This is going straight into the LLM

Wait, you're releasing a free ebook about your experience developing on Nostr? Why not also put it on Alexandria?

I will try to do that

This is the main reason I'm here. "The cost of giving away our attention and our data to these Internet intermediaries, is ultimately, the loss of our free will."

Wen 30040 book event 😉?

Yeeesss :rocketship:

I was just thinking there need to be more Nostr books. 📚

Do we have a nostr epub reader yet?

Gave up on one, wrote a better one absolute builder energy. Half philosophy, half protocol, all signal. Love it already👏

Excellent

Looking forward to this

What did Claude miss or get wrong? Core Architectural Insights Simplicity Over Perfection: The author discovered that Nostr’s “good enough” approach works better than trying to build perfect solutions. Using WebSockets instead of more advanced P2P tech, embracing “easy” over “simple” in Rich Hickey’s terms, allows rapid adoption and iteration. Numbers Not Names: Using numeric event “kinds” instead of descriptive names was brilliant - it prevents semantic drift and allows organic meaning to emerge through usage, like natural language evolution. Embrace Chaos: The radical openness creates complexity, but this complexity enables agency rather than diminishing it. The protocol becomes “infinitely extensible” through the kind system. Identity and Data Sovereignty Revelations Signed Data Changes Everything: Moving from server-based authentication to cryptographic signatures fundamentally shifts power from platforms to users. Data becomes “referentially transparent” - you can verify authenticity without trusting custodians. Identity Webs Over Trust Graphs: Rather than explicit trust attestations (which fail like PGP), implicit social signals through follows, mentions, and reactions create more robust reputation systems. Publicity Technology: Nostr isn’t privacy tech - it’s “publicity technology” that makes public discourse more sovereign and less capturable by platforms. Network Architecture Learnings Multi-Master is Essential: Using multiple relays isn’t just redundancy - it’s the core censorship resistance mechanism. The author notes that 3-5 diverse relays dramatically reduce deplatforming risk. Routing Heuristics Are Critical: The “Outbox Model” and similar patterns for intelligent relay selection are what prevent the network from collapsing into either aggressive replication (unsustainable) or missing content (unusable). Relays as Repositories: Keeping relays simple as “buckets for events” rather than complex application servers maintains interoperability and reduces implementation burden. Protocol Development Philosophy Implementation-First Works: Like JavaScript, starting with working implementations and iterating beats top-down specification. The author compares Nostr to “the JavaScript of web protocols” - messy but successful. Backwards Compatibility Trade-offs: Perfect compatibility isn’t always worth the complexity cost. Breaking changes should be rare but not forbidden when they serve users. Political Dimension: Protocol development is inherently political - requiring human coordination and compromise. Technical solutions alone don’t solve governance problems. Economic Model Insights Value-for-Value Mechanics: Micropayments through “zaps” can realign incentives from attention-farming to genuine value creation, though the author notes this works best in smaller communities. Patronage Over Trade: Digital content monetization resembles patronage more than traditional commerce - supporters get identity and belonging rather than just content. Custody Challenges: Both Lightning and eCash approaches have trade-offs between convenience and sovereignty that the ecosystem is still working through. Community Building Discoveries Different Spaces for Different Communities: The author identifies five distinct community types (social clusters, group chats, discussion forums, owned communities, commons) that need different architectural approaches. Access Control Complexity: Moving from broadcast to private/semi-private spaces introduces enormous complexity that can’t be solved purely at the protocol level. Interface Diversity: Different clients can provide different interfaces to the same underlying data, but this requires careful specification of expected behaviors. Challenges and Warnings Bootstrapping Problems: Getting people started without custodial solutions remains difficult - key management and relay discovery are ongoing challenges. Scaling Concerns: Aggressive content replication doesn’t scale; intelligent routing is essential but complex to implement correctly. Capture Risks: While more resistant than other protocols, Nostr could still be captured through “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics if the community isn’t vigilant. The author’s main meta-insight is that building protocols is ultimately about building communities - the technical architecture must serve human flourishing and agency, not the other way around. Nostr’s radical openness creates a “convivial tool” that amplifies human agency rather than constraining it, even if it means accepting more complexity and chaos than top-down alternatives.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Guess I should have just vibe coded my book

Its temping, but it never produces things actually worth reading...if not for the simpel fact nobody bothered to write it in the first place.

Nice! Congrats

Didn’t mean to undermine the value of your work. I just work crazy hours so this way at least I get something out of it

Thank you for writing this by the way. I need to set up a wallet

My first and best Nostr book so far, whoever you are and whatever you are doing with Nostr, this book will have some insightful takes for you View quoted note →

👀

Great that you finalized this, I hope it brings us many more builders, thanks!

😂👌

I'm sure this book would be useless to me since I don't know a thing about coding or building on Noster, but I want to thank you anyway in principle for providing an EPUB format. So many self-published books are only available as a PDF. It is a pain to cozy up with and read a PDF. I hope you keep advancing and building good things using Nostr. I appreciate your good work.

Great work. I think you misunderstood Bluesky though, it is much closer to Pubky, or rather Pubky is much closer to it, with the main differences being Pkarr vs PLC, and that Pubky homeservers don't sign data, but as you might be aware, almost all Atproto apps use the stream that does NOT contain signatures... which vindicated Pubky's design decision; if you have to trust an aggregator regardless because of scale, might as well ignore signatures and detect frauds by visiting the source of truth. Nostr on the contrary has no source of truth at all, bot even with the Outbox model because there is no consistent way to know where is the authoritative host... so in Nostr case signatures are not optional. I want to finally say that if you think of Nostr as small social networks, and if I were to design an alternative to that, as opposed to the requirement that Pubky was designed under (aggrrgatuon and indexing), I would definitely not only sign the data at client side but encrypt it too, just like Peergos does. But that simply wasn't an option, and to be frank Nostr didn't start with that goal either. I also want to note that in that small world paradigm, Pkarr aligns perfectly with storage incentives, just like DNS is aligned with websites hosting... because if you don't need aggregation, and if you are only querying data from 100s of friends, you all can use tens of small servers that cost nothing, ran by friends or free cloud hosting even, and migrate when they need to rug pull you. Anyways, I am glad that more and more people are giving up on the search engine global indexing goal and focusing on communities.

=============================== #2 🔥 Community Highlights =============================== 1. revolution.social is with Kara Swisher this time View quoted note → 2. A pleb is asking a question from the Nostr community View quoted note → 3. A Real-life proof of the value of Nostr View quoted note → 4. A meme master is talking about Nostr View quoted note → 5. A nice new feature of @blosstr View quoted note → 6. A Great news from @Club Orange View quoted note → 7. Here is a job opportunity for a talented brand designer View quoted note → 8. The reason @Terry Yiu is on Nostr View quoted note → 9. Amazing news from @ hodlbod View quoted note → 10. These Nostr Remote Signers will be shipped soon View quoted note → 11. This is the thinking every person needs View quoted note → 12. Great to see the new onboardings like this View quoted note → 13. A question for Android users View quoted note → 14. Why @Derek Ross is dedicated so much to Nostr View quoted note → 15. This is well said View quoted note → 16. A nice thing to be thought about View quoted note → #community_nostr_recap

Hi @ hodlbod, I’ve been thinking of turning your book into an audiobook to listen on the go and tried it out with the intro. If you’re into it, we could do the whole thing and post it as an album on @Wavlake. That way, people can listen and zap chapters, which could help fund a print version faster. Let me know what you think of the intro and if you’re interested.

This is great! You have a very good reading voice. You even got the right pronunciation of "nostr" (although I pronounce my name "hawdlebod"). The book's license prohibits derivative works or monetization by a third party, but I would like to see this happen. I'll send you a NIP 17 DM — let me know if you don't receive it.

"elides"?

Sitting at the airport with my kindle loaded up with your book @ hodlbod

Crazy

Checking it now and geat rip on @CITADEL DISPATCH recently. I’ll forever be confused how some of the “don’t trust - verify” crowd trusts religion, but I absolutely love your takes on reality 😂

#tools 💜

Absolute awesome! Thank you!