I randomly came across Nostr along with Tildes and Lemmy in my early hunt for THE reddit alternative to make a home. While I decided to make a home in lemmy, on the basis that its interface and structure isn’t that much different from reddit and apollo, curiosity keeps gnawing at me. And I just have to ask.
What exactly is Nostr and how is it different from the Fediverse? What are the pros and cons of each?
And if somehow both platforms mature to the point of mainstream, is an eventual bridge between them feasible? Something like what this site is attempting to do?
https://soapbox.pub/blog/mostr-fediverse-nostr-bridge/
Sorry of this question is somewhat loaded. I just don’t see much discussion on this anywhere else. Or maybe I just didn’t look hard enough.
Copy paste of my research:
Nostr
https://nostr.com/
https://nostr-resources.com/
https://nostr.com/clients
Nostr is a Twitter alternative that’s decentralized, not a Reddit alternative.
Nostr is not P2P. Its a broadcast protocol. Nostr is pub/sub, distributed, decentralized; while others such as Matrix,mastodon, bluesky are federated and are somewhat closed than nostr.
Nostr is just a protocol - a structured way to send and receive data. Not tied to one-email or a centralizd service for identity. Anyone can create anything on top of nostr. (https://www.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/14ea9y3/whats_the_difference_between_nostr_matrix/)
No, they (Nostr) are not doing ActivityPub. ActivityPub requires server-to-server communication, which Nostr does not have. They only have client-server communication. And the actual protocol is different to ActivityPub, all the way from the transport (which uses WebSockets rather than HTTP REST) to the schemas of the objects being passed. They also rely much more heavily on public key cryptography.
Nostr takes decentralization too far to be practical for a wide audience IMO. The relay model is even more abstract than Mastodon instances (which can at least be analogized to e-mail hosts) and the public/private key system is both inaccessible (copy/paste a key or look people up in a directory-- like a phone book! Friend codes on steroids) and unforgiving (no password resets). Like much of crypto, there are interesting ideas that don’t seem practical in actual use. Curious if it pans out. (https://kbin.social/search?q=nostr)
But unlike ActivityPub, the Nostr protocol is extensible with NIPS (https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips) so maybe there is hope to fix these problems (https://kbin.social/search?q=nostr)
Browser addons:
Android app:
Here is a link to most if not all Nostr clients if anyone is interested: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr#clients
Here is a link of clients that Nostr themselves recommend if anyone is interested: https://nostr.com/clients
Full of Crypto-currency traders.
Thank you so much. The way I see it, it’s more like twitter than an actual forum. Thus not really viable for long form communication.