1 year later, why Nostr still resonates

One year ago I wrote the article Why Nostr resonates in Dutch and English after I visited the Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023 conference and the first Nostrdam event. It got published at bitcoinfocus.nl (translated in Dutch). The main reason why I wrote that piece is that I felt that my gut feeling was expanding that Nostr is going to change many things on the web.

After the article was published, one of the first things I did was setting up this page on my website: https://sebastix.nl/nostr-research-and-development. The page contains this section (which I need to update): One metric I would like to highlight, the number of repositories on Github. Compared to a year a go, there already more than 1130 repositories now on Github tagged with Nostr. Let’s compare this number to social media protocols and decentralized platforms (24-10-2024):

• Fediverse: 522
• ATProto: 159
• Scuttlebot: 49
• Farcaster: 202
• Mastodon: 1407
• ActivityPub: 444 Nostr is growing. There are many Nostr repositories not hosted on Github, so the total number of Nostr reposities are higher. I know many devs are using their own Git servers to host it. We’re even capable of setting up Nostr native Git repositories (for example, see https://gitworkshop.dev/repos). Nostr will make Github absolute.

Let me continue summarise my personal Nostr hightlights of last year.

Organising Nostr meetups

This is me playing around with the NostrDebug tool showing how you can query data from Nostr relays. Jurjen is standing behind me. He is responsible for setting up some Nostr meetups. He is one of the people I’ve met this year who I’m sure I will have a long-term friendship with.

OpenSats grant for Nostr-PHP

In december 2023 I submitted my application for a OpenSats grant for the further development of the Nostr-PHP helper library. After some months I finally got the message that my application was approved… When I got the message I was really stoked and excited. It’s great form of appreciation for the work I had done so for and with this grant I get the opportunity to take the work to another level. So please check out the work done for so far:

• https://nostr-php.dev

• https://github.com/nostrver-se/nostr-php

  Meeting Dries

  One of my goosebumps moments I had in 2022 when I saw that the founder of Drupal (and still tech lead) Dries Buytaert posted ’Nostr, love at first sight’ on his blog. These are the type of very rare moments where two different worlds merge. Later on I noticed that Dries would come the yearly Dutch Drupal event so this was a perfect opportunity to meet in person and have some Nostr talks with him. I admire the work he his doing for Drupal and the community. I hope we can bridge Nostr stuff in some way between those worlds (this in general applies for any FOSS project out there). Here is my recap of that Drupal event.

  Attending Nostriga

  A conference where history is made and written. I felt it immediately at the first sessions I attended. I also pushed myself out of my comfort zone with a keynote called ‘POSSE with Nostr - how we pivot away from API’s with one of Nostr superpowers’. You can find the presentation here. It is recorded, but I’m not sure if and when it gets published.

  Nostr billboard advertisement

  This advertisment was displayed on a billboard besides the A58 highway in The Netherlands from September 2nd till September 16th 2024. I share all the assets used for this ad and more footage of the billboard ad here: https://gitlab.com/sebastix-group/nostr/nostr-ads. My goal was to set an example how we could promote Nostr in more traditional ways and inspire other to do the same. In Brazil a fundraiser was achieved to to something similar there: https://geyser.fund/project/nostrifybrazil.

  Volunteering at Nostr booths growNostr

  This was such a great motivating expierence. Attending as a volunteer at the Nostr booth during the Bitcoin Amsterdam 2024 conference. Please read my note with all the lessons I learned here.

  The other stuff

• The Nostr related blog articles I wrote past year:

  • Run a Nostr relay with your own policies (02-04-2024)
  • Why social networks should be based on commons (03-01-2024)
  • How could Drupal adopt Nostr? (30-12-2023)
  • Nostr integration for CCHS.social (21-12-2023)
• https://ccns.nostrver.se CCNS stands for Community Curated Nostr Stuff. At the end of 2023 I started to build this project. I forked an existing Drupal project of mine (https://cchs.social) to create a link aggregation website inspired by stacker.news. At the beginning of 2024 I also joined the TopBuilder 2024 contest which was a productive period getting to know new people in the Bitcoin and Nostr space.
• https://nuxstr.nostrver.se PHP is not my only language I use to build stuff. As a fullstack webdeveloper I also work with Javascript. Many Nostr clients are made with Javascript frameworks or other more client-side focused tools. Vuejs is currently my Javascript framework I’m the most convenient with. With Vuejs I started to tinker around with Nuxt combined with NDK and pretty soon I created a starter template for Vue / Nuxt developers.
• ZapLamp This is a neat DIY package from LNbits. Powered by a Arduino ESP32 dev board it was running a 24/7 livestream on zap.stream at my office and flashes when you send a zap to my lightning address sebastian@lnd.sebastix.com.
• https://nosto.re From the beginning the Blossom spec was publishing by @hzrd49 and @Stuart I immediately took the opportunity to tinker with it. This website is a result of that tinkering and can be used to distribute your blobs through Nostr. I’m also running a relay for transmitting Blossom Nostr events wss://relay.nosto.re.
• Relays I maintain

I’m still sharing my contributions on https://nostrver.se/ where I publish my weekly Nostr related stuff I worked on. Also this website is build by Drupal where I use the Simple and Nostr NIP-23 modules to crosspost the notes and long-form content to the Nostr network.

People I met thanks to Nostr

• Bitpopart We both have a background in arts and we also both love cycling. Another example how two worlds / interests are merged into one here.
• Arjen In less than 6 months you decided to quite your job as a C# dev and devops engineer to work on Nostr fulltime. I do remember your question about some Nostr basics this summer but now I have the feeling you are deeper in some Nostr stuff than I am.
• Jeroen We’ve met at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023 and we live in the same area. So catching up and having Nostr talks with coffee is really inspiring!
• Alex Gleason We shortly met at Nostriga but afterwards you were in Amsterdam with your wife. I appreciate your time you set free for out meetup there! Thanks for insights that we are not only just some developers building stuff, but that we are more of artist type tying technical things together to invent new features with Nostr.
• Nathan Day

• Wouter Constant

  Next year

  In general I will continue doing what I’ve done last year. Besides the time I spent on Nostr stuff, I’m still very busy with Drupal related work for my customers. I hope I can get the opportunity to work on a paid client project related to Nostr. Even more better will be to combine my Drupal expertise with Nostr as paid projects for customers.

  Building a new Nostr application

  When I look at my Nostr backlog where I just put everything the many ideas I have, there are quite some interesting concepts there for building Nostr applications. Filtering out, I think these three are the most exiting ones:

• nEcho, a micro app for optimising your reach via Nostr
• Nostrides.cc platform where you can share Nostr activity events (NIP-113)

• A child-friendly video web app with parent-curated content

  Nostr & Drupal

  When working out a new idea for a Nostr client, I’m trying to combine my expertises into one solution. That’s why I also build and maintain some Nostr contrib modules for Drupal.

• Nostr Simple Publish Drupal module to cross-post notes from Drupal to Nostr
• Nostr long-form content NIP-23 Drupal module to cross-post Markdown formatted content from Drupal to Nostr
• Nostr internet identifier NIP-05 Drupal module to setup Nostr internet identifier addresses with Drupal.
• Nostr NDK Includes the Javascript library Nostr Dev Kit (NDK) in a Drupal project. One of my (very) ambitious goals is to build a Drupal powered Nostr (website) package with the following main features:
• Able to login into Drupal with your Nostr keypair
• Cross-post content to the Nostr network
• Fetch your Nostr content from the Nostr content
• Serve as a content management system (CMS) for your Nostr events
• Serve as a framework to build a hybride Nostr web application

• Run and maintain a Nostr relay with custom policies

  Nostr-PHP

  With all updates in NIPs and new NIPs being added to the protocol, this helper library will never be finished. As the sole maintainer of this library I would like to invite others to join as a maintainer or just be a contributor to the library. PHP is big on the web, but there are not many PHP developers active yet using Nostr.

  Grow Nostr outside the Bitcoin community

  We are working out a submission to host a Nostr stand at FOSDEM 2025. If approved, it will be the first time (as far as I know) that Nostr will be present at a conference outside the context of Bitcoin. The audience at FOSDEM is technical oriented, so I’m really curious what type of feedback we will receive.

Let’s finish this article with some random Nostr photo’s from last year. Cheers!