I'm trying out https://coracle.social today. Still need to try Current. The ability to try lots of Nostr clients simultaneously is so freeing. I'm used to the scuttlebutt ecosystem where you can't use the same key across multiple apps. You end up generating a bunch of different keys and then you have to set your bio and manage follows on all separately. I can open a new browser tab and be trying a Nostr webapp safely in under 60 seconds. With Alby I don't even have to trust them with my private key. It's amazing.

Nos has come alive this week!

The rate of change on Nostr is really exciting but also a little scary. In the last 4 weeks there has been more change than some protocols see in a year. Nostr is clearly a invasive species. Let’s make sure we are replacing the old ecosystem with one that more diverse *and ultimately healthier for humans*. Public-key-cryptography-as-identity flips the power structure on its head, but it has plenty of its own problems and by itself doesn’t solve any of the higher-order human problems that are endemic to social media. I hope as we solve some of the basic technical problems on Nostr we start seeing more innovation in the social part of social media.

Wow Damus is feeling much better today. Posts aren’t jumping around and threads seem to be loading quickly!

Our new Nostr client "Nos" is taking shape. We are starting Monday on a spike that will run until #Nostrica. The main goal is to take our best ideas from Planetary (our Secure Scuttlebutt client) and put them into a Nostr client. They include: - Scuttlebutt's "2 hops" algorithm applied throughout the app. This restricts your view in most places to people you follow and the people they follow. This creates a safety net against spam and abuse that works similarly to social circles in the real world. Some Nostr clients, like Iris, are already doing this and its working really well. - Our Discover screen. A nice-looking card interface for finding new people to follow. When you first start using Nostr this screen will show a curated feed from people we find interesting instead of a "global" feed. Once you have found some people to follow it will switch to showing posts from people *they* follow (2 hops). - Basic safety features: mute, report, content warnings, and delete. We hope this will lower the bar for non-technical people using Nostr, and bring in people who are put off by what they see in the global feed. 5 weeks isn't much time to build though. We definitely have our work cut out for us!

It turns out that in order to Bech32 encode something the data needs to be in base 5. At least with the library I'm using. It only took me like 4 hours to figure this out. I'm still a little confused because the Bitcoin wiki includes steps for sha256 and RIPEMD-160 hashing in the encoding process, but nostr clients don't seem to do that part?

Bech32 - Bitcoin Wiki

I set up my new #rowing machine last night. I’ve never owned one before, and I’m pretty excited to start doing some cardio that doesn’t require braving the frozen wastelands of Indiana.

Rad new tool from #[0]: when you need to look up a NIP just type nips.be/ into your browser and then the ID of the NIP. So to look up NIP 33 you can just type https://nips.be/33.

There's an online unconference happening this weekend that one of my friends is co-organizing. It's called Decent Social, and it's designed for people building the decentralized web to come together and cross-pollinate. I'm looking forward to learning the lessons of some protocols that I know less about: Earthstar, Goblin, P2Panda. I'd love to see some Nostr builders there!

DecentSocial

We're not asking for a perfect social web. We're just want something decent.

#DecentSocial

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#[0] #[1] I think you should rename the "Block" function in your clients to "Ignore" or "Mute". We had the same situation in Planetary where we called it block. We had some users get surprised and upset to learn that in Scuttlebutt a person you have blocked can still read your posts. It's a departure from what block means on centralized social platforms. The same is true on Nostr. All you are really doing is hiding the given account from your view.

#[0] I am seeing the same set of relays in Gossip that I do in Iris and Damus, and most of them have a connection success rate of 100%. However Gossip says "coverage short by 2 relays" for most of the people I am following and I'm not seeing posts from them. Any idea why that would be? I left all the settings on default, and followed the setup instructions carefully.

@#[0] is there a way to rebroadcast events from gossip? I published an event to only one relay before I pulled my exisitng relay list.

Trying the Gossip nostr client. This thing is ugly as sin but the developer in me is loving it so far 😁