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@ Greg
2023-08-12 18:00:17Hey folks, happy Saturday!
Here’s your weekly newsletter on the technical happenings in the nostr-verse. Things are moving fast, people are building many amazing projects.
Let’s dive in.
Recent Upgrades to Nostr (NIPs)
1) Moderated Communities 💬
This NIP outlines how to implement a Reddit-like experience, where moderators can create and manage communities. Then anyone can propose a post, but moderators get final say about what shows up in the community. Can’t wait to use it! Hopefully we can use Zaps instead of upvotes like Stacker News!
Authors: nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z and @arthurfranca
2) Proxy Tags (Approved!) 🌉
There’s been significant work done to bridge between other social media and Nostr (Twitter, ActivityPub, etc). One of the challenges is the amount of duplication that can happen. Now that this NIP is adopted, a proxy tag can be added to events so that a Nostr client can link an event that was originally in Twitter to the original Twitter url.
Author: nostr:npub108pv4cg5ag52nq082kd5leu9ffrn2gdg6g4xdwatn73y36uzplmq9uyev6
3) Rewrite of NIP 65 - Relay Lists by nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z
Many in the Nostr dev community desire to have many small relays instead of centralization around a smaller set of massive, highly capable relays. In order to do that, there’s a challenge with discovering relays to pull events for a users’ followers.
This NIP was approved weeks ago, but was rewritten recently to make it easier to implement, which should help add more momentum to decentralizing relays.
Notable projects
Vault - Nostr-based Password Manager 🔒
nostr:npub1alpha9l6f7kk08jxfdaxrpqqnd7vwcz6e6cvtattgexjhxr2vrcqk86dsn implemented a way to store and retrieve sensitive information (like passwords) via Nostr. It has a 1Password-like interface for ease of use.
It’s also encrypted twice, once via the normal Nostr secret key signing like any Nostr event, but again with the password to unlock the vault. That way, if someone compromises your Nostr account’s secret key in the future, they still need your vault password to decrypt your sensitive information.
Can’t wait to migrate!
Nostrscript
Looks like nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s added a way to activate code in Damus via a link on a website. This pattern could help clients interoperate (one client activating actions in other clients a user is using). Endless possibilities!
Relay Backup
nostr:npub1cmmswlckn82se7f2jeftl6ll4szlc6zzh8hrjyyfm9vm3t2afr7svqlr6f Built a way to easily back up your events from a relay. This helps folks make sure all their events from public relays are copied to a private backup relay so none of their events are lost to time.
Stacker news
Not exactly new, but this project has been a delight to engage in discussion with other folks interested in Nostr, Bitcoin, and freedom tech in general. Using zaps as signal instead of upvotes is pretty novel to me, and all the zaps go to the posters as well as the platform to distribute rewards to the community. #valueforvalue
Latest conversations
Who controls NIPs?
Right now NIPs are hosted via a Github Repo. This is helpful in many ways because there’s one publicly-accessible way to read NIPs and get started contributing. By the nature of this being a code repository under source control, there are a small group of folks that are able to “approve” updates to NIPs.
The nature of projects like Nostr (or Bitcoin in the early 2010s for that matter) is that the early folks often need some control over the direction to make sure that the project has a chance to become self-sustaining without imploding into chaos.
The debate in the linked thread seems to be stemming from the timeless question for protocols, which is “how much should the protocol be able to do?” and that’s generally decided by early devs and those that control the generally accepted version of the spec for the protocol. That’s currently the NIPs repo, so who gets to “approve” NIPs in that repo?
Here’s hoping we can find a collaborative place to land that preserves the heart of nostr and maximizes its chance of success 💪
How to handle illegal content on Nostr
There was a Plebchain radio conversation with nostr:npub1yye4qu6qrgcsejghnl36wl5kvecsel0kxr0ass8ewtqc8gjykxkssdhmd0 who has been an advocate for folks that’ve been trafficked. She’s a rare advocate of preventing trafficking and CSAM through the internet without compromising encryption, or other online freedom.
There are unanswered questions about how the Nostr community is going to handle this content so we don’t see Nostr become a haven for activity most see as despicable. With the collection of smart people on Nostr, I’ll bet that a solution emerges to maximize freedom on the internet and drastically reduce the ability for illegal content to spread via the Nostr protocol.
Events
I’ll keep a running list of Nostr-related events that I hear about (in person or virtual).
- Nostrasia Nov 1-3 in Tokyo & Hong Kong
I haven’t heard of any new ones this week, but if you wanna see something advertised here just DM me!
Until next time 🫡
If I missed anything, or you’re building something I didn’t post about, let me know, DMs welcome.
God bless, you’re super cute