takinbrrrr

The client you use as your daily driver has an outsized impact on your #Nostr experience. It’s like the difference between using Coinbase and Sparrow to send bitcoins. It’s hard to know what you’re missing out on until you’ve tried something else. Most Nostr clients are good — for the regular user, even great but for someone who needs something more and doesn’t want to murk around on the command line, you should check out

.

I initially dismissed the client because it lacks that polish that makes it a very good looking client. Looks are important and you don’t always get to make a second impression. However I keep most of the clients around because I like to follow their evolution. All of that “lacks polish” impression flew out of the window when I started to murk around in the settings. You know that feeling when you desire a certain feature but you don’t complain about what you’re given because you didn’t write the client but then you find this one client that implements not just one, two or three of the things on your wish list but like MANY of them? That’s what I found in Nostur and why it’s now my favourite client. I don’t have to go through all the features but the fact that I can:

1. Choose what relays I want to read from, write to and search
2. See what relays I’m seeing a note from and that I posted to (sometimes you need to rebroadcast a note in case a relay missed it)
3. Share an actual image of a note with other apps
4. Use a custom NIP-96 media upload service
5. Configure your own web of trust filtering system and (specifically) restrict loading media to your web of trust
6. Choose what relays to publish as your reading and writing relays

among others, makes it the most powerful client I’ve used to date. Basically, this is the mobile (and desktop) client for power users and it’s become my daily driver.

Beauty is not only in physical appearance but in character.

One way #nostr clients can improve #privacy today would be to support the use of proxies (http or socks, possibly with authentication). Rather than reveal the client’s IP address to the relay, the proxy’s IP is all the relay will see.

I thought this could be solved today by using custom relays that are just proxies; for instance wss://my.relay.proxy/nos.lol could just be a #proxy for wss://nos.lol and all nos.lol would see is the IP address of my.relay.proxy but that interferes with #nip65 so it’s better for the client to directly support proxies.

One of these days #Nostr will get some attention (attack). Are we preparing for this? How would relay operators handle it?

#censorship #freedomofspeech

I just realized that DMs on #nostr are not as private as some people think they are. When you send a DM to someone on nostr, you signal to the entire flock and anyone (with the right tooling) can see who you’re communicating with and the frequency with which you communicate with that account.

How does one use #nostr without #zaps? 😔

I’ve been musing over the best strategy for uploading media to #nostr. Most people can already host a relay but I doubt they’ll want to host their own media, not to mention doing it for others.

Services like nostr.build allow you to upload and will serve your media but I get nervous about it going away one day and losing access to all my uploaded media.

This is where a protocol like #ipfs might be useful. Without doing much in the sense of a media server, you can run the ipfs daemon and pin files you intend to share and use the url of a public ipfs gateway to serve your files.

I’m going to experiment with hosting future media content on ipfs and see how it goes.

#nostr may not be censorship-resistant but it is censorship-agnostic.