nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

The original post which launched the Nostr protocol, the "simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global “social” network:

• ... doesn’t rely on any trusted central server, hence it is resilient
• based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is tamperproof;
• does not rely on P2P techniques, therefore it works."

How it works in brief:

• "Everybody runs a client... native or web... Clients fetch data from relays of their choice and publish data to other relays of their choice
• write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself)...
• Anyone can run a relay ... very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don’t have to be trusted.
• To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people.
• Signatures are verified on the client side.

So to “follow” someone, the user "instructs their client to query the relays it knows for posts from that public key".

And posts "can contain any kind of structured data".

A few comparisons with other protocols (not including ATProto, which probably came later) are included, including a pretty devastating takedown of the Fediverse, before it explains how the Nostr approach tackles problems others cannot, how it scales, etc.

Some questions I had, answered:

• to follow someone, get their public key, make sure you're using at least one relay connected to them (or connected to relays connected to them? - are they chained?)
• no way (in protocol) to know how many people follow you