News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Promotion of alternative social platforms policy. Parent comment

Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by legutierr on Sunday December 18, 2022 @01:14PM (#34040582)
Nostr is perhaps the most interesting of the list. Fully decentralized; messages are cryptographically signed; users are identified by their private keys; following is done on the client side, with no stateful server-side component; messages broadcast via stateless relays.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email, in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by drexlspivey on Sunday December 18, 2022 @01:41PM (#34041071)
Are relays stateless? When I join a nostr channel I see all previous conversations
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by legutierr on Sunday December 18, 2022 @02:18PM (#34041673)
Per my understanding, relays are stateless in the sense that they do not store any user state or message state, except what is self-contained within the relayed messages themselves. Also, messages can be relayed by any relay server and by multiple servers, and messages don't necessarily persist.

I've only started learning about it today, though, so my understanding is limited!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by jacquesm on Sunday December 18, 2022 @01:23PM (#34040711)
Very interesting, thank you.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by legutierr on Sunday December 18, 2022 @02:20PM (#34041700)
Per my understanding: most important functionality is implemented in the client; clients can connect to any relay server, and any number of relay servers; messages can be relayed by any number of relay servers; and anyone can spool up a new relay server at any time.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by jacquesm on Sunday December 18, 2022 @02:26PM (#34041790)
Ok. I will definitely have a look.

My decision so far was to go and run a one-person Mastodon instance but this sounds intriguing.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by leesalminen on Sunday December 18, 2022 @03:07PM (#34042399)
I was able to get nostr-rs-relay[0] running in <5 minutes on fly.io. Got all my client apps and those of ~5 friends writing to and posting from it. Hasn't crashed yet.

[0] https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by jacquesm on Sunday December 18, 2022 @03:35PM (#34042937)
Neat!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by 323 on Sunday December 18, 2022 @02:40PM (#34041990)
Recommended by Jack too:

https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by jacquesm on Sunday December 18, 2022 @03:35PM (#34042933)
I'll make sure it is sell-out proof then :)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by djcannabiz on Sunday December 18, 2022 @05:43PM (#34044757)
im getting a tweet not found. was that tweet from jack deleted?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by 323 on Sunday December 18, 2022 @06:53PM (#34045966)
No, some nitter problem:

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1603945963944480768

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by poser-boy on Sunday December 18, 2022 @08:59PM (#34047314)
This is probably the reason Nostr makes an appearance in the policy then.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by omoikane on Sunday December 18, 2022 @01:49PM (#34041201)
Nostr looks interesting, and its critique of programs similar to Mastodon[1] more or less matched my experience with Pluspora up until the point where it got shut down[2].

[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/sy7e67/pluspora_p...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by thyrsus on Sunday December 18, 2022 @02:17PM (#34041660)
Is that the Morris worm sendmail with its Turing Complete address rewriting language that I'm seeing in the same sentence with the word "barebones"? ;-)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Promotion of alternative social platforms policy by klabb3 on Sunday December 18, 2022 @03:13PM (#34042529)
Nostr is awesome from a technical POV. And they have something that very few projects today get - which is reduced scope.

Their critique of both centralized and dweb alternatives are mostly spot on. The elephant in the room though is whether people-oriented broadcast social media (those with a strong emphasis on one-directional “followers” and personalities) can ever be good. If Nostr was content oriented like Reddit or HN, I would have already started using it. The good news is that it can probably be retrofitted, or at least replicated easily, while adhering to the same technical architecture.

[ Parent | on HN ]