Riding the Purple Ostrich

How to get a look at the latest social networking protocol without wasting a dime of your money or a minute of your time or giving up a bit of your personal information.

All you need to get on Nostr is a computer or a phone connected to the Internet. If you use a phone it will need an app, so let’s assume you are using a computer, OK?

By now there must be over a hundred Nostr “clients” available to you as phone apps and web sites, and keys to any one of them work on all of them, and your profile (if you eventually create one) and the list of folks you follow, the list of folks who follow you, and the list of folks you never want to hear from again, all these go with you from one client to another, as long as you use the same log-in credential.

Note I said credential, not credentials. There’s only one alphanumeric string that serves as both user ID and password. And I said “As long as” because it’s pretty damned long. Too long to remember. Too long to write down accurately. And that’s the whole problem with Nostr. But it’s not your problem. Yet.

Your client software has the job of remembering your secret password, or private key, for as long as you are logged in. If you log off before you make a copy of it you will lose your identity. Most Nostriches (as we call ourselves) have done this — at least once. But you don’t have to.

If you’re ready now, just open up another window on your browser and go to a website named Iris. All she needs to know is a name to call you by for now — you can change it later. When you have entered that you are on Nostr, just like that. Go ahead and make that Hello World post. Say something about yourself. Conclude with the hashtag “#introductions” so folks can reply with words of welcome. Some will even follow you right away.

Now for some light housekeeping. Bookmark the site so you can find it easily. Now go to Settings near the bottom of the menu on the left. Remember that Secret Password or Private Key I told you about? You have one now. In fact Iris used it to sign the message you sent so that Nostr knows it really came from you. Whoever you are at the moment. (Don’t worry, your cryptographic signature is hidden from all other users — they see a Public Key, which is just as long and complicated. Go to Backup to copy the Private Key to your computer’s clipboard, paste it into a text file, save the file, and print it out. Make at least three copies and put them in safe places.

Now follow some other users. Start with the twenty most followed users, the movers and shakers, the leaders of the Nostr pack. You will find them near the bottom of the Social Graph section. Now you can go to the top of the Settings section and fill out your Profile; you have probably done this a hundred times. At least give yourself a name, and a picture if you have one handy. If you don’t mind people sending you money, leave your Lightning address as well, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s perfectly all right.

One more thing. Maybe you don’t want to have to share that big ugly Public Key with the people you already know or (worse) people you meet at parties and bars (or church). That can look pretty dorky, especially when you exchange QR codes on your phones. You don’t have to do that any more. Iris offers you an “iris.to” username, which not only identifies you on Nostr, but can turn your profile into a

web page, and you can even list that as your home page on other social media. There’s one other client I know of that offers this, and they charge for it.

And that’s all you need to get started on Nostr. If you aren’t quite ready, I get that. Nostr will be ready when you are, and no doubt better than ever. For now let me address some questions most people have.

Nostr isn’t a social network but a protocol people like you and me have used to build out our social networks. It’s actually a number of protocols called Nostr Implementation Proposals, NIPS for short. Nostr itself is short for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted over Relays. NIP 001 defines what a Note is in terms of another protocol called JSON, the Java Script Object Notation. Other NIPs define the Other Stuff Nostr can send as JSON Objects — over the WebSockets protocol, if you must know — articles longer than mere notes, pictures, videos, audio files, you name it. Nostr calls these Objects Events, which is fine with me. Other NIPs specify the architecture of relays and clients.

All of this is Free and Open Source (FOSS) under the standard MIT license; you are free to download the files and play with them, but at first you will want to use a client programmed by somebody else.

Who owns all of those relays? Anybody who wants to. The software runs on a Raspberry Pi, which I guess you can plug into your cable box. I even heard of a guy recycling an old Android phone for that purpose. But most relay runners prefer to buy them plug and play. I think many people in the Bitcoin world who buy a Lightning node find the Nostr relay capacity built in, but I’m not really part of that world.

Some nodes are run by homesteaders for their families and friends, some by Evangelical pastors for their congregations, some by community organizers for fellow activists, some by folks with unusual lifestyles for their fellows. They can differ vastly in kind and degree of moderation, and one of the greatest freedoms of users is being able to pick your relays, though at first you have the ones selected by the client you are using, and this may not apply to children, or, for that matter, to people living in monasteries.

Mass adoption will begin, if at all, when lodges of fraternal orders come on board, Freemasons, Oddfellows, Knights of Columbus, Moose, Elks, Lions, Raccoons, Sons of the Desert, Mystic Knights of the Sea, Rotary Clubs, Optimists, and so on. You might expect Mensa to lead the way. Maybe when they get tired of whatever they are up to — I sure am.

And normal people just don’t have time for all this Secret Key nonsense. No, mass adoption won’t come until clients hide all that behind the 24 word Seed Phrase thing the Crypto Bros use for their “wallets.” Somebody recently tried that, but it doesn’t seem to be working very well, at least for me, but it probably is the next thing. When that happens some Grand Lodge or other will set up a relay, encourage the lodges under it to do the same, maybe release some generic client for fraternal and general community use.

But I have already said enough for you to take a look around without having to wait.