nostr

the protocol

nostr is a protocol for establishing pseudonymous identities and using them to cryptographically sign messages and pass them around via relays. it grew out of a small community of bitcoin/lightning devs, specifically fiatjaf. it was a reaction to the counter-party risks in using centralized social networks (twitter, facebook, etc) and the failings of other, semi-decentralized approaches (mastodon).

bitcoin familiarity helps when groking nostr. the identity portion of nostr is private/public key pair. similar to a bitcoin wallet where one uses one’s private key to sign a transaction and publish it into the network, one uses a nostr private key to sign an event and publish it to relays. there are various defined kinds of events, from profile information (name, about, url, avatar url, etc), to contact lists (follows), to notes (a short plain text message). the bitcoin network is peer to peer (distributed), where nodes will gossip transactions around to all the other nodes, but this is not the case with nostr. events stay where you publish them, relays only talk to clients, not other relays. this makes nostr decentralized, but not distributed. since it’s not peer-to-peer, one client doesn’t need to see the entire traffic of the network, or to query some distributed hash table a la IPFS, to find content across the network. this middle ground between centralized and distributed allows snappy response times yet prevents the domination of network lock-in.