Nostr Tech Weekly 12.31.2023
Happy New Year #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.
Let’s dive in!
Recent Upgrades to Nostr (AKA NIPs)
This week’s NIP summaries all revolve around the emerging DM and Group Chat patterns being developed to maximize security and privacy while still being Nostr-native.
1) NIP-44: Encrypted Payloads in Nostr
In Nostr, the most basic way to send encrypted DMs to specific users is via NIP-04. You use the public key of the recipient to encrypt the message and wrap it in a Nostr event which gets published to relays that the sender and receiver share. The receiver pulls the event down and decrypts it with their private key.
The patterns used in NIP-04 around the actual encryption are not ideal. NIP-04 does not minimize how much metadata is leaked when encrypting data to transmit via relays. NIP-04 encryption itself also isn’t as secure in the context of publishing these encrypted DMs to relays for any attacker to gather, helping them to guess a user’s private keys or decrypt their messages.
NIP-44 is a step change improvement in how Nostr apps can encrypt data to move more secure data around via Nostr. On its own it’s helpful but what’s being built on top of it could be game changing for Nostr.
The NIP-44 spec was recently audited by Cure53, a summary of which can be found by hodlbod (npub1jlr…ynqn) here.
So much time and effort from a large swath of the Nostr dev community went into getting this across the line. Nice work y’all. Thanks to paulmillr (npub10jc…3kag) for kicking it off and driving it home.
2) (Proposed) NIP-17: Private DMs and Group Chats
Building on NIP-44 as a foundation, this proposal’s goal is to coordinate a more private DM and Group Chat solution on Nostr than NIP-04.
NIP-17 utilizes (the also proposed) NIP–59: “Gift Wrapping” pattern for keeping the metadata of Nostr events private. In this case the gift wrapping will be for DMs and group chat messages.
If I understand correctly this could make it so that group chats can be entirely run using Nostr relays; so messages live on relays just like any other Nostr content, but neither the identity of the sender or receivers are leaked, and much of the other metadata is hidden as well.
Amethyst built their DMs based on this proposal since Vitor Pamplona (npub1gcx…nj5z) is the author of this NIP and Amethyst. So it’s working in the wild and is definitely an improvement on NIP-04.
3) (Proposed) NIP-43: Shared Key DM
This is an alternative to NIP-17 from arthurfranca. There are some flaws to NIP-17 (as outlined in this proposal):
- The receiver has no way to fetch just DMs
- The receiver has no way to fetch just Gift-wraps/DMs from a specific person
- The receiver needs to fetch messages from the “last read at” moment minus one week onwards
So this proposal is to use a shared key to encrypt and decrypt messages to avoid some of the problems above. This proposal has its own difficulties and is early in its development, but may be the foundation of an alternative method for managing private communications via Nostr.
Notable Projects
Flare 📽️
Flare is attempting a Nostr-powered Youtube. They’re even using new Nostr events to store views and comments and all sorts of other interactions that are part of a video platform.
From what I can tell the videos are not hosted on relays so they’re likely stored in an existing video storage service or by Flare itself. (which seems like a good call for the time being).
As even Rumble is starting to get pressure from governments and interest groups, a censorship resistant video platform seems more important than ever. Nice work zach (npub1zac…5dy5) !
Unleashed.Chat 💬
NVK (npub1az9…m8y8) recently shipped https://unleashed.chat which looks like a similar product to ChatGPT or HuggingFace but you can choose different open-source models to chat with.
The most amazing feature is that the models are able to query Nostr content allowing you to ask about events, conversations, or people on Nostr. It’s a struggle to aggregate all that is happening on Nostr and having this type of solution could be a game changer.
It’s also a Bitcoin-driven way to pay for such services as well. So if you’re interested in having a ChatGPT experience but paying in Bitcoin, this is your solution!
It seems like the future of the product will include unleashed.chat being used to develop and deploy Data Vending Machines as well. I look forward to seeing how this project takes shape!
Nostrrr 🌐
verbiricha (npub107j…ncxg) announced big updates to https://nostrrr.com which is a relay explorer and management app.
Tools such as Nostr.Watch are a great source of raw data on the relays that are currently publicly addressable in the Nostr-verse, but there’s other information that’s helpful for everyday users when determining which relays they should use.
Many applications are using relay list meta-data (NIP-65)[https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/65.md] when it comes to tracking a user’s preferred relays.
Nostrrr.com helps users find good relays and to manage their list of preferred relays. Having a dedicated web app for this helps so that Nostr clients don’t have to build a relay management interface if they don’t want to, but still help give users direction on where and how to manage their relays.
Nostr-based Patreon 💰
The folks over at Nostr.Wine seem to be at it again! They’ve recently shipped the ability to subscribe to creators using Nostr and Lightning payments. This could be the Patreon competitor that creators need to unshackle from the platforms that take such a large tax on their income. 💪
NDK Updates ⚒️
When developing Nostr clients there are some operations that you do all. the. time. And so PABLOF7z (npub1l2v…ajft) built a tool for Nostr devs that automates a lot of the tedious work in building Nostr clients.
He just announced an update that has a truckload of improvements in it including support for new Nostr operations from recently adopted NIPs. Thanks Pablo!
Latest conversations: Funding Nostr Development
Will over at Damus recently posted that funding for Damus currently won’t stretch beyond 2024. This sparked many conversations about the sustainability of Nostr development and how to fund it in perpetuity.
Many Nostr devs contribute for the joy of it. There are some funding sources that allow a few devs to work on Nostr full time, some are able to dedicate significant time to Nostr development because of their life situation, but many are just using their nights and weekends to contribute to the Nostr community.
The Nostr-verse will need ways to sustainably fund development if the current pace of progress is to be sustained (or even accelerated).
Zaps
Devs get zapped fairly often. Sometimes it’s directly from grateful users, other times it’s on posts about new or updated products. These are great examples of value-for-value, but the amount of sats being zapped aren’t currently valuable enough to sustainably fund all the dev work being done.
The Zap economy could sustain development in two situations:
a) Bitcoin’s value skyrockets and the sats that have been zapped so far will be valuable enough to pay the bills for devs and increase their current runway (I imagine folks will begin to zap in lower amounts in this future so it’s a temporary bump).
b) The number of Nostr users skyrockets so there’s more people zapping devs. The architecture of Nostr is such that as usage of Nostr grows, the amount of labor needed to sustain it doesn’t grow at the same rate. Therefore as usage scales, zapping may be able to sustainably fund development and support of Nostr apps.
These aren’t variables that anyone can control directly so it may not be wise to wait around for them to happen.
Private donations
Since Nostr aligns with their goals: Jack Dorsey, the Human Rights Foundation, and OpenSats have been fairly public about granting funds to prominent Nostr devs to help development along.
As far as I’ve heard in public areas, these funds are not recurring. So the funds will run out at some point. Donations are also a way for Nostr to be captured by the interests of donors. I am not sure if this can be a sustainable way to fund Nostr.
Sustainable businesses
The holy grail for Nostr development is the creation of sustainable businesses that rely on Nostr. Any business that’s profitable and requires Nostr to operate will be inclined to improve the Nostr protocol and contribute to the community (as more Nostr users will likely benefit them directly as well).
Nostr is still early in the technological development lifecycle so it’s not a surprise that it’s hard to name a profitable Nostr-based business. But this may be the clearest path to sustainable funding for Nostr and building the network effects that will drive wider Nostr adoption (and in turn more profitable businesses in the Nostr-verse).
The question is what app(s) can be built on Nostr that are significantly better than current products available in the world. Not just a little better, not just 10 times better for freedom-minded folks, but 10 times better for a large population of people that are already paying for something similar. It’s a tough question and if there were any easy answers I’m sure they’d be built and profitable already.
Luckily, Nostr has a few unique things that have enormous potential:
- Data Vending Machines: this is a concept I’ve never seen anywhere else and with the emergence of AI APIs (LLMs, text to speech, image generation, speech to text, translation, etc) there may be something unique we can build in Nostr around this.
- Nostr + Lightning: Patreon charges 8% from creators, platforms like Substack, Youtube, and Twitch take 10-60% of revenue from creators. This can likely be disrupted by the extremely low fee payments available via Lightning. If we could build a drop-in replacement for Patreon or Substack for creators that charged 1% instead of 8-10% that could really draw in sustainable business.
If we can create a few sustainable businesses on Nostr, I’ll bet we can keep advancing Nostr and make even more sustainable businesses possible. On and on until Nostr becomes an unstoppable juggernaut disrupting the legacy tech ecosystem.
If there’s something on Nostr that you’d pay a subscription for if only it had a few more features, reply to this thread. Hopefully we can discover a few businesses if we put our heads together.
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.