Nostr

It looks like my adventure with Nostr came to a sudden end, and I decided to write a couple of words about that experience.

The end

But let's start from the end: it is sudden because without any action from me, one day, I was cut off from publishing to relays I've been using so far. I'm stuck with 3 (earlier 6-7), but it looks like no one follows them, so while I can post, I ended up with posting to myself. And for that I have this account here.

It coincides with a version of Amethyst that did something about relays, but I have no idea if that's the reason or something else.

The beginning

And now let's get back to the beginning. I knew about Nostr for a while, but it was commonly known as Twitter for Nazis and built on a weird principle of cryptographic keys in lieu of logins (which makes sense if you realise that Bitcoiners did it), so I didn't even bother. Once Twitter itself became a Nazi bar, I started looking into other platforms, out of curiosity. I was setting SSH key in my work's Gitlab and recalled this social media based on keys and I decided to see it after all.

The main twist: there weren't any Nazis on Nostr. Or, more accurately: I haven't met any. There is overabundance of Bitcoiners which brings all the libertarianism and freedom of speech and even free access to guns, but that's probably the worst I saw there. Point in case: there is a lot of that. But if anything, everyone was overhyped about those topics and they would talk to you a lot (not that there's much sense in the long run, but the attitude is enthusiastic).

The principle

Nostr is organised in an interesting way: thanks to the cryptographic keys you have a consistent persona across all the relays (servers under other name), so you can move between them still as yourself. There are no usernames per se (there is a public key, but it's too long and too "codey" to function as a handle), so finding the right person can be tricky. There are hundreds of Jack Dorseys, who is probably the biggest celebrity there.

There is downside, though. The secret key is basically a password, so in case of losing it or getting stolen, you're done. Your persona is compromised forever. There is no recourse and no authority to reach out to. I think this could be a pain point for tech normies. So far, there are mostly Bitcoiners who understand the importance of protecting their keys. I think Nostr is relatively relaxed place precisely because it's a small group of peeps.

This is a common thing which I saw also on Mastodon/Fediverse and Bluesky: confusing smoothness due to relatively small user count with the protocol. "The protocol works," people will say. But not necessarily. I saw a couple of bot attacks where everyone would get spammed with gay porn gifs to any of their message. They managed to tackle it, but the protocol itself doesn't prevent that. In fact, this is considered the strongest point of the protocol: that the user cannot get banned per se. You can get rejected by a relay (what ended my adventure, actually), but you can send messages to other relays. In a way, that is the most decentralised approach to social media.

But again, it works because they're small. Relays are by the end of the days servers and servers are located in certain physical locations. It's security-by-obscurity due to the novelty of the approach.

Ah, and one more thing. Because it's a Bitcoin bastard, each post as well as a profile in general can be zapped. Zapping is nothing else than sending sats (1 sat = 1/100,000,000 of Bitcoin) to other users. In order to receive the money, you need to attach your Satoshi wallet which happens to be on Lightning Network layer, so you kind of have Bitcoin, but you cannot transfer it to a Bitcoin wallet because it's a different layer. In theory people can earn money on their posts/content. But only few get enough, so it's a curiosity at best.

The end: Reprise

But yeah, for reasons unrelated to what I was posting, I ended up limited to 3 relays (sometimes 2) and having no reactions to what I was publishing. So I'll focus on other endeavours.