Yeah, it was way harder than expected. But this time is different (hopefully) 🙃

New app is way more consistent. Coming soon!

Thanks for your work. I still have poor understanding of what the reliability issues were, yet I hope this release will be more competitive with Cordn in terms of reliability.

The main difficulty in group messaging is consensus. How does a group of people agree on what key to encrypt the next message too. If people disagree, someone can't decrypt the messages of someone else. That's a fork in the group state, it's quite a similar problem to Bitcoin. Contrary to Bitcoin, in most group messaging systems you know exactly who the group members are, which makes things easier. The main hurdle for marmot specifically is that there is no central server whom you can trust with ordering messages properly. Every client has to be a "fully validating node" and create "the blockchain" of messages so that they're in the exact same order as everyone else. Cordn takes a different approach, each group has one central coordinator who is trusted with message ordering. This massively simplifies the consensus problem, and reduces the amount of complexity in the client. This likely means cordn is relatively more stable than marmot if the coordinator is honest. And cordn uses lots of fancy tricks to make this central coordinator as blind and trust minimized as possible, and easy to run even in a browser tab. This is somewhat similar to Bitcoin CoinJoin, almost impossible to do fully decentralized (only coin shuffle achieved it in theory) so everyone built centralized coordination models (even joinmarket) and then Wasabi optimized the coordinator to be blind and trust minimized. So to some extend Marmot is trying to achieve the impossible, decentralized encrypted group messaging, many wizards keep telling us this is too difficult and probably impossible to achieve. But let's see, it smells to me like we're close on actually making it work...

Hermes. Both work well in the new whitenoise apps btw.

Finally! I will be able to get rid of telegram!

Yes, Cordn is designed the way it is to allow exactly this: a leader or preferred coordinator per group that keeps everything in order and avoids races that might occur when multiple sources have competing or out‑of‑order commits. It isn’t implemented yet, but it will be, we haven’t put much work into it so far because it’s an advanced feature that only power users will need, and we wanted to polish the UI/UX first. It will definitely come. But make it work reliable and have a good UX semeed what users request the most

Ah, you're talking about Radar. It uses signal infrastructure, and that means your limited to use the network only from exactly one phone. You can't create an account on the laptop, and not have the same account in multiple phones, or multiple accounts in the same phone. That's one of the big complaints I have with Signal, and exactly why we started @White Noise So regarding this concern of yours, you won't get new PTSD here!

We started work on the Linux app, and it's quite nice already!

gitworkshop - Decentralized Git

Decentralized GitHub alternative over Nostr for browsing repositories, managing issues, and collaborating on pull requests.

What we haven't done yet is enable you to use the same nsec on both phones. That's a bit tricky, and we first want the basics to work flawless, but this is going to be a big focus after initial release.

Cool to hear about Hermes/OpenClaw integration! So basically can use whitenoise to chat with your agents rather than through telegram?

The new white noise works great with Amber.

The new one is not yet released. You can build it yourself for now. gitHub.com/marmot-protocol/whitenoise-android

Has a single coordinating key been implemented already in Marmot? I'd imagine that this is desired in some use cases and serves as a good starting point.

Woo! Good news! While the same nsec is not a hinderence for my use case right now, that's kind of a necessity feature to have in the future. I will continue to be patient! Keep up the good work!

What do you mean?

For example, if Alice creates a group, she can act as the admin without a need for consensus; coordinating messages can be distributed across several relays. No?

The list of group members, and admins, is part of the consensus state. Any member in a group knows exactly who's part of that group, and that only admins can make valid commits. Servers are only trusted for message delivery. Given that every group member somehow gets every commit message, they will converge on a shared state of the group. For now marmot uses nostr relays for message delivery, we're already thinking how to do this with fips, it should work.

The reliability of message delivery of commit messages is the main difficulty, even in the case of a single admin?

Correct, every member MUST have every commit message. (Regular chat messages can be dropped) Only admins can write commits.

A structured network strategy to sync Nostr relays I think can greatly help the persistance and reliability of messages. Negentropy is a huge help. For example, if all admins independently run relays and have write policies exclusive to members/admins, the relays can sync and secure only those messages between each other. Strfry has some support here with a router. However, last I remember, the features were new and could be optimized. I would need to look again.

Yes, and now do this with relays on the phone and fips connection between them, cypherpunk future is now.

Sure, in some cases! Though, the notorious flakey internet connection of phones adds complexity and difficulty. Local messaging use cases could also benefit from wireless connections (e.g., LoRa/Bluetooth/Wi-Fi). In other cases, relays with low latency and high availability would be useful to bolster reliability. For example, with redundant-powered SBC or VPS relay servers with multiple internet connections/transports.

#2 1. Nostr unofficial CEO ensures the build gets done even if he is away 👨🏻‍💻 View quoted note → 2. Nostr workout tracker Progressive Web App officially stable 🔥 View quoted note → 3. Nice music that every bitcoiner should listen 🎧 View quoted note → 4. A huge White Noise release is on its way 😍 View quoted note → 5. The move of a Spanish Olympic skateboarder’s life 🛹 View quoted note → 6. Anyone can’t say that privacy isn’t important 👇🏻 View quoted note → 7. A nice capture of a solar eclipse 🌑 View quoted note → 8. Let’s wish him luck for the win 🏃🏻‍♂️ 🚴🏻‍♀️ 🏊🏻‍♂️ View quoted note → 9. A nice suggestion from the Nostr founder 👌🏻 View quoted note → 10. Being altruistic is always so nice 🫶🏻 View quoted note → 11. A pretty nostrich celebrated her birthday 🎂 View quoted note → 12. The people who love even animals have the best hearts in this world ❤️ View quoted note → #community_nostr_recap

waiting for it

Why is the official place to download it from? The website is pointing to archived read-only github for apk standalone (which is also used by zapstore). The new android specific page has no releases yet?