Laurens Hof on Nostr: Understanding Nostr In the coming period I’ll be posting more regular about Nostr, ...
Understanding Nostr
In the coming period I’ll be posting more regular about Nostr, as there are some interesting developments happening with implications for the fediverse. This blog is meant as a reference and explainer of what Nostr actually is, to provide more context of the news and developments that are happening.
Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Through Relays) is an open-source protocol, that enables a decentralised social network. It draws inspiration from crypto with its focus on keys instead of usernames and passwords, and has a significant crypto community as well.
There are four parts to the Nostr network to understand: Clients, Relays, Public keys and Private keys:
Your client is an application that you log into. This can be a website or a mobile app, and anyone can create clients for the network. The client is where you post and read messages. It does not store any of your data.
The first time you visit a Nostr client, you create a public key and a private key. Together these effectively form your account.
Your Public key is your username, and it is a long hexadecimal string of random letters and numbers. You find other people on the network by searching for their public key.
Your Private key is your password. There is no authority that controls this, meaning that if you loose your private key, or someone else accesses your private key, your account is permanently compromised.
Relays are the back-end of the Nostr network, and are effectively a group of servers that store all the data of the network. Your account is not hosted on a specific relay, nor is your data. Instead when you create a post, you select which relays (plural) you send your information to. Sending your post to multiple relays creates redundancy, and is the core part of the censorship-resistance that people on the protocol want. Similarly, when you open a client, you get the data from most relays, in order to make sure you get all the posts of the people you follow.
Finally, some personal thoughts regarding Nostr. A social network that prioritises censorship resistance with little to no content moderation tools available for users is simply not safe to use for a large intersectionality of different groups of people. I write and care about decentralised social networks because I value that everyone can have a place on the internet that is safe for them to use, especially marginalised people. As such, I don’t feel that Nostr’s ideology aligns with mine, nor do I think that they set themselves up to escape the ‘nostr bitcoin bubble’, as Jack Dorsey calls it.
https://laurenshof.online/understanding-nostr/
In the coming period I’ll be posting more regular about Nostr, as there are some interesting developments happening with implications for the fediverse. This blog is meant as a reference and explainer of what Nostr actually is, to provide more context of the news and developments that are happening.
Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Through Relays) is an open-source protocol, that enables a decentralised social network. It draws inspiration from crypto with its focus on keys instead of usernames and passwords, and has a significant crypto community as well.
There are four parts to the Nostr network to understand: Clients, Relays, Public keys and Private keys:
Your client is an application that you log into. This can be a website or a mobile app, and anyone can create clients for the network. The client is where you post and read messages. It does not store any of your data.
The first time you visit a Nostr client, you create a public key and a private key. Together these effectively form your account.
Your Public key is your username, and it is a long hexadecimal string of random letters and numbers. You find other people on the network by searching for their public key.
Your Private key is your password. There is no authority that controls this, meaning that if you loose your private key, or someone else accesses your private key, your account is permanently compromised.
Relays are the back-end of the Nostr network, and are effectively a group of servers that store all the data of the network. Your account is not hosted on a specific relay, nor is your data. Instead when you create a post, you select which relays (plural) you send your information to. Sending your post to multiple relays creates redundancy, and is the core part of the censorship-resistance that people on the protocol want. Similarly, when you open a client, you get the data from most relays, in order to make sure you get all the posts of the people you follow.
Finally, some personal thoughts regarding Nostr. A social network that prioritises censorship resistance with little to no content moderation tools available for users is simply not safe to use for a large intersectionality of different groups of people. I write and care about decentralised social networks because I value that everyone can have a place on the internet that is safe for them to use, especially marginalised people. As such, I don’t feel that Nostr’s ideology aligns with mine, nor do I think that they set themselves up to escape the ‘nostr bitcoin bubble’, as Jack Dorsey calls it.
https://laurenshof.online/understanding-nostr/