About a year and a half ago, the Nostr protocol was first mentioned in my channel — initially as the basis for a recurrent Lightning payments engine, and subsequently more detailed impressions were given regarding the protocol as a means of decentralized publishing. What has changed since then?

Unfortunately, not much. The adoption of Nostr is happening quite slowly, and even in Montelibero, no one really uses it properly (although Sondre from Liberstad is even writing his own software for Nostr, we don’t use it). I have tried several clients and settled on Amethyst for Android and Gossip for Windows. Web services are all terrible; none have gained traction. The vast majority of Nostr clients cosplay Twitter, except without character limits — which results in a complete lack of the ability to make posts with human-readable formatting. In principle, this is logical: even if one client understands a post with markup, another won’t bother with it. Decentralization encourages a certain degree of primitivism.

The browser application Alby has long relied on using a custodial Lightning wallet, but its support is ending soon, and now those interested are being offered to either set up their own node from the same provider or rent a ready-made one. Overall, this is sensible, but since I have no idea how to set up a node on a server, I had to just install it on my laptop, and now, as I understand it, post donations can only be sent when the node is online. Perhaps I’ll manage to do it properly eventually, but honestly, this task is not a high priority; usually, it’s just trivial stuff coming in anyway. For my part, I use these satoshis to reward other people’s posts—a simple cycle of gratitude in the blogosphere.

As for Nostr to start being widely adopted in Montelibero, it seems we need some serious persecution of freedom of speech; without that, no one will leave Telegram voluntarily. I understand perfectly)))