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@ Greg
2023-08-05 18:59:53Hey folks, happy Saturday!
Thanks for all the support last week with the first attempt at a “this week in Nostr” newsletter, feedback is very welcome 🙂
The hope for this newsletter is to be technically focused (new NIPs, notable projects, latest debates, etc) and a way for folks to keep up with how the community and the protocol is developing.
Recent NIP Updates
1) Calendar Events 📅
Early this week Calendar Events got added as a new NIP, so now we have a standard way to create calendars and calendar events in a way that can be shared via Nostr. Looks like we’ll be able to kick Meetup and Eventbrite to the curb soon!
2) Proxy Tags (Proposed) 🌉
There’s been significant work done to bridge between other social media and Nostr (Twitter, ActivityPub, etc). One of the challenges is the amount of duplication that can happen. If this NIP is adopted, a proxy tag can be added to events so that a Nostr client can link an event that was originally in Twitter to the original Twitter url.
This has the approval of many folks including @fiatj so I bet we’ll see it merged soon.
Notable projects
NostrDB: shipped! 🚢
Mentioned last week, but shipped this week: NostrDB is an embedded relay within the Damus app built by @jb55 built to improve performance and make new features easier. By having a relay inside the client, the client gets far more efficient with pretty much everything. It’s a standalone project so I imagine many clients could adopt this and reap the benefits.
As he mentions in the announcement, it has enabled Damus to recommend follows, as well as speed up many resource intensive operations in the app. Definitely feels snappier to me 💪
Stemstr 🎵
Shipped this week, Stemstr is a way to connect with people over music. There seem to be budding collaboration tools as well meaning the music on stemstr is constantly evolving and being reshared. Quite an impressive project.
Relayable 🌍
One of the underrated challenges of using Nostr right now is curating your relays. For the snappiest experience in your clients, speed is important! Many relays are hosted around the globe but it’s not easy to keep track of that.
Relayable is a relay you can add that will automatically find the closest, fastest, reliable relay to you get you connected so you can get your notes as fast as possible. Really neat project, I’ve added that relay and it’s worked great
Ostrich.work ⚒️
A job board that runs on Nostr for Nostr-related jobs. Definitely check it out if you’re looking to work on Nostr projects or need to find someone to work with you on the same!
Secret Chats on Iris 🤫
DMs on Nostr aren’t entirely private because we’re still publishing the metadata about the DM on publicly accessible relays even if the content is encrypted. There’s been a desire to implement more secure chats through the Nostr protocol, there’s even a bounty from Human Right Foundation about it.
Looks like Iris pushed support for their take on secret chats, looking forward to people telling the community how they like it.
Learn to dev on Nostr course 📖
If you’re looking to get started building on Nostr, or just curious how it works under the hood, here’s a course that was put together just for you! It’s about 40 minutes long and it starts assuming no knowledge about Nostr.
Latest debates
DMs 🔒
DMs on Nostr (using the original NIP 4 protocol) isn’t very private, and there’s a desire from a large group on Nostriches to fix that natively in Nostr. Some folks are ok to leave it “unfixed” in Nostr and use protocols like Simplex because Nostr doesn’t have to solve all problems. Many ofthers thinks we can have our cake and eat it too with some effort on the Nostr protocol.
The debate rages on! I hope you weigh in wherever you see the discussion, your voice may help the community get to clarity.
Email notifications
Much of the world still relies on email to get notified about what’s happening across their various apps and services when they’re not regularly logging in. @karnage@snort.social believes it may help adoption of Nostr if there was a client that allowed users that opt-in to get email notifications for activity happening on Nostr.
There are other folks that feel like it wouldn’t be useful and in fact could make Nostr feel more spammy. I saw another thought that Nostr should be fairly self contained so bridges to other protocols (email being one) would pollute the network. It’s an interesting debate.
Events
I’ll keep a running list of Nostr-related events that I hear about (in person or virtual). If you wanna see something here please let me know! (DMs welcome) - Nostrasia Nov 1-3 in Tokyo & Hong Kong
I haven’t heard of any new ones this week but I hope the one in Chiavenna, Italy went well this week 🙂
Until next time 🫡
I realized this week I should be tagging each major contributor/author of each of the notable projects. I'll keep track of that from now on, so I can tag the people doing the awesome work in our community.
If I missed anything else, let me know, DMs welcome.
And to shamelessly rip off my favorite youtuber’s signoff “God bless, you’re super cute”