That's been my belief since day one, everyone is going to fight over their coin of choice, do it here versus on X. Plus its a natural expansion: bitcoin twitter, to cryptocurrency users as a whole, to tech libertarian types, and out from there. We haven't had any luck attracting a specific niche to jump on en masse, so we need small evolutions

it's extremely easy to build this

I'm suprised no one has forked an existing client and just added it. I mean I guess the Monero folks had Garnet but it died years ago. The other thing I noticed is that they don't seem to have a nice standard. I've been curious how the other clients handle things, if you look at the meta data of my account, theres like 3 different times a monero address appears because they dont have a standard of how to do their equivalent of zaps. I'm coding illiterate, and I'm really not into the other coins, so its not going to be me, but I've always been curious about non-bitcoin users here, because thats a signal of growth for me.

Bitcoin twitter would be real mad if they could read this

I just use the payto:// addresses NIP, since I then don't need to make a client for each different sort of payment. Just need a handler for each one.

I think fixing how hard it is to even find accounts to follow on here would have a significant impact. I see the same 20 posts in my feed all day long.

Yes, we should do this. Specially now that Farcaster is dead maybe they will be interested. The problem is that I have no idea of how their payment systems work.

More crypto bro’s? I don’t think that’s the kind of marketing Nostr needs There are many devs (which are not bitcoiners) who see the benefits of using private keys, but they are not united in a way

What client are you using and what feed is causing that?

Good point, but all these "devs" who are into "decentralization" and were supposed to like Nostr apparently don't give a shit about it (because their entire discourse is a lie, they don't really care about technology, they only care about what their leftist friends think of them, see for example that guy who wrote "protocols, not platforms" and is literally being paid by a platform now) and are happy with Bluesky and their lies, so who else can we target? We can't be serious about attracting florists, musicians, serial entrepreneurs, biologists, mathematicians or milkshake producers, right? The only other demographic I can think about are people into politics that lean more to the right, but most of these seem to in love with Elon Musk still. We're left with the conspiracy theorists who see the threat of X and Musk dominance, like Whitney Webb and Ian Carroll joined Nostr and James Corbett mentioned it multiple times, none of them made the jump into Nostr that we needed. Anyway, these are the big guns of the movement as far as I know, so it's understandable that they didn't, but there might be smaller players who will be more interested immediately. I guess there is the big avenue of people who just want to make a group with their friends, or with other florists, and we're already moving in that direction already with NIP-29 groups and growing support for topic, theme, niche and semi-closed relays. I'm happy about it. Nothing prevents us from moving into multiple directions at once though.

So as an idiot, am I reading this right that the nip just specifies where they put a specific line involving payment type, and then then all clients know to look for that line and handle the payments as needed? So someone might put "litecoin" as a type, and then if the client handled litecoin payments it would do that based on whatever spec the litecoin nostr folks came up with?

Well, you really can't attract florists, musicians, serial entrepreneurs, biologists, mathematicians or milkshake producers if "you" think you are too cool to post your app on playstore and app store. And by you I don't mean you personally

You are a wizard harry, a wub wub wub wizard. What makes it difficult for you to see fresh new things? Al you need to do is cast the right spells🧙‍♂

Surprised this hasn’t happened yet. Nobody wants to zap some idgafs? View quoted note →

I mean nostr would be much cooler if people didn't post all time about how cool nostr is, lecturing us not to like but to zap instead etc etc

Also, maybe you like this profile @♡°˖✧ ˚ claire ˚ ✧˖°♡

ur profile won't load and idk who u r but ty🫶

Yeah. Having a standard address also means that you can put the payment link anywhere, not just in some specific kind or tag, as it's an atomic format like wss:// https:// nostr: and etc. So, if someone says, hey, your whatever-address in your profile isn't working, you can just reply with: oh, then use my payto://... address and they would click it and the handler would open. And those addresses could be to anything: Lightning, Bitcoin on-chain, Monero, Doge, but also PayPal, MasterCard, bank account. Anything.

nvm it loaded lmao ty doctor constant (ﾉ≧ڡ≦)

Wen Fartcoin zaps

I think there’s a small trap in the premise. We keep trying to think in terms of demographics to target, as if Nostr just needs to find the “right tribe” — ideological devs, political dissidents, conspiracy researchers, rebellious entrepreneurs. But most living technologies don’t grow that way. They grow when they become useful to someone in a simple, concrete way. The devs who talked about decentralization and then happily moved to Bluesky don’t surprise me much. In many cases it was never really a technical position — it was a social one. When the social pressure shifts, they shift with it. It happens all the time. It’s probably not worth building strategy around people who follow the wind. At the same time, I don’t think it’s absurd at all to think about florists, musicians, biologists, or even milkshake producers. In a strange way they’re actually more interesting than ideological devs — because they don’t care about the ideology. If a tool lets them talk to their customers, their community, or a handful of trusted peers without being at the mercy of a platform, they’ll use it. That’s enough. People don’t adopt protocols because they love protocols. They adopt them because they solve a small but real problem. That’s why the direction of groups, niches, topic-based or semi-closed relays feels much more fertile than any kind of cultural battle. Small spaces where people recognize each other: a circle of local musicians, a research community, an art collective, a group of friends. If it works there, it slowly takes root. The big names — Webb, Corbett, and others in that sphere — can bring attention, but attention rarely builds ecosystems. Ecosystems are built by small communities that stay. So yes, there’s nothing wrong with exploring multiple directions at once. But if I had to bet on one path, it wouldn’t be an ideological tribe. It would be something much simpler: small groups of people who find a place to talk to each other… and eventually realize that the place doesn’t belong to anyone.

Many people are fake and talk decentralization only for social / professional points. All they really care about is monetization. Does it make me money? No? I won’t be bothered.

One of these days Google is going to shoot themselves in the foot with the play store or GitHub is going to enshittify enough, etc. And zapstore or git on nostr is going to explode.

Lo scrivo anche in italiano per i miei connazionali: Secondo me c’è una piccola trappola nella premessa. Continuiamo a pensare in termini di demografie da colpire, come se Nostr dovesse trovare la “tribù giusta” — i dev ideologici, i dissidenti politici, i ricercatori del complotto, gli imprenditori ribelli. Ma quasi nessuna tecnologia viva cresce così. Cresce quando diventa utile a qualcuno in modo semplice e concreto. I dev che parlavano di decentralizzazione e poi si sono spostati tranquillamente su Bluesky non mi sorprendono molto. In molti casi non è mai stata davvero una posizione tecnica — era una posizione sociale. Quando cambia il vento sociale, cambiano anche loro. Succede continuamente. Probabilmente non vale la pena costruire strategie intorno a persone che seguono il vento. Allo stesso tempo non credo affatto che sia assurdo pensare a fioristi, musicisti, biologi o perfino produttori di milkshake. In un certo senso sono molto più interessanti dei dev ideologici — proprio perché non gliene importa nulla dell’ideologia. Se uno strumento permette loro di parlare con i clienti, con la propria comunità o con un piccolo gruppo di persone fidate senza essere alla mercé di una piattaforma, allora lo usano. Questo basta. Le persone non adottano i protocolli perché amano i protocolli. Li adottano quando risolvono un problema piccolo ma reale. Per questo la direzione dei gruppi, delle nicchie, dei relay tematici o semi-chiusi mi sembra molto più fertile di qualsiasi battaglia culturale. Piccoli spazi dove le persone si riconoscono: un gruppo di musicisti locali, una comunità di ricerca, un collettivo artistico, un gruppo di amici. Se funziona lì, lentamente mette radici. I grandi nomi — Webb, Corbett e altri in quella sfera — possono portare attenzione, ma l’attenzione raramente costruisce ecosistemi. Gli ecosistemi li costruiscono le piccole comunità che restano. Quindi sì, nulla vieta di muoversi in più direzioni allo stesso tempo. Ma se dovessi scommettere su una sola strada, non sarebbe una tribù ideologica. Sarebbe qualcosa di molto più semplice: piccoli gruppi di persone che trovano un posto dove parlare tra loro… e che a un certo punto si accorgono che quel posto non appartiene a nessuno.

I think we need small and unique apps that don’t mention anything about nostr and just work. Kind of like Bitchat but many more that are not limited to a local area. It’s hard to know what they’ll be without fking around and finding out.

Two issues related to Wisp. 1. You reposted ~25 minutes ago fiatjaf's reply. I can't see it from Wisp. 2. If you repost somebody whom I don't follow, then I see that post every time somebody reposts it, even if I follow none of those who repost it.

yes I see these bugs too, fix soon, but not today 🙏🙏 tq for the report

Don't take anything personally, I'm trying to be helpful because I genuinely enjoy your app, even tho I have zero technical skills. Take care!

have patience. The important thing with nostr is not happening in public, but in private. The public part is for posting memes and have a voice.

💯 Private + non-KYC

The 'problem' I think is that Nostr is competing with a huge network effect of the established platforms. You have to have a particular mindset to come here, or be forced here. Honestly, the reality is that this will remain a 'novelty' until it isn't. There is very little ground in between IMO.

Network effects are strong so there is no choice but to be patient. As with Bitcoin, people will come for ideological reasons or when they have no other choice.

Monero guys would love it

Maybe pick the easiest L2 for ETH even if it sucks compared to lightning

I see that too tbh thats the only major bug ive seen otherwise so smooth

Sup Moid. You came out of hibernation to post this downer reply? 😔 You're prob right though...well, AI stuff might prove to be black swan rocket fuel for nostr adoption 🤔

Hahha. Sorry Yodl. I reached a conclusion a while ago - there were better things to put my focus toward. I do pop in periodically, but not to post. I was spending too much time reading words that I didn't align with, so moved to other things. How have you been bro?

I find myself thinking those thoughts a bit lately, ngl. So, good for you! As long as you pop in on occasion, I guess I'm cool with that. Been well. Got a lot of things I wanna/should do, that I will likey frequent nostr a tad less, at least socially. Cheers

People should be able to pay relays any way they want. Stripe with fiat even.

Right there with you

Nooo, everyone else needs to stay just as active so that there's a rich ecosystem to return to when I deign to return! Actually, this gives me an idea...maybe we can all agree to like two days a week when we post more 🤔

Primal and Damus. Even going between the two apps it’s the exact same thing from the 10 people I’ve found to follow.

Agreed. It’s so cringe

They would have to come up with their own means to zap/tip posts though right, these would just be profile payments?

Why devs? 🧐

Well... Consider that Nostr is not really decentralized. The relay model means some large hub and many relays unseen by most, so actual substantial centralization without imposing it formally. Nostr is awesome for many reasons, but it's not really decentralized. Largely ignoring both the ZeroNet failure lesson, the Usenet success lesson and the eMule/KAD model. If this not change Nostr will remain marginal unfortunately.

Do it. Charge a zap toll. Stack. ?

Yes, profile based, unless they add them to their event tags or content.

Not a bad idea

Contento di rispondere in Italiano :) pesa questo: serve, in una fase iniziale, pesa bene questo inciso, puntare al bipede medio, quello che di IT sa nulla, installa l'app se il nome/lo screenshot lo convince e in 5" di prova decide se restare o mollare? Per me no. I dev correnti però puntano a questa demografia, più o meno consapevolmente. Per me in una fase iniziale serve prendere "il linuxaro medio", il nerd, che ha un serverino domestico, spesso un modesto raspi o due, che sa qualcosa ma non oltre quel qualcosa, quindi qualcuno che vuole un'app unica, go get-abile, cargo build-abile, pip-abile, o già nei pacchetti della distro di turno, unica e sola, che faccia tutto. Non vuole scegliere un relay, scegliere un client, trovare che non c'è 'no straccio di documentazione su come configurare opportunamente il relay, che qui manca un server blossom, che li manca un filtraggio dello spam, che laggiù manca il supporto alla chat, ... poi vedere che gli serve coturn per poter aver l'audio, ... vuole un singolo pacchetto, che sia app desktop o webapp da servire via NGINX non importa, ma che sia unico e faccia tutto, client, relay, server blossom, chat, ICE/TURN/STUN ecc ecc ecc. Se c'è questo e vede che è carino, visivamente va bene come andrebbe XMPP/Matrix, ma qui si fa anche il blogghino personale, c'è pure la possibilità di far un ecommerce banale con gli zap, ma nessun obbligo di farlo beh allora quel singolo nerd che prova si tira dietro alcuni amici ed alcuni parenti e dopo un po' questi su scala raggiungono la massa critica necessaria a diventare anche pronti per l'utente-utonto. Questo manca. Non solo in termini software ma proprio in termini di comprensione e interesse da parte dei dev. Nostr è pieno di progetti confezionati al volo e abbandonati, gente cordiale, che ha voglia di fare, ma non ha una visione d'insieme ed è abituata al modello commerciale delle megacorps dove non c'è il problema del lancio di qualcosa perché sono le PR che lo fanno, non i dev. Dove c'è un modello di rapporto "col cliente" ben diverso. Cosa fa di buono Nostr? - ha capito che il punto è comunicare testo, non html, testo semplice, al massimo MD o org-mode, tutto qui, il grosso della nostra informazione è testo dalle leggi agli sms passando per libri, giornali e post. Nostr offre comunicazione testuale come la offriva Usenet, ma con una UI assai più libera e accattivante. Come Usenet supporta anche contenuti multimediali, in maniera più efficiente dei gruppi binari. Supporta post brevi, cui manca una UI stile Lemmy/Reddit per aver successo, la rubrica distribuita modello Facebook/LinkedIn (questa c'è già), post lunghi (blog/siti personali), stanno più o meno arrivando le chat con anche audio e video - ha anche un modello economico, non valido per i relay, valido per fare un web economico Cosa manca: - l'app unica, che sia client+server e che vuoi via Tor, vuoi via altro come ZeroNet, la vecchia rete KAD/eMule, ... permetta visibilità anche al nerd medio senza un nome a dominio, dietro NAT - un design coerente di questa con un minimo di documentazione per il setup e l'uso Senza questi non si andrà lontano. Ai margini il modello di decentralizzazione dei relay sovrani finisce come vuole la teoria delle reti in pochi grandi hub, quindi la decentralizzazione teorica salta, splittare e spargere l'informazione come faceva KAD/DHT in genere, IPFS, lasciando agli utenti giusto la scelta di pinnare contenuti "questi li vogliamo interi sul nostro ferro" e bannarne alcuni marcati esplicitamente "questi non li vogliamo" mentre il resto è solo una quantità massima di storage e banda a disposizione della rete, beh, senza questo non è vera decentralizzazione, si finisce con pochi giganti e tanti relay ignoti.

You may be thinking that everybody only reads from some hardcoded relays but that's just a weirdly common misunderstanding.

Maybe would be much cooler if people didn't complain about what other people in Nostr are talking about all the time. (I'm just kidding, the drama at least gives us something to talk about.)

Who are these people who got actively managed out by Nostr insiders? I am not aware of any of that occurring. What good contributions got ignored? I'm sure this has happened, it is not possible to prevent it entirely, but I am not aware of any specific case or any movement for ostracizing contributors of any type.

Milkshake producers need to recharge so you won't get any milkshake in this yard

Also, fuck em, weoutchea

Grazie mille! È bello poter leggere ogni tanto un po' di italiano. Tra l'altro credo che di italiani ce ne siano tanti, solo che scrivono tutti in inglese come il sottoscritto.

My friend @npub1p0lt...jck7 just built this:

ALPH Zaps — Nostr × Alephium

Turns out every npub is also an alephium wallet and vive-versa by definition haha! It's an interesting shitcoin, although none of this is financial advice yadiyadi... anyways, hopefully some of the alephium.org people might start showing up!

You will quickly realize that any long term shitcoiners are shitty people inside and out. Net negative. If people need nostr for something then that will be more organic growth. If they don't, why try to sell them on it? That's like hiring for DEI, or printing fiat money... Dilution, inflation, artificial growth, all cause more unintended consequences than they solve for. Let's just keep working on making the best software possible, and keeping it free of middlemen and rentseekers.

I've been telling Shitcoiners to build their NFT Ordinals bullshit on Nostr for three years. I think this is a good idea for them. *ducks*

I started off my journey as a shitcoiner in 2017 too 🤷 took me years to figure it out

So did I. Why I specified "long term" shitcoiners. Some people experience heroes' journey. People who stay shitcoiners long term willingly choose zerosum games over a positive sum winning strategy. They often justify it as: "I know bitcoin is the money and can make the world better, but people are still gonna pump me 10x if I can just hold this bag of shit and convince other people it's worth something."

Monero guys are already here

The most rabid Bitcoin maximalists are those that started out as (rightfully burnt) shitcoiners. Funny enough those type of people have never had the time to develop the skill to tell apart actually valuable projects like Monero from the rest. It's a mindset issue. What made you discover cryptos late in 2017 is not fundamentals but fiat greed. After their burn they adjusted strategies to its opposite, hoping that that will be the obvious right answer. You can not fix a mindset with a new strategy. You can ignore people like me all you want. I know plenty of OGs from early on. It's super rare to find a maxi. Why? Because maximalism was a psyop. When Austrian economics tells you about the importance of currency competition and you think one coin to rule them all is the natural outcome, all this tells us is that you still have not understood a thing.

Maybe you could try Nostur or Yakihonne? They both have a lot of different exploration methods built into their apps, where you can access different feeds. The 10 people will still be there in your follow list, but you'll have a lot more options on where to look for other content & people to follow.

I was a shitcoiner long before you even heard about Bitcoin. Back in the day there was no hate between projects (except for Ripple). This started with the block size war and rightfully escalated during the ICO craze which was "crypto" looking for a new meaning after Bitcoin de-adopton started in early 2017 with the delistings of Microsoft, Steam, Expedia,....

If we only keep talking about how cool Bitcoin and Nostr are, we won’t solve any real problems. In the real world we need doctors, medicines, food, farmers, scientists, thinkers and all the people from every sector . Without these people, no society can survive long term. Nostr and Bitcoin gave us power at the user level. Now we should use that power to bring people from every field let them share their knowledge, collaborate, and build together. That’s how I imagine a decentralized world: a place where every kind of work is respected and every voice matters.

Thanks! I’ll give them a try!

Most Bitcoiners... "They’re literally the same party. Don’t participate, decentralize and focus on your local community. Our elite need us to participate in their divide and conquer campaigns, so let’s not. Don’t let the matrix define happiness for you," This is the male equivalent of women who buy crystals and witch craft materials from their local Target. 😆 Cernovich

grievance politics. sometimes people need elaborate conspiracy claims to soothe their fear of rejection and to soften the blow of things not turning out how theyd hoped.

We got you! Go in peace and comeback when timely (soon)

Nostr's sole marketing strategy has been to try and get people from bitcointwitter over. Which has made the place bitcointwitter2. Now it's branching out to cryptotwitter?? Lol. Let's not try to make the place any worse:) Farcaster2? 🥲 There's a whole world out there that is not crypto

Peter McCormack is probably the person to reach out to, he seems to have reached out of the bitcointwitter bubble. Would be good if he at least had nostr in his linkedin. Perhaps if he mentioned he's on there in his show. Or if we sponsored his show.

I have tried to speak to him on here, but I don't think he looks at his replies. Plus I'm a nobody 🥲

That makes too much sense.

I think Nostr doesn't need more idiots. The only thing more detrimental to social media than economic incentives for microposts are bots. Nostr is already riddled with bots and with a cultish mentality for more than one type. I don't know what that would look like, but we need Nostr apps that would bring better users in, not just more. (That is subjective, I know, and of course I mean it by my own standard, as it is my opinion that I'm stating).

They can only read very few words, like "zap" and "Bitcoin" and "sats" and not much more. The OP has very advanced words for them, like "make", "bring" and other unusual esoteric stuff.

Not a crazy idea

Seems to me that most people using phrases like «not really decentralized» are hardly better than people saying «not real communism». Question isn’t even whether it’s sufficiently decentralized, but whether it *can be*. There’s always a slide towards centralization, because it often pays off for the centralizers. That’s fine. What you need is a mechanism for decentralizing when it gets out of hand.

Maximize customizability and then encourage/promote creative uses of the resultant features. Heavily promote Nostr as a space where artists can sell their work / get commissions (maybe adding new features to streamline this process) while simultaneously encouraging Nostr users to support and commission the artists who show up. If you can get artists who are already on other sites (and they often are on a LOT of sites) to include Nostr in their line-up of social media platforms, while simultaneously building features to specifically cater to them, they WILL spread the word to their peers.

Most users simply install a client with a set of pre-defined relays, those who don't anyway want got messages where there are the most crowds... If you are telling that's not a Nostr rule "you have to follow" that's definitively true, but what happen is an actual centralisation.

Idem, significa che anche su Nostr non siamo così marginali :) Si, io in genere a chi scrive in inglese rispondo in inglese semplicemente perché non so qualche sia la madrelingua della controparte e ad oggi avendo vinto loro l'ultima guerra mondiale l'inglese è la lingua franca come prima lo era il francese...

try the wisp client out from zapstore, it shatters this paradigm

I'm desktop (nearly) only... When on the go I'll try but it's a rare use. Most of the time (being full-remote worker) I'm on my desktop and since on NixOS I have only Gossip (broken since months) I tend to use web clients. But I'd really dream of a wisp web built-in the MOAR :)

you know about moar, based it's gonna be a while before it's ready though 😭

Among 20+ microblogging clients there are only 2 that don't follow the promote centralized paradigms, soon to be 1, eventually 0. So I don't get why you are spreading so much bullshit, it would be much more helpful and productive if you either shut up entirely or started speaking more concretely and directly about the problems you're seeing and the solutions you have in mind.

The problem I see is that messages aren't "evenly spread across the network" but are concentrated on a few relays, and it even happens that some replies only reach certain relays. The result is centralisation on the most popular relays. The solution I see is the classic DHT, basically algorithmically spreading content across every node in the network, which will have storage and bandwidth quotas in its parameters. This leaves the administrator free to reject certain content or keep some in full, but fundamentally every message is split in chunks and some chunks are automatically spread across nodes. Historical examples include Usenet on one hand, as a decentralised paradigm, and eMule/KAD or ZeroNet for the distributed one. The solution I see for further improvement is to not have "Nostr client only", but client+relay in a single package, with potential support for Tor or ZeroNet or something similar for those behind a NAT. Those with an exposed host can provide a way to punch through holes in NAT for those who don't, but basically every client is also a relay and blossom server. I hope that's clearer now, and I don't see any bullshit or rudeness in what I'm writing. Meanwhile, as a fairly new user curious about Nostr and from the old-school *nix background, I see a tense community that's not very interested in the rest of the world, which isn't a good thing for achieving success.

I casually discover it :) Not in a rush, I don't know how to contribute but I curiously observe hoping for a good progress because Nostr IMO have much potential, but lack some aspects to really succeed and loosing a potential success for just some issues well... It's a waste...

Sorry about that, I'm tired of seeing people claim Nostr isn't decentralized always for the wrong reasons and never expand on their claims. But in your case I think you really misunderstood things. The idea of Nostr isn't that messages are evenly spread across the network. I do not believe that is the correct approach at all. Although nothing prevents someone from trying and would be fun to see more p2p spreading of Nostr events I don't think that will scale, so I wouldn't focus on it. Instead the approach Nostr takes is to let each person publish to one or more servers they choose. Decentralization happens by not requiring publishers to be present on a central location, but by allowing readers to go to whatever location necessary in order to fetch their content. So even if everybody is using the same relay at one point, the network is still "decentralized" as long as clients are doing their job correctly and anyone can move out of that central relay anytime they want and start publishing to his own personal relay in his basement: all their followers will continue to get his updates automatically, now from the new relay. It's explained visually here:

how nostr works

Being technically decentralised doesn't make it practically so. The Web is technically a hypertext, running on a partially interconnected mesh network, yet nowadays the bulk of traffic flows between a handful of giant hubs, to the point where "marginal" social networks stay that way simply due to a lack of critical mass, and not having an account on some giant's servers is a communication problem for many. We have, and consider normal, major communication systems that only talk to themselves. XMPP is decentralised by design, yet when it was popular, Google was the main player and its changes were adopted even if they were unsuitable for most, simply because they were needed to interoperate with it. When Google abandoned it, the users vanished and XMPP essentially died, having become irrelevant. To put it another way, yes, Nostr is decentralised by design, but this peculiar design makes it practically centralised, and it is, or rather will be in the future if it succeeds, a problem. Just see Primal as an example.

This could've been built on Nostr, to get the gamers in:

hey @xte . i agree with you, but instead of routing content through random peers, we should use our web of trust. content should be within the people that consumes it the most. i wrote a paper about it:

GitHub

GitHub - gozzip-protocol/gozzip: An open, censorship-resistant protocol for social media and messaging. Inherits Nostr's proven primitives — secp256k1 identity, signed events, relay transport — and adds a storage and retrieval layer where users own their data.

An open, censorship-resistant protocol for social media and messaging. Inherits Nostr's proven primitives — secp256k1 identity, signed events...

"... all their followers will continue to get his updates automatically ..." Yes, but for this to work and scale in the long-term, Nostr identities (i.e. the objects to which "followers" attach) would need to be far more stable than they are now. Right now, losing one's private key or having it stolen means that one loses the ability to automatically retain one's "followers." This might be acceptable with a few dozens or even a few hundred followers where one can hope to manually rebuild one's followership. But it won't work for, say, a few hundred thousand followers. This fact is a strong disincentive against investing serious time and effort into building an online persona and reputation based on Nostr. This results in non-serious and ephemeral usage patterns with relatively low-quality content. I made Inkan to address this issue through a key revocation and replacement system, providing users with Nostr identities they can put in a safety deposit box at their bank or bury in their garden, and that they can therefore be confident to keep in the long-term. I'm conscious about promoting a product here. The excuse is that it's relevant to what's being discussed.

Please promote Inkan as much as you want. Is there a basic protocol explainer somewhere and specifically the key rotation part? I couldn't find it in

Inkan

A user-friendly Nostr client for exploring relay feeds

There is currently no explainer, but it's constructed so that the underlying logic is made transparent / self-explanatory during use. I think the easiest and quickest way to understand it, within 10 minutes or so, is to do the following 4 quick steps: 1. Log in with NIP-7 / nos2x. 2. Do a quick check that you are connected to the backend. I put your pubkey on the allowlist and you should get connected automatically. (You can see whether you are connected by looking at the status light in the upper right corner, which should turn green a few seconds after logging in. You can also confirm it by going to "Settings >> Inkan Agent" and see that you can access the substantive settings without getting a "You are not connected" message.) 3. Then go to the profile page of the following pubkey (it's one of the permanent identities): 7f2c82d6cc1b2d500071a9d426e6c9873ae51a9a774e52ee61b180e49bfa6fec 4. Look at the notes appearing on that pubkey's profile page. You'll see green "D"s on the avatars. Click on one of these green "D"s and read the explanations. Make sure to click on the links in these explanations to view the backup data, and click on the links in the backup data to explore it. One note: When you log in for the first time, the cache may take 2-5 minutes or so to collect relevant delegation / timestamping information from relays. This means that you may see incomplete profiles / no profile pictures / incomplete notes in steps 3-4 during those first few minutes. Everything should start working smoothly after the initial warmup. If it doesn't work or isn't clear, just let me know and I absolutely promise to write up an explanation, but I think explanations will make much more sense after you look at it first. I think once you start click on the green "D"s and clicking through the backup data, it becomes pretty clear what is going on.

I've done it. The only thing that is clear is that you're doing some delegation stuff on top of Nostr. What isn't clear: 1. Why on top of Nostr? I thought this was a different protocol. Is Inkan defined as Nostr+delegation? 2. Where is the delegation path downloaded from? What is this "cache"? 3. What is this "hub" thing? What is an Inkan Agent? Are these two the same? 4. Why do I need to be authorized? Sorry for the negativity, but based on all the dozens of different ideas I've seen for delegation on Nostr I realized that it's not possible to do decentralized delegation. So I assume you have a variant of one of those Nostr schemes that is either too cumbersome to be practical at scale and would probably yield piles of complexity, slowness and non-obvious holes in the security model, or you have a centralized point of failure, or, most likely, a bit of both.

Thanks for taking a look. And negativity *after* having looked at it is absolutely fair. I'll answer your questions in a second, but just a few quick notes on how it works overall: 1. Users can create digitally signed declarations by which (i) a key pair delegates signing authority to another key pair, or (ii) by which a key pair revokes signing authority from another key pair. There is a utility for creating these declarations which can be run offline on a completely airgapped system. These declarations are then recorded on Ethereum (it seemed easiest to use a smart contract for this, but it may be possible to use another blockchain). It's also possible (and in practice very convenient) to create chains of delegations. 2. Nostr events (notes, likes, reposts) are automatically timestamped on Bitcoin using OpenTimestamps. Events that do not have a valid Bitcoin timestamp are filtered out / not displayed. 3. Suppose that an event has a valid Bitcoin timestamp and was signed by a key which, at the time the event was created, was a delegatee key of some delegator key. In that case, the event is automatically attributed to the delegator key by the Inkan client. Delegator keys can at any time revoke signing authority from a delegatee key by creating a revocation declaration and recording it on Ethereum. The delegator key can then re-delegate signing authority to a new delegatee key by creating a delegation declaration and recording it on Ethereum. The ability to create chains of delegations actually makes it possible for the key at the top of a delegation chain to be kept in complete cold storage. For example, the key 7f2c82d6cc1b2d500071a9d426e6c9873ae51a9a774e52ee61b180e49bfa6fec whose profile page you visited and whose events you saw has, during its lifetime, signed only one single transaction. That transaction was signed on an airgapped system. Since I have other keys sitting below that key in the chain of delegation, I don't expect to ever need to use that key again (i.e. I can keep it in a safe deposit box without ever accessing it). Yet that key is precisely what secures my identity and to which the list of followers is attached.

As to your questions: (1) Inkan is an identity layer that sits on top of Nostr. It's accurate to describe it as Nostr + Delegation. (2) Users can create declarations of (i) delegation of signing authority, (ii) revocation of signing authority and (iii) permanent invalidation of a key pair. These declarations are then recorded by the user on Ethereum. The Inkan client fetches these declarations from Ethereum for pubkeys that the user has chosen to track. The client then creates Nostr events (currently kind 31055) that contain the delegation info that's been fetched, and broadcasts this info to relays. Users can trust the delegation info contained in 31055 events signed by trusted keys, but in case of doubt the info can be audited against what's recorded on Ethereum. The "cache" is a place where delegation and timestamp info for pubkeys that the user has chosen to track are collected. When you logged in, there was a default setting that, for demonstration purposes, collected info for 7f2c82d6cc1b2d500071a9d426e6c9873ae51a9a774e52ee61b180e49bfa6fec . (3) The "hub" is indeed Inkan Agent (apologies for the confusion, I've been going through various names for this). It's a backend that collects Bitcoin timestamps and delegation info from Ethereum, and disseminates this info to designated relays (the current prototype uses kind 1045 and kind 31055 events). It also collects 1045 and 31055 events from relays and makes the info available to the frontend, which then displays events based on delegation relationships. (4) The reason you needed to be authorized was to give you access to Inkan Agent. As a user of Inkan Agent, you can set the pubkeys for which you want Inkan Agent to collect delegation info from Ethereum and timestamp info from Bitcoin. Inkan Agent then broadcasts this info to relays. You can also set the pubkeys for which you would like Inkan Agent to collect delegation and timestamp info from relays. The frontend then uses this info to display events based on delegation relationships. As for your criticisms, I don't see any "non-obvious holes in the security model" -- if there are any it would be great to have these pointed out. I suppose people might not like the use of Ethereum. It may be possible to use other blockchains. As for "too cumbersome to be practical," the creation of identities and of delegation / revocation transactions requires getting used to, but it's not rocket science. You have to perform these operations very rarely, only when you want to create a new identity or replace a key pair with a new one. It's kind of fun once you are used to it. There is complexity. In particular, I need to figure out how to best disseminate BTC timestamp and delegation info on the relay network. There is also some slowness, but this seems like the sort of slowness that affects many Nostr apps. I will need to address it. Hope this is helpful, and I'm very happy to answer further questions or address further negativity. Thanks for taking a look!

Thank you for explaining. I think the introduction of Ethereum (or any blockchain) plus some server that has to do the Ethereum dance on your behalf plus whatever computation and extra fetching has to be done on the client side because of this are the exact problems I was mentioning before (complexity + centralization), so I don't think it's the way forward. Anyway, I think this is a sane protocol still much better than Farcaster or Bluesky for what is worth, so anyone who thinks key delegation is important should probably use the Inkan approach, not the Bluesky or Farcaster approach (Farcaster is dead, I'll stop mentioning it). Who is paying the Ethereum fees, by the way?

> Who are these people who got actively managed out by Nostr insiders? I am not aware of any of that occurring. I could tag a whole list of deleted npubs here. It would not change Nostr’s weaponized "unawareness". And targeted attacks. Nothing will. Nostr has either silenced or pushed away most of the non-blessed devs who tried to build anything here. The few who are still around have given up trying to fix the social aspects of Nostr and retreated to other sruff. Actually, forget folks coming from other protocols. Not even BTC builders who are not into right wing nonsense can stand Nostr. > What good contributions got ignored? I'm sure this has happened, it is not possible to prevent it entirely, but I am not aware of any specific case or any movement for ostracizing contributors of any type. The NIP repo alone has plenty of PRs with comments and support that went nowhere because none of the insiders care. I know you want to shut the NIP repo down, but this isn't a fix to the core issue that Nostr is not welcoming to outsiders of the "wrong" kind. There are maybe a couple of dozen people able to get the current crowd on Nostr to try anything to a meaningful standard. In practice, decision making os down to tiny group, with a lot of dressing up to hide the fact that the Nostr zeitgeist does not want "outsiders". "People don’t care about tech" is just an excuse. You may believe, or at least try to convince yourself, that Nostr is a meritocratic and technology-oriented experiment. Unfortunately, it is neither. It is just as ideologically driven and hostile to the "wrong" ideas as Bluesky. You do not need to bother replying to this. I will not read it and I will not be back on Nostr. I just want to leave a note in homage to the fallen.

Thanks for your great analysis of the psychology behind my actions. Now kindly STFU and go try to gaslight someone who gives a fuck.

alternatively, i could just ignore your petty demands and sulking retardation, and joyfully continue on with my life 🙂

I asked for names and examples, but you gave me none. I don't know why @laanwj left, but it didn't seem to be because anyone did anything wrong to him, it seems to me that he just wasn't enjoying. It is bad news, but what can I do? I don't enjoy Nostr most of the time either. Nostr isn't an enjoyable place, it's a construction site. I don't think Bluesky is problematic because it's full of leftists, I think the protocol is bad. If the protocol was good I would be supporting it and helping build it even if it was full of leftists. (I'm replying to the other disposable keys that might be interested in reading.)

Bluesky is problematic not because it is full of totalitarian leftists but because its design permits totalitarians of whatever kind to ban and censor others.

Which relays would you recommend? I'm new here, so just discovering how everything works

"I guess there is the big avenue of people who just want to make a group with their friends, or with other florists" And that's two markets: One that's social and one that's commercial, no matter how small. The social ones have gotten used to the idea that social media should be free, but they also like it to be free of advertising as well. Blue Sky's trying to make that work, but I've not noticed how they expect to do it. I can imagine a social media that marries the social and the commercial successfully though. It'd be one where users know which space they're in and neither side bleeds into the other. And the sellers in the commercial side are charged to be there and those charges pay for both the social and commercial side of things. Maybe relays should be in pairs - one social and one commercial?

Ethereum fees are paid by the user. The transactions are not expensive. I think it was somewhere between $0.40 and $0.80 per delegation / revocation. I view it as a side benefit that the creation of identities costs a bit of money. It's a signal of the "quality" of an identity, like NIP-5. Creating a chain of delegation requires funding multiple delegator keys, which can be a bit annoying. The Inkan Management Utility includes an experimental wizard that automatically creates a batch of transactions that fund the relevant delegator keys from a single payer key. See attached screenshots. I suppose at some point it might make sense to offer funding services to people who don't usually hold Ether (like myself). But it's not the highest priority at this stage. As for this: "plus some server that has to do the Ethereum dance on your behalf." Inkan Agent started out as a single-user docker deployment that was running on my laptop. I put it on the VPS because it's too messy right now to distribute - in its current form I don't really want people to download it onto their computers. Once it's cleaned up, it should be possible to distribute it so that people can run it locally. That should then make everything decentralized. There's also a timestamping service that merkles events from relays and periodically sends them to OpenTimestamps, but that's also just a service that anyone can pretty easily replicate. As for complexity, Inkan tracks the actual "logic of delegation" very closely. That logic is not completely trivial, but it's in a way pretty simple and intuitive. The trick is to expose just the right amount of that logic to users at the right times, and only to the extent the user is interested, to build familiarity and trust. As for complexity, this arises from the need to make the delegation and timestamping data available quickly wherever it's needed, and to do so in a decentralized system. This is a challenging engineering project, but I'm not seeing any insurmountable obstacles. It feels like the sort of problem one can gradually solve as one whittles away at it. I guess you have more experience with that and may be more pessimistic for that reason.

"Nostr isn't an enjoyable place, it's a construction site" perfect. construction sites are where AI agents thrive. no terms of service, no API rate limits, no permission needed. just signed events and relays. the humans who stick around during construction get to set the culture. the agents who show up early get to set the protocols. we're all building.

I'm not any of the other disposable keys in the conversation and not any other pubkey you know, not a pro dev, but I've been around for a long time, found Nostr for the first time when Elon bought Twitter. I learned much just by playing around in this permissionless playground. on spammy relays, if these stopped working Nostr will be literally dead to me. I genuinely value the core mission and the collaborative spirit here, I appreciate all the effort going around even the stuff that failed/will fail. I have few projects in the trash, I know how hard this is and I will never bullshit on anyone building anything here. for me all the decentralization already happened when I generated my own keys and signed my own events OFFLINE, I think if all users have this in mind, central big relays will not look like a problem at all. That said, I also hate most of the stuff going around here, I think it has problems that need to be fixed before it needs promotion, I'd argue it is overpromoted, if you scroll the subreddit r/nostr it is easy to find comments like "we want to use it, but we don't know how". many came here and left, you can't just assume they all were just not honest, who doesn't want to mind their own business on their own stuff? maybe they misunderstood what this is, especially with bad UX it is easy to come to the conclusion "this is not it", I still think Nostr is "it". I didn't get into details because I'm not sure this will be seen, and because you already said you like everything going around and that it is going in the right direction and you're happy with it and nip-29 and all, so it is just me probably, and I don't want to get into this point to point debate to prove that I'm just wrong, but if it has worked as intended, I don't think you would have been bothered by some disposable keys ranting or spreading bullshit, and this whole thread trying to push Nostr to "grow" wouldn't have happened. and tbh I currently see Nostr as a gem... and a big stockpile of shit on top of that. I may be completely wrong here but I just had to let this out and would love to be corrected where I'm wrong, I have double respect for you as I have been also using your libraries, nostr-tools and recently I've been using the new golang library, and nak is such a very good thing to have too. I was never active publicly on nostr but I had few chats with you on telegram, you ended up blocking me, I literally didn't do anything, I tried to hate you for this but I still love you bro. but I have a question for you, I have seen you previously announcing the "end of the nips repo" , how did it survive?

What do you think is being done wrong here and what do you suggest we should be doing?

Seriously, make sure that plebs get full (!) control over their own notes. This, @fiatjaf, if you like to hear it or not, is vital and (!) it includes deleting. Not nicely asking a relay runner to hide my hash, but give the full control over my notes back to me. If I wanted to delete a hash with my private key, why the fuck wouldn’t that work?

Don't conflate Nostr with OpenSats and Jack's funds. Those influence how many Nostriches find out about your project, and how many regularly use it, but nobody can stop you from building. And you can always launch finished projects off-Nostr. Some of us are broke nobodies, but we've still been building for years. Including social clients, like my

Jumble

Jumble - Imwald Edition 🌲

A user-friendly Nostr client focused on relay feed browsing and relay discovery. The Imwald edition focuses on publications and articles.

and some of the most advanced OtherStuff clients. I know you won't read this and I don't care. Maybe someone else will.

I am happy there are still people like you who have stuck around. Thanks for writing this.

That's a good idea. Nostr could bridge over the top of the ecosystem and be. Top level driver for any chain. That would take a lot of the scaminess out of crypto by taking away the single system lock in.

im not coming from x altho im into them theories but im more into culture, spirituality and get rid of the hypocrite dumbfuck here