Nostr

Nostr (acronym for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is an open protocol for decentralized message transmission, with the intention to be able to resist internet censorship while maintaining session integrity. "Noster" can also be translated as "our" or "ours" from Latin. The protocol achieves decentralization through users publishing content associated with a cryptographic public key to various "relays", which are WebSocket servers that store and distribute an activity stream of received data from users. This allows the network to verify users and achieve account portability on Nostr, as users have to sign all posts using their secret key, preventing any relay from tampering with content without invalidating the signature.

The Nostr protocol was first written in 2020 by a right-wing Brazilian open source developer known by the pseudonym "fiatjaf". Nostr was created as a result of perceived moderation issues on Twitter, as well as both technical and cultural disagreements with other protocols such as ActivityPub and Secure Scuttlebutt.

Protocol

As an open standard designed to be implemented with little difficulty, there are a number of third-party apps and utilities that support Nostr, the majority of which is free and open-source.

Data on the Nostr protocol is stored in JSON blobs called Events, which is the only kind of object on the Nostr protocol. Users are identified by their public key, tagged as an "npub" key. Different extensions to the Nostr protocol are called Nostr Implementation Possibilities, or "NIPs". One of these extensions provide integration with the Lightning Network, a separate payment protocol that operates over the Bitcoin network, allowing Nostr users to send and request small payments (nicknamed "Zaps") among other users. Other NIPs include ways to add a human-readable alias to an npub key using a well-known URI hosted on a web server, a method that is used by other protocols such ActivityPub and the AT Protocol.

Users

The Nostr client Damus is a microblogging social networking app akin to Twitter. Damus was the first Nostr app to be listed on the App Store.

Nostr is primarily popular with cryptocurrency communities, primarily Bitcoin users. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, has endorsed and financially supported the development of Nostr by donating approximately $250,000 worth of bitcoin to the developers of the project.

Two days after it was launched in February 2023, the social media app Damus, which runs on Nostr, was removed from the Chinese version of the App Store per a directive from the Cyberspace Administration of China.

As a result of its ability to quickly and discreetly create accounts and publish posts to relays, Nostr can propagate spam much easier if left unchecked. A notable example includes a case where multiple protocol bridges have been used to conduct spam waves on the Bluesky social network (itself connected to a competing protocol, the AT Protocol) by creating posts on Nostr, bridging the post to ActivityPub and bridging it again to Bluesky.

As of May 2023, Nostr claimed to have over 18 million registered users.

See also

* ActivityPub, a decentralized social networking protocol
* AT Protocol, a similar protocol used by Bluesky
*

References

External links

* {{GitHub, nostr-protocol/nostr

Social media
Social networking services
Public-domain software
Distributed computing projects
Internet properties established in 2020
Cryptographic protocols
Open standards
Open source projects
Internet censorship