Nostr notes by fiatjaf

No. But are you looking for purely an overlay network on top of ...

2026-10-14T02:09:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…zved
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No. But are you looking for purely an overlay network on top of the current internet or a new internet? FIPS was interesting to me because it at least claimed to be for replacing the current internet (by which I mean it is supposed to work on top of physical links), although now I see people treating it just as an overlay network like Tor, which is sad.

I had this idea a long time ago of how to connect and route between mesh networks potentially scaling through the entire globe, but I'm thinking here only about physical links and a new internet:

quoting naddr1qq…smcd

a way to do an open and permissionless mesh network

I don't have much experience with that so maybe this is all a stupid nonsense, but I think routing in mesh networks (by which I mean all the software that exists out there for creating smallish mesh networks and the real-world projects that use them and effectively have a community of people that connect to each other in some geographical area or a virtual network that uses the underlying internet) is never scalable. It basically always requires all the nodes to keep a full view of the network in order to route packages -- and often there is no incentive for them to do that either. And then the thing is easily spammable but either that problem doesn't happen because the mesh never gets big enough or it has a central committee that decides who can join.

The biggest example is, of course, the big ICANN-controlled IP network, that gets all the negatives of being centrally controlled while weirdly getting also all the negatives of being a kinda-decentralized peer-to-peer ad-hoc network between indepent ISPs.

A good solution that makes kinda-decentralized (at least open and permissionless) routing possible and replaces node addresses with pubkeys could get make it possible for us to get rid of ICANN. Once that is done, ad-hoc peering would become more seamless and ISPs wouldn't have to be so big and clunky, they could slowly split, and non-comercial entities could join the party too by basically just plugging a cable or pointing an antenna to the correct place.

What is it?

One very dumb solution that came to my mind that has a chance of working is one in which each node as a keypair and to be reachable by others they announce their address -- for example, using some kind of DNS (on a [spacechain]?) or by directly communicating their address through some other means -- as their public key plus some "routing hints".

The routing hints are just pubkeys of other nodes known to be routers. Known to whom? Well, this would require some schelling points to naturally appear and the network would be ordered around them, but you are never forced to use them, you have to include as many routing hints as required to ensure that all the people you want to connect to you will eventually be able to, but nothing is ever 100% guaranteed.

Such network could probably work with a pure onion routing scheme with all its privacy benefits in some cases; degrading to a trampoline onion routing scheme otherwise, which means it will just be slightly less private the more trampolines you have to use. And every node has to keep track of just a set of routes from them to a bunch of known routers (or trampolines, which in my mind are mostly the same nodes, but are slightly different roles).

Example

Suppose A is trying to connect to B.

A is a home computer in the city of Évora, Portugal.

B is a home computer in the city of Udine, Italy.

There is a route (we, the narrator, know) between them that goes like this:

A--Ev--Li--Al--Ro--Sm--Ve--Ud--B, in which Ev means the node of an ISP in Évora which directly serves A, Li means a big node in Lisboa, Al a node in Algiers, Ro a node in Rome, Sm a node in San Marino, Ve a node in Venice and Ud a gateway node in the mesh of Udine to which B is connected.

There could be many other routes, but we'll ignore them for now.

B could have published his address as <pubkey-B>?hint=<pubkey-Ud>,<pubkey-Ve>,<pubkey-Sm>,<pubkey-Ro>, which would mean A would only have to know a route from Ev up to Ro.

If Ro is known to be a big router, A could easily have a route cached there, and could discover other routes by asking around every now and then too. It wouldn't take a lot of space to have routes cached to some thousands of different known big nodes like that. Then A can just wrap an onion with all the coordinates and the message inside and hand it to Ev and it would reach B. Inside the message she would also include the full route for a message to be sent back.

However, even if A doesn't have a route to Ro, it could still hope that Li would have, then she could make a special "trampoline" onion that goes Ev--Li and then when Li receives it it sees a request to forward the next packet to Ro, so Li has the freedom to choose a route from itself to Ro (as long as it knows Ro, of course) and from there A's message continues.

The same trampolining can exist on B's side, if B doesn't have a route from Ud to Ro, but knows Ro is likely to have one up to Ud -- or if B feels it's not worth including so many hints when most big nodes will have routes to Ud, for example, it can publish his address as <pubkey-B>?hint=<pubkey-Ud>*<pubkey-Ro> meaning that one should find a route up to Ro and from there ask Ro to trampoline it up to Ud.

Or, if B doesn't expect Ud to be very well-known, but Sm yes, then it could do <pubkey-B>?hint=<pubkey-Ud>,<pubkey-Sm>*<pubkey-Ro>. Again, this is just one hint, in practice it would have to have a lot (maybe 10, 20?) other hints, in a tree structure that this querystring syntax isn't very suited for encoding:
Ud
  Tr
    Pu
      Za
    Li

  Sm
    *
      Ro
      Ba
  Mi
    La
      Ge
    *
      Mo
    Tu
(Remember, we're using city name abbreviations here, but each of these would be a specific node, with a specific public key, supposed for the example to be in such a city, but nothing prevents them from being in different cities or that multiple nodes exist in the same city.)

Summary

Basically packets go from node to node, in a sequence established by the sender -- with optional trampolines in between -- until they get to the target. Target responds in the same route. Nodes can be anyone. Focal points form around big nodes, but they can be replaced easily, the receivers just have to stop using them in their hints, so the network is flexible and open.

I have no idea of how bad this idea is, because I couldn't find anyone to criticize it or any other idea to compare it to and I have zero experience with any of this.

As far as I know all the mesh networks in the world are sadly much less ambitious than I want: they're all happy to just be a local thing. And in some cases they clearly state that their routing algorithms don't scale at all (they're either based on a centralized supernode, or nodes flooding the network with packets, or on everybody keeping a routing table of the entire network locally).

Projects like Meshtastic are just a stupid psyop. They get people to be excited about a completely useless thing, thinking they are contributing to creating a new decentralized internet, and that their stupid toy is actually a step towards that, but in fact it can never be more than that toy.

What I wanted to see was an actual meshnet project that employed some routing algorithm capable of easily adapting to new nodes joining freely, but also adapting to a new mesh network being connected by some new node, and then some other mesh connects to that, and so on, until you're able to route a message to someone a thousand miles away.

I think my method above works, and it is not magic because it has this important tradeoff: you can't route only with keys, i.e. your address can't be just your key like all these other projects do, you also need route hints in the address. It's like using an nprofile instead of an npub.

My method needs a lot of flushing, though. All the details are unspecified. And it would probably not work with any existing base network software, as it wouldn't deal with IP addresses at all (addresses would be much bigger than even IPv6 can support). It also needs a name, then we would have to adapt TCP and UDP to work on top of it (the name is important so we can call it TCP/<name> thing). I also didn't think about the incentives for routing at all.

#nevent1q…l6m0

2026-10-14T00:44:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…cu8h
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quoting nevent1q…l6m0
What do we have more on Nostr?

1) users
2) DM standards
3) slop websites
4) relay implementations by mattn (npub1937…haj6)

Pomegranate is pretty fast, and it doesn't require reliable ...

2026-10-14T00:05:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…wgem
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Pomegranate is pretty fast, and it doesn't require reliable relays. It is a single request to the single central server itself, which fakes as a relay but it's actually the server that does the signing (coordination) directly, and it responds with the signed event, so it doesn't use a lot of bandwidth either.

You shard your key in many parts and give it to semi-trusted ...

2026-10-14T00:03:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…xjqr
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You shard your key in many parts and give it to semi-trusted operators to sign stuff in your behalf.

Later you need to be able to contact these operators to get their shards back so you can rebuild your key, or ask them to delete them. So you need an alternative authentication mechanism.

Doesn't have to be Google, as I said above, it can be any other method, but Google was easy enough to start with and would reach lots of people.

It's ridiculous how ineffective and unnerving phones are, ...

2026-10-13T23:59:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…hu0d
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It's ridiculous how ineffective and unnerving phones are, they are optimized for browsing garbage and shutting down your brain.

When are we going to be able to vibecode a dumbphone with exactly the features we need?

Vibecoding software is useless, give me vibecoded hardware, please.

I was trying to use a dumbphone recently. It worked quite well, except that I couldn't block numbers, so I got spam-called a lot. I wish it had this one extra feature.

Would also be nice to have a way to send voice messages through the internet, using some chat app, to some selected few contacts. Without having to include the entire chat app in the phone. I don't know, some very restricted features like that.

And they say we don't have enough addictive content. ...

2026-10-13T23:53:23Z

And they say we don't have enough addictive content.

quoting
nevent1q…tyuz
Cows coming in

/trianglize@@npub1zh8…5aww 4

2026-10-13T23:52:32Z

In reply to nevent1q…w42v
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/trianglize@triangles_nbot (npub1zh8…5aww) 4

/trianglize@@npub1zh8…5aww 2

2026-10-13T23:52:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…4z73
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/trianglize@triangles_nbot (npub1zh8…5aww) 2

It's very cool that they made an amusement park on it, but ...

2026-10-13T23:51:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…w42v
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It's very cool that they made an amusement park on it, but still the last picture looks very depressing with these ugly government-style buildings.

They are pretty similar indeed. But the original in which the ...

2026-10-13T23:49:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…pvh7
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They are pretty similar indeed. But the original in which the trianglized version was based is quite disturbing. The colors, and the format of the thing. Yours is more humane.

I don't have use for these things right now, but I'm ...

2026-10-13T23:45:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…t0wk
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I don't have use for these things right now, but I'm trying to understand the rationale for having the launcher.

Is the idea that other people will also publish apps compatible with it? What benefit does the launcher add in comparison to having each app be its own thing? Does it to make things easier for you somehow?

Yes, it is more secure to not have a central server that you ...

2026-10-13T23:34:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…qlx9
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Yes, it is more secure to not have a central server that you trust to not sign bogus events in your name. But then it doesn't work with any Nostr app.

By doing it with a central server that speaks NIP-46 one can reuse their Google/Pomegranate bunker URI in any app, even if that app doesn't support the thing directly.

But Pomade does the signing locally if I remember correctly, you could look into that. It is deployed on Flotilla.

And there is FROSTR (which has been renamed, probably, to Igloo or something else) for the full self-sovereign setup in which you run all the things. They have an Amber-like app that does the signing in your phone.

The problem is that I don't want to annoy the current ...

2026-10-13T23:29:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…hzff
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The problem is that I don't want to annoy the current operators to make them update their stuff, and it would risk splitting the ecosystem, making it too complex and so on.

But If someone wants to run an alternative central, perhaps they could do just GitHub, Apple and Microsoft and not Google? With a different set of operators? I don't know, to avoid conflict.

Someone else could run one that does phone numbers and raw email (not supported in the codebase, but should be easy to add, although SMS costs money and these things are directly painful to me so I don't want to touch them).

Someone else could run one that doesn't integrate with anything, just generates a secret and tells the user to store that, which they can later use to recover their nsec or login in to other apps. How this could work exactly is yet to be discussed.

The thing is just a NIP-46 bunker, it doesn't require ...

2026-10-13T23:24:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…redp
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The thing is just a NIP-46 bunker, it doesn't require adoption by others to be useful in one app.

I used to use Google Reader many years ago and if I ever skipped ...

2026-10-13T14:58:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…ukgm
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I used to use Google Reader many years ago and if I ever skipped a day of reading it would start to accumulate hundreds of articles. It was almost slavery. Eventually I was saved by Google Reader shutting down.

/trianglize@@npub1zh8…5aww

2026-10-13T14:55:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…lu05
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/trianglize@triangles_nbot (npub1zh8…5aww)

/trianglize@@npub1zh8…5aww

2026-10-13T14:55:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…z69u
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/trianglize@triangles_nbot (npub1zh8…5aww)

Is this a bunch of stuff related to antennas? I don't get it.

2026-10-13T14:53:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…trrd
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Is this a bunch of stuff related to antennas? I don't get it.

I should have phrased 5 more like an argument (because liking ...

2026-10-13T14:51:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…5gls
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I should have phrased 5 more like an argument (because liking Amber is not an argument against supporting an alternative, I like Amber myself too!), because perhaps people who say that in fact want to say something like:

"I think every person should have a phone with Amber installed and only use Nostr apps from that phone and the absolute requirement for ever thinking about using Nostr is that you have to first install Zapstore then Amber and promise you'll never uninstall that, never lose your phone to someone that will steal your key, and that you'll keep a paper or steel backup of your nsec at home at all times."

What are your apps? Did you read my answer to the anti-Google ...

2026-10-13T14:48:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…qvrf
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What are your apps?

Did you read my answer to the anti-Google sentiment above?

Are you saying that some people decide to fund and encourage ...

2026-10-13T14:46:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…xync
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Are you saying that some people decide to fund and encourage stupid projects that waste millions of hours of time of thousands of people who could otherwise be working in actual competitors to these incumbents?

That makes a lot of sense and I believe this stuff happens indeed, but I was trying to think of an example of this when I realized it would lead to the conclusion that Nostr itself is a psyop.

I told a big story and forgot to elaborate on the exact point you ...

2026-10-13T14:40:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…fjep
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I told a big story and forgot to elaborate on the exact point you had asked, so here it is:

if these new inventions have such obvious flaws that make them impossible to scale to a billion users, why haven't their own inventors realize it?

For a long time I thought they were just not seeing the issues, but after some experiences I observed I changed my answer.

Now I think they are not really thinking about changing anything, they just want to see their pet project running, and they are happy if it runs with a few thousand users and they're idolized by some of them. I don't really understand it and can't imagine the feeling myself, because to me the technology or protocol or whatever is really just the means to what I consider a higher end, but to these people I think the technology itself is the end. This perspective is what I was calling "unserious".

People making new apps, why aren't you adding Pomegranate ...

2026-10-13T14:33:13Z

People making new apps, why aren't you adding Pomegranate support?

1) I didn't know it existed (now you know);
2) I think it has a fatal flaw (please say what is it);
3) I am phisophically opposed to Google (Pomegranate supports other providers, and even no providers at all, it can even be made to support phone numbers, a single password, an email, a set of friends' keys, you name it, but none of that is active yet because there is not enough interest);
4) I think users have to be trained to type private keys everywhere;
5) I like Amber (I've heard this one before so I included it here even though it makes no sense).

quoting
nevent1q…h5lu
I understand what you're saying and linking accounts sounds like a solution to this.

But, honestly, Pomegranate solves this already in a much more elegant and better way that doesn't come with death-inflicting tradeoffs: nevent1q…nwp6

I understand what you're saying and linking accounts sounds ...

2026-10-13T14:26:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…wup8
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I understand what you're saying and linking accounts sounds like a solution to this.

But, honestly, Pomegranate solves this already in a much more elegant and better way that doesn't come with death-inflicting tradeoffs:

quoting nevent1q…nwp6
How to add Google login to your app without having private keys in your app or handing them to Google: https://viewsource.win/fiatjaf.com/pomegranate

A very dry demo of its capabilities: https://pomegranate-admin.netlify.app/

At its core it's a bunker powered by FROST threshold signatures. Supported now in https://nostrord.com/, https://jumble.social/ and https://hallway0.netlify.app, with others incoming.

If you already have NIP-46 bunker support this becomes very easy to implement, there is a step-by-step flow in the README there that even an LLM can follow.

What is a website? We should start with this deeply philosophical ...

2026-10-13T14:21:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…4hen
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What is a website? We should start with this deeply philosophical question.

Just kidding, but really. By "website" I was talking merely about the fact that each website has an owner (or dare I say a "webmaster") and that owner decides what content it hosts, who can write to it etc.

I was not at all talking about having some fancy UI for publishing or reading content, that is the job of clients already and perhaps the essence of what makes Nostr different (and why relays are not exactly websites, that was just an analogy): that it allows clients to be fully independent from servers and vice-versa. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO2dHp-uluo for more discussion around this.

All relays are like that, by the way, all relays have rules, the difference is that the most popular ones are very liberal in their rules: they basically accept anything from anyone with almost no ratelimits even.

Nostr event nevent1qqsq4sr2ymv7ep2n974yp45vt4w67ryacfw7z0pdvehe2f9u09svlwczyqalp33lewf5vdq847t6te0wvnags0gs0mu72kz8938tn24wlfze6n2c3py

2026-10-10T01:03:38Z

What do we have more on Nostr? 1) users 2) DM standards 3) slop ...

2026-10-02T03:02:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…9mpe
_________________________

What do we have more on Nostr?

1) users
2) DM standards
3) slop websites
4) relay implementations by mattn (npub1937…haj6)

I'm working on a new operating system for Nostr, it's ...

2026-10-01T17:48:05Z

I'm working on a new operating system for Nostr, it's called Verdana (a tribute to the famous Slovenian alpine ski racer Ana Drev).

Just kidding, it's only a program. But the idea is that you install a bunch of very micro apps that do one thing only and compose your own client, in a way, by combining them. They are web apps and run in webviews, each in its own independent window, but they have access to a common database, a centralized engine that fetches feeds of notes from profiles efficiently, a common signer and many other Nostr helpers.

And of course they also have access to each other, by invoking actions on other apps and potentially getting responses back.

If you are brave and wants to help, please try to download a binary from https://github.com/fiatjaf/verdana/actions/runs/36899284292 (or go to the most recent) or build it from source.

Here's a bunch of microapps if you want some inspiration: nostr:naddr1qvzqqqrhnypzqwlsccluhy6xxsr6l9a9uhhxf75g85g8a709tprjcn4e42h053vaqy2hwumn8ghj76twv3jhstnwva5hgtnyv4mz7qg4waehxw309aex2mrp0yhxuemfwshxgetk9uqq2mnpwpc8xnhuz22.

There are many things to do still. There is an Android app too that works similarly, but it's currently broken. And the "build your own client" needs more configurability aside from the manual picking of apps. But the desktop app has some cool things already, like the ability to create bundles of apps that you start from a shortcut.

In the near future it would be nice to have someone share a big bundle of configuration and apps with others, so people are onboarded to Nostr with an experience and a set of microapps already pre-curated by a friend or some community leader; and later they learn how to customize things their own way. So this would be like a more flexible version of https://hallway.fiatjaf.com/.

I had to make a new app to try this, so here's one that has ...

2026-09-29T22:40:01Z

I had to make a new app to try this, so here's one that has been needed for a long time:

And the only way to install it for now is by having Go installed and running this command:

~> go install nostr.technology/npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6/nostr-bunker@master

quoting
nevent1q…nenc
Another problem solved: https://nostr.technology works as a proxy for Golang packages published via NIP-34 now.

If you have a Golang package you can name it like 'nostr.technology/npub1.../dtag' and later install it with 'go get nostr.technology/npub1.../dtag' and it should work.

NIP-05 names also work, or just a naddr1... code directly.

Let me know if you tried.

nevent1q…g5xy

After 16 years I've decided that petnames are actually good. ...

2026-09-18T16:31:23Z

After 16 years I've decided that petnames are actually good.

I read your report on Nostrability, but I don't understand ...

2026-02-24T12:10:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…e7te
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I read your report on Nostrability, but I don't understand how you're doing these benchmarks. Are you firing up the apps and measuring the notes they display? Can't be that, right? And what are those algorithms you listened. I tried looking them up but didn't get a clear view of how exactly they would work with outbox.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li8EEGSxSSo

2026-02-21T18:34:25Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li8EEGSxSSo

I'm seriously considering deleting the NIPs repo. What do you ...

2025-10-17T15:13:40Z

I'm seriously considering deleting the NIPs repo. What do you think?