Okay, so people give out their
npub
, post it on their website, print it on their business card, etc. Awesome. Your npub
is basically a public key, so you own it. Nobody can take it away from you, cancel it, etc. It has none of the problems of Mastadon/Matrix where whoever owns the domain name of your homeserver can cancel you on a whim.But... if I hand out my
npub
to people, how tf are they supposed to find the relay that relays my notes?NIP19
nprofile
s with a relay entry are not a solution -- they just resurrect the Mastadon/Matrix problem. If I print my nprofile
on my business card and invest a ton of effort into getting that to people, the relay operator can just decide they don't like me and stop relaying my notes. You own your npub
but you don't own your nprofile.relay
.So basically, nostr has not solved the cancellation problem. It just shifted it somewhere else.
I'm kinda disappointed with this. The only solution to this problem that has stood the test of time is a DHT like bittorrent uses. The MPAA throws millions and millions of dollars at trying to kill bittorrent, and their DHT just sort of laughs. Bittorrent proved that DHTs work, so long as the DHT keys are network endpoints (IP address and port number) and nothing else. That way you can't spam the DHT -- you have to prove ownership of the endpoint to get it into the DHT, so your spamming capability is bounded by the number of IP addresses you own (incidentally this is why IPv6 DHTs are unlikely to happen anytime soon).
So... when are we getting a nostr DHT to map
npub
s to relays?Hint: if there isn't one yet, please follow the Bittorrent design as closely as possible. There are so many ways to fuck this up (like IPFS keeps doing). Use UDP, don't use connections (not even QUIC), be stateless like NFS is. Seriously, just copy what Bittorrent is doing, swap ed25519 with secpk256, and don't touch anything else.
npub
that I want to follow?npub
and are looking for its relay.npub
on the entire internet. Even if this were possible, it would cause awful spam attacks.npub
s, and now you've pointed out that validly-signed NIP65kind:10002
notes should be the values.nprofile
is a huge win over Mastodon, where your identity (that you don't own) is stuck on one single instance that can ban you at any time.nprofile
is good enough.