Nostr

Nostr is a Internet protocol developed in 2019, that enables global, decentralized, and censorship-resistant social media. From Nostr, an Introduction

"Nostr is a new system that brings me joy to work on and use, so I’d like to take a few moments to share a few words about it. Nostr tries to solve the problem of publishing short notes ('and other stuff') on the Internet. Twitter solved this problem neatly, then complicated it through API and client restrictions, advertising, and a clumsy interface. Finally, they fully unsolved it by inserting themselves as the arbiters of what speech is allowed. That’s fine, their platform, their rules; clumsy censorship is just a feature I don’t want."

Like the World Wide Web, Nostr is based on the client-server model. A client computer inquires data residing on a remote computer, the server. In Nostr, a server is called a relay. Some basic rules are:

Each user runs a client. Anyone can run a relay.
Clients fetch data from relays of their choice and publish data to relays of their choice. Relays don't talk to one another, only directly to users.
Every user is identified by a public key. Every post is signed. Every client validates these signatures.

Transport is done by Websockects. Data format is JSON. Events represent the basic structure of anything that's being sent to/from relays. The protocol is defined in documents called NIPs (Nostr Implementation Possibilities). Aside from the first NIP, NIP-01, which describes the basic protocol, all NIPs are optional. Here is one example of an NIP-01 event:

```json [ { "id": "4376c65d2f232afbe9b882a35baa4f6fe8667c4e684749af565f981833ed6a65", "pubkey": "6e468422dfb74a5738702a8823b9b28168abab8655faacb6853cd0ee15deee93", "created_at": 1673347337, "kind": 1, "content": "Walled gardens became prisons, and nostr is the first step towards tearing down the prison walls.", "tags": [ ["e", "3da979448d9ba263864c4d6f14984c423a3838364ec255f03c7904b1ae77f206"], ["p", "bf2376e17ba4ec269d10fcc996a4746b451152be9031fa48e74553dde5526bce"] ], "sig": "908a15e46fb4d8675bab026fc230a0e3542bfade63da02d542fb78b2a8513fcd0092619a2c8c1221e581946e0191f2af505dfdf8657a414dbca329186f009262" } ```

Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays
Nostr, an Introduction

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