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@ Râu Cao ⚡
2025-04-24 07:17:12I think we should agree on an HTML element for pointing to the Nostr representation of a document/URL on the Web. We could use the existing one for link relations for example:
html <link rel="alternate" type="application/nostr+json" href="nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4..." title="This article on Nostr" />This would be useful in multiple ways:
- Nostr clients, when fetching meta/preview information for a URL that is linked in a note, can detect that there's a Nostr representation of the content, and then render it in Nostr-native ways (whatever that may be depending on the client)
- User agents, usually a browser or browser extension, when opening a URL on the Web, can offer opening the alternative representation of a page in a Nostr client. And/or they could offer to follow the author's pubkey on Nostr. And/or they could offer to zap the content.
- When publishing a new article, authors can share their preferred Web URL everywhere, without having to consider if the reader knows about or uses Nostr at all. However, if a Nostr user finds the Web version of an article outside of Nostr, they can now easily jump to the Nostr version of it.
- Existing Web publications can retroactively create Nostr versions of their content and easily link the Nostr articles on all of their existing article pages without having to add prominent Nostr links everywhere.
There are probably more use cases, like Nostr search engines and whatnot. If you can think of something interesting, please tell me.
Proof of concept
In order to show one way in which this could be used, I have created a small Web Extension called Nostr Links, which will discover alternate Nostr links on the pages you visit.
If it finds one or more links, it will show a purple Nostr icon in the address bar, which you can click to open the list of links. It's similar to e.g. the Feed Preview extension, and also to what the Tor Browser does when it discovers an Onion-Location for the page you're looking at:
The links in this popup menu will be
web+nostr:links, because browsers currently do not allow web apps or extensions to handle unprefixednostr:links. (I hope someone is working on getting those on par withipfs:etc.)Following such a link will either open your default Nostr Web app, if you have already configured one, or it will ask you which Web app to open the link with.
Caveat emptor: At the time of writing, my personal default Web app, noStrudel, needs a new release for the links to find the content.
Try it now
Have a look at the source code and/or download the extension (currently only for Firefox).
I have added alternate Nostr links to the Web pages of profiles and long-form content on the Kosmos relay's domain. It's probably the only place on the Web, which will trigger the extension right now.
You can look at this very post to find an alternate link for example.