‘Nostr, love at first sight’ on his blog. These types of moments are very rare moment where two different worlds merge where I wouldn’t expect it. Later on I noticed that Dries would come to the yearly Dutch Drupal event. For me this was a perfect opportunity to meet him in person and have some Nostr talks. I admire the work he is doing for Drupal and the community. I hope we can bridge Nostr stuff in some way to Drupal. In general this applies for any FOSS project out there.
Here is my recap of that Drupal event.

Attending Nostriga


A conference where history is made and written. I felt it immediately at the first sessions I attended. I will never forget the days I had at Nostriga. I don’t have the words to describe what it brought to me.

I also pushed myself out of my comfort zone by giving a keynote called ‘POSSE with Nostr - how we pivot away from API’s with one of Nostr superpowers’. I’m not sure if this is something I would do again, but I’ve learned a lot from it.
You can find the presentation here. It is recorded, but I’m not sure if and when it gets published.

Nostr billboard advertisement

This advertisment was shown on a billboard beside the A58 highway in The Netherlands from September 2nd till September 16th 2024. You can find all the assets and more footage of the billboard ad here: https://gitlab.com/sebastix-group/nostr/nostr-ads. My goal was to set an example of how we could promote Nostr in more traditional ways and inspire others to do the same. In Brazil a fundraiser was achieved to do something similar there: https://geyser.fund/project/nostrifybrazil.

Volunteering at Nostr booths growNostr

Bitcoin Amsterdam 2024

This was such a great motivating experience. Attending as a volunteer at the Nostr booth during the Bitcoin Amsterdam 2024 conference. Please read my note with all the lessons I learned here.

The other stuff

  • The Nostr related blog articles I wrote past year:
  • https://ccns.nostrver.se
    CCNS stands for Community Curated Nostr Stuff. At the end of 2023 I started to build this project. I forked an existing Drupal project of mine (https://cchs.social) to create a link aggregation website inspired by stacker.news. At the beginning of 2024 I also joined the TopBuilder 2024 contest which was a productive period getting to know new people in the Bitcoin and Nostr space.
  • https://nuxstr.nostrver.se
    PHP is not my only language I use to build stuff. As a fullstack webdeveloper I also work with Javascript. Many Nostr clients are made with Javascript frameworks or other more client-side focused tools. Vuejs is currently my Javascript framework I’m the most convenient with. With Vuejs I started to tinker around with Nuxt combined with NDK and so I created a starter template for Vue / Nuxt developers.
  • ZapLamp)
    This is a neat DIY package from LNbits. Powered by an Arduino ESP32 dev board it was running a 24⁄7 livestream on zap.stream at my office. It flashes when you send a zap to the npub of the ZapLamp.
  • https://nosto.re
    Since the beginning when the Blossom spec was published by @hzrd49 and @StuartBowman I immediately took the opportunity to tinker with it. I’m also running a relay for transmitting Blossom Nostr events wss://relay.nosto.re.
  • Relays I maintain
    I really enjoy to tinker with different relays implementations. Relays are the fundamental base layer to let Nostr work.

I’m still sharing my contributions on https://nostrver.se/ where I publish my weekly Nostr related stuff I worked on. This website is built with Drupal where I use the Nostr Simple Publish and Nostr long-form content NIP-23 modules to crosspost the notes and long-form content to the Nostr network (like this piece of content you’re reading).

POSSE

The Nostr is the people

Just like the web, the web is people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCgvkslCzTo

the people on nostr are some of the smartest and coolest i’ve ever got to know. who cares if it doesn’t take over the world. It’s done more than i could ever ask for. - @jb55

Here are some Nostriches who I’m happy to have met and who influenced my journey in Nostr in a positive way.

  • Jurjen
  • Bitpopart
  • Arjen
  • Jeroen
  • Alex Gleason
  • Arnold Lubach
  • Nathan Day
  • Constant
  • fiatjaf
  • Sync

Coming year

Generally I will continue doing what I’ve done last year. Besides the time I spent on Nostr stuff, I’m also very busy with Drupal related work for my customers. I hope I can get the opportunity to work on a paid client project related to Nostr. It will be even better when I can combine my Drupal expertise with Nostr for projects paid by customers.

Building a new Nostr application

When I look at my Nostr backlog where I just put everything in with ideas and notes, there are quite some interesting concepts there for building new Nostr applications. Filtering out, I think these three are the most exciting ones:

  • nEcho, a micro app for optimizing your reach via Nostr (NIP-65)
  • Nostrides.cc platform where you can share Nostr activity events (NIP-113)
  • A child-friendly video web app with parent-curated content (NIP-71)

Nostr & Drupal

When working out a new idea for a Nostr client, I’m trying to combine my expertises into one solution. That’s why I also build and maintain some Nostr contrib modules for Drupal.

One of my (very) ambitious goals is to build a Drupal powered Nostr (website) package with the following main features:

  • Able to login into Drupal with your Nostr keypair
  • Cross-post content to the Nostr network
  • Fetch your Nostr content from the Nostr content
  • Serve as a content management system (CMS) for your Nostr events
  • Serve as a framework to build a hybrid Nostr web application
  • Run and maintain a Nostr relay with custom policies
  • Usable as a feature rich progressive web app
  • Use it as a remote signer

These are just some random ideas as my Nostr + Drupal backlog is way longer than this.

Nostr-PHP

With all the newly added and continues being updated NIPs in the protocol, this helper library will never be finished. As the sole maintainer of this library I would like to invite others to join as a maintainer or just be a contributor to the library. PHP is big on the web, but there are not many PHP developers active yet using Nostr. Also PHP as a programming language is really pushing forward keeping up with the latest innovations.

Grow Nostr outside the Bitcoin community

We are working out a submission to host a Nostr stand at FOSDEM 2025. If approved, it will be the first time (as far as I know) that Nostr could be present at a conference outside the context of Bitcoin. The audience at FOSDEM is mostly technical oriented, so I’m really curious what type of feedback we will receive.

Let’s finish this article with some random Nostr photos from last year. Cheers!

Nostriches Explaining Nostr ZapLamp
With Nathan Day
Alex Gleason

Author Public Key
npub1qe3e5wrvnsgpggtkytxteaqfprz0rgxr8c3l34kk3a9t7e2l3acslezefe