Although we often focus on the positive aspects of Nostr, it is important to also discuss its shortcomings and areas for improvement. This is not meant to criticize any developers, who have done an incredible job so far. However, as with any software project, there is always room for growth and improvement. What is something that you DO NOT LIKE about Nostr?

Replies (102)

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Most people are dumb.
The biggest problem with Nostr is that it's not easy. Personally, I had a hard time understanding how things work here. I have adapted with inserting images, with writing all the notes externally on deepl and then pasting them here, with translating every single DM for fear of misinterpreting any request on my paintings. I knew bitcoin before Nostr, but here I had to do a crash course to learn it better and all by myself. In short, a huge effort for a stubborn Italian like me. My biggest defeat about Nostr? My wife doesn't want to know about Nostr, but she patiently puts up with all the updates I give her about what's going on here. No guys, I'm sorry. Nostr will never take off unless it gets easier.
Default avatar
nobody 2 years ago
Are you just playing with words or making noise for attention?
When we have zaps based on ecash it would make it a lot easier to build a wallet directly into nostr clients. It’s less complex than integrating a lightning wallet and might help to create this smooth integration. Of cause it would also introduce security concerns when storing funds in a plain text token somewhere in a browser. I’m excited to see how this will be solved.
Mostly playing with words 😂 sorry Although it is partially true, in real life you can’t delete a mistake. Makes sense that we’d want to give ourselves that power in the virtual realm though
Default avatar
nobody 2 years ago
Yeah you're just blathering on; you can go away now
Cant agree more. Especially on the wife part. 😅 we are in the same boat. But my wife is not a social media person anyway. She is not on any platform that connects you with strangers.
Absolutely agree. It needs to work seamlessly to where the technology just fades into the background. We're getting there on some of these fronts. For example on Amethyst when adding an image. This is bad for users IMO. It's great to offer choices but this is confusing as hell for people. Perhaps a random image host could be selected automatically to help decentralization with images, but have a user settings option where we pick our default image host? @Vitor Pamplona image
Default avatar
nobody 2 years ago
Maybe I just misinterpreted your words Would hate if that were lethal And it is!
Kind of thinking while I type here but what if there is a way to use an existing service like strike to build and in client wallet that has absolutely no bitcoin shit in it. You load up your in client wallet with a debit card all you see is dollar denomination don't even have to know you're using bitcoin but in the background it can all be Bitcoin. regulatory wise it would probably be a real bitch because as soon as you start messing with debit cards things get funky and imo something like that would be a little antithetical to the entire point of bitcoin but...i dunno.
Nostr DMs are encryptesdwith AES-256. Has AES-256 been compromised? No. Again, the metadata is leaked as I mentioned above, but the content is safe and can't be read by a third party unless a screenshot is taken.
The complexity of trying to get all the ppl I follow in one feed scroll … but that’s on me as I’m technically retarded! 😅😎
Btw is this tagging issue an Amethyst specific problem? I seem to be able to tag fairly easily on Damus. -the visual glitches of course.
- Inconsistent user experience when tagging event and user IDs in various clients. Some clients support @note ID and @npub, some nostr:note and nostr:npub, some use nevent or naddr or nprofile. You may tag a note or user in one client, and half of the other clients don’t render it. - In several clients, there’s no way to link to other events in a note without them being rendered inline in your event. This makes for some very long notes or long form articles if you link to multiple other notes. There should be a user setting to disable or enable that in your client, or a way to simply link to another note that doesn’t generate an inline preview in your event. Imagine if every hyperlink on a webpage rendered the full page it was linking to inline in the middle of a paragraph. - A request to DM someone should cost an amount of sats defined by the user you’re requesting to DM. - There’s no way to transfer your existing account to a new key pair.
That when a friend Quotes a note posted by someone not in my relay list, I see my friends post, but usually a placeholder for the quoted note. I understand why it happens and I understand the tradeoffs I'd have to make to minimize it from happening. That's not the point. The point is, it's annoying.
The idea of it having to be every dev for themselves when it comes to developing clients. Why have 50 devs working on 50 different good, but not really great, clients, when they should be grouping up and focusing on 2-3 bigger and more robust clients. To me, this would create a standard of what NIPs Twitter alternatives should be implementing by default. Then again I'm not a developer so keep my ignorance in mind. That also leads to this feeling of not really knowing what the hell nostr is supposed to be. I use it exclusively as a Twitter/X alternative. That's what people fleeing X most likely want. But we have 50 devs working on 50 good but not great clients that fill 50 wildly different roles. That's going to confuse the hell out of the normies. My peanut gallery take is devs should focus on establishing a large userbase for the microblogging apps, then figure out what roles nostr tackles next.
💯 It’s such a basic user activity to reference/tag another user or note. It really ought to just work, no matter which client you publish or read from.
1) The search feature. When people join, I have a hard time finding them. 2) Adding multiple relays to see users and content. 3) Adding a lightening wallet. 4) Delete feature.
shifty wizard's avatar
shifty wizard 2 years ago
interesting, i've tried a couple of different clients/sites and they haven't given me any issues with my vpn. i use Mullvad, could be your VPN in particular or maybe the region you're connecting to?
shifty wizard's avatar
shifty wizard 2 years ago
nostr is relatively new, no? i think this kind of thing is bound to happen. just give it time and natural selection will narrow the scope of things.
1) Apple keeps trying to erase my zapping powers. Luckily I have a developers loophole "testflight". So my request to developers is how do we take over Apple? 2) Because I am an American in Japan I am missing out on my fRiEnDs in America. Just wondering if algorithms could be user or relay customized. Or give the user the option to sort their note feed by zaps, likes, replies, time zone or random sort. I hate Facebook and Twitter algorithms but they did allow the timezone gaps to be bridged together. 3) Attachments in DMs. How am I supposed to send dick pics to all my asian influencers wondering how my trading is going?
Most users will expect to use the @ format especially when tagging users, simply because that’s what 10+ years of social media have taught us. I think Damus must do the first two things you suggested, but with a bare identifier it adds nostr: automatically. In these screenshots I used the naddr provided by Habla and the noteID provided by Damus for the same article (Will’s nostrdb article). In the first test Damus added nostr: automatically to the naddr, but didn’t render a preview or link. In the other 2 tests I used the note ID format with and without the @ and in both cases it rendered a preview. The Nostur client doesn’t render a preview for naddr, but it does make it clickable and opens the corresponding article in the client, which I think is at least an acceptable fallback. Just makes sense from a user side that if you tag someone or a note in your client, people in other clients will be able to see who/what you tagged.
Video uploads are a pain point for sure. Essentially needed an account on a media host is a bad experience, because users don't know they can do this unless they ask. Maybe it should be included in the onboarding process mentioning larger or longer videos will need this.
Water Blower's avatar
Water Blower 2 years ago
I absolutely agree with all your critisims about Nostr and we will address all of them in Blowater at least for the DM part. We will be there.
Nice! I will check Blowater out 🤙 And thank you for the zap! 💜 It doesn’t show on the note for some reason, I think maybe because I switched my receiving wallet recently. The sats went to my old wallet, but just letting you know I did receive them. Nostur shows it as an “unverified zap” which happens when I’ve changed wallets. Maybe that’s another thing clients should do, double check that it’s sending to the wallet in the user’s profile 😅 🤣 image
Water Blower's avatar
Water Blower 2 years ago
The core problem is that profiles is not updated in time on most clients so that I still had your old profile.
Default avatar
Linux Walt 2 years ago
Maybe someone should write a NIP that defines a suggested minimum featureset (list of NIPs to be implemented) for microblogging type clients. Then, clients can claim NIP-XYZ compliance and users can have an idea what they can do.
LOVE Nostr but I don’t like the way my zaps don’t show accurately… not sure if this is a Nostr or Damus issue but sometimes all zaps show in order, sometimes none, sometimes only the first zap I received, sometimes random zaps from months ago. For me personally, zaps are the 2nd stickiest thing about Nostr … 2nd only to the quality of people and subsequent discourse. Often I only know I’ve been zapped by looking at my linked wallet. Because it is such a stickiness factor it would be great for any zaps you’ve received in between visits to hit you in the face as soon as you open your Nostr client. Also, is there a Nostr marketplace yet? No pressure, so grateful to all the developers. #Nostr and #Bitcoin give me hope for the future of my children, their children, their children’s children... 🙏💗🙏
LOVE Nostr but I don’t like the way my zaps don’t show accurately… not sure if this is a Nostr or Damus issue but sometimes all zaps show in order, sometimes none, sometimes only the first zap I received, sometimes random zaps from months ago. For me personally, zaps are the 2nd stickiest thing about Nostr … 2nd only to the quality of people and subsequent discourse. Often I only know I’ve been zapped by looking at my linked wallet. Because it is such a stickiness factor it would be great for any zaps you’ve received in between visits to hit you in the face as soon as you open your Nostr client. Also, is there a Nostr marketplace yet? No pressure, so grateful to all the developers. #Nostr and #Bitcoin give me hope for the future of my children, their children, their children’s children... 🙏💗🙏
LOVE Nostr but I don’t like the way my zaps don’t show accurately… not sure if this is a Nostr or Damus issue but sometimes all zaps show in order, sometimes none, sometimes only the first zap I received, sometimes random zaps from months ago. For me personally, zaps are the 2nd stickiest thing about Nostr … 2nd only to the quality of people and subsequent discourse. Often I only know I’ve been zapped by looking at my linked wallet. Because it is such a stickiness factor it would be great for any zaps you’ve received in between visits to hit you in the face as soon as you open your Nostr client. Also, is there a Nostr marketplace yet? No pressure, so grateful to all the developers. #Nostr and #Bitcoin give me hope for the future of my children, their children, their children’s children... 🙏💗🙏
I do not like being an ignoramus when it comes to relays, and I don’t like the relay discovery and maintenance process, and probably it’s because I’m an ignoramus but it’s confusing as f@ck
Default avatar
Jake 2 years ago
No 'follow' button in follower lists of the people I follow. If I want to follow someone I have to view their profile which takes a lot of time if you want to rapid fire follow your friends followers etc. Hope that makes sense
You’re a shitty troll lmao. We could tell within a few posts, and to top it off you gave up the goat in less than a few posts. Skill issue. Fuck off back to 4chan.
Mycelial's avatar
Mycelial 2 years ago
Use @Enki's idea to hide bitcoin units in favor of $ and integrate a p2p trading tool (Robosats?) so users can swap and feel like the money is real.
Agreed, good advice, & no anger here ser. I use profanity but I find this amusing, especially how bad they are at their sole purpose of being here.
Default avatar
nobody 2 years ago
Now you've insulted my friends! #MarkZuckerberg
Only if they’re good at what they do hahaha 🤣 in this case, not so much
Idk if its a problem of the client or the relays but this past days I had trouble with my followers list loading and with recent posts and replies loading. I use primarily Amethyst and used to use plebstr, stopped using it because of this. I seemed like it didn't connect to the relays.
I would second this, mostly because I've just been spending the last 15 mins trying to figure out why every client shows me a slightly different list of connected relays. Little inconsistencies like that causing me to client hop every 5 mins. (great that I can do that, but for the wrong reasons in this case)
I reccommend cheap VPS and wireguard. It's really nice looking like you are some random address from Kazakhstan. I'm not touching Tor, every time a tor relay appears in the directory it gets blocked by half the internet.
1) I haven't seen a relay that wanted payment, laid out the benefits, and then let me pay with a zap. 2) Maybe petty but also getting to a reason why people donate, I'm not able to donate to an app and have that donor status show for other users of that app. 3) NIP-O4 (DMs) are not secure. NIP-44 seems an improvement but needs security review. 4) Overall, the chaos level is on the high side.
Integration into other apps, like normal websites (like, share etc.) for a better network effect. #Nostr needs a kind of Public API for share/like buttons across the hole web, similar to the public API of Facebook, Twitter with OAuth.
Of course. I believe Nostr is still a work in progress. There are so many features missing that need to be added, like I said Nostr is still progressing, so far the user interface has been really good, not too colorful but with this little color it's really cool. I will like to see this feature add to next version upgrade; ability to pin an important post to your timeline.
Shawn's avatar
Shawn 2 years ago
Lack of delegated posting. nsecBunker gets close, but we need a true enterprise key storage and signing solution.
+ive critcism is not a troll nostr / nostriches / dev -> sometime need to be in LAYMAN style of presentation which severely lacking for bringing in new ordinary non-tech users to here yet - this aspect all pro-nostriches need to understand clearly spread the word simpler way this is single most factor why many non-tech users not yet leaving X or similar microblogging platform yet nostr is almost 3yrs old and public version is about 1yr - great tech dev achievement were been made - but the narrative n easy of use not quite well propagated yet to ordinary netizens
The problem with privacy, a relay knows a lot of things about the pubkeys that write in them. The problem with scalability, there is no incentive to maintain a relay. The problem with media providers, as I said the other day, we must agree on a NIP to solve the lack of freedom of users to choose their favorite provider (or be one themselves).
Default avatar
Dullahan 2 years ago
Sometimes when I comment something on some clients, it disappears after 5 minutes. Why does this happen? #asknostr
Default avatar
Dullahan 2 years ago
Sometimes when I comment something on some clients, it disappears after 5 minutes. Why does this happen? #asknostr
Default avatar
₿itcoin 2 years ago
Cluttering feed and my messages of a week are fust gone. Without any trace. I want a local data backup for your own texts plus settings and relay things. Plus adjustments for user defined filters like search and follow hashtag requests. oh and splitted feeds are needed.
nsecBunker is a true key storage and signing solution for enterprises though. they can host it themselves and delegate keys for clients and users.
Default avatar
₿itcoin 2 years ago
And all of this needs to be able to be accessed by the user and maybe even editable.
I would love to see photo albums implemented. Facebook is horribly authoritarian, and I'd prefer not to use at all, but they offer an excellent photo albums (documenting vacations & events, etc) service / addition to your digital journal.
* Alternative solutions to paid relays should be produced so that everyone can see what people write, spam solutions should be produced. I am a poor person and I cannot pay for every relay. * We need clients that are compatible with each other. I can't have the same experience on mobile and browser * Decentralized approaches should also be produced for the files we share * Posts should be distributed to all relays and should be easy to delete. * And most importantly PLEASE talk about something other than Nostr or Bitcoin to encourage the Nostr community. Every time I look at Damus, 3 out of 5 posts are either BTC or Nostr related.