Тег: Nostr

Continuing to settle into Nostr: building a pyramid

In my previous post on this topic, I told you how I set up my own personal Nostr relay. I used strfry, which is quite popular for large relays because it is stable and performant. However, I also wanted ease of configuration so that I wouldn’t have to work magic with console commands every time. An attempt to attach a web control panel on top of the existing relay was unsuccessful. The Khatru relay suggested by Grok turned out to be a project abandoned in early 2026. But its developer is @fiatjaf, the author of Nostr itself, and he doesn’t just abandon projects. So I started looking into what he is developing as a replacement and came across Pyramid. This is a specialized relay for community management; meaning, while it can handle basic relay functions, it also helps manage various private and club-like features.

After some tinkering, I uninstalled strfry and installed pyramid. Voila — I have an engine for developing an online community, and half a day later, the first invited client of the new relay appears. We discuss the process on Nostr in the comments of my previous post, and I tag the software creator. Fiatjaf likes this comment and then comes to me on Telegram, congratulates me on installing Pyramid, and starts asking for feedback on both the relay and Nostr in general. We already had a chat history from the time when he created a popular custodial Lightning wallet in the form of a Telegram bot, and I actively promoted it (that project was wound down, and Nostr emerged to replace it).

Anyway, I gave all the feedback I was capable of, given my limited experience and competence:

  • I asked for a more convenient format for adding a new user to the relay: the user clicks to leave a request, I click to approve or deny the request — basically, the familiar Telegram method. I received a promise that this would be done soon.
  • I asked for a monitoring service for relay availability from different corners of the network, suggesting an implementation option that doesn’t require renting servers all over the world. Fiatjaf said the option was doubtful, but he would try to attach one third-party service instead.
  • I asked for a service for local key generation so that new users could be sure that the Nostr client would not have access to their private key. He replied that he had already built a whole set of such utilities — both for offline key generation and for offline event signing, so security advocates can sleep soundly.

That’s where my imagination ran out for now, but I certainly assume that readers have or will soon have their own brilliant ideas.

Anyway, for anyone interested in testing a specialized relay for community management, welcome. Leave requests in the comments, and I will send the invitation link via DM — for now, this is the not-so-convenient connection mechanism in place.

https://stuff.fiatjaf.com — a collection of various things from the author of Nostr

https://github.com/fiatjaf/pyramid — description of the Pyramid relay

https://relay.ancapchan.info — my relay, where you can observe the community participant tree growing and publications appearing from them

I hope you won’t need a special guide on how to set up a Nostr account. Since it is a very decentralized ecosystem, there are already tons of ways to enter it, as well as ways to use it. But anyway, let me recommend that you start exploring via the Nostria client. I also know the developer there, Sondre Bjellos, a participant in the Liberstad and Montelibero projects; he lives three kilometers away from me (when he doesn’t head back to his native Norway, of course) and is very actively developing his client.

Decentralization of publications, homework

Yesterday, I felt a sudden urge to have my own personal relay for Nostr. My system administration skills are practically zero; even the ancapchan.info site was once built and configured for me without my involvement. But since then, LLMs have appeared, and it would have been a sin not to use them. So, I dug into Grok, and after a few hours of tinkering, the relay relay.ancapchan.info was up and running. This fully revealed the peculiarities of the protocol’s decentralization. For instance, broadcasting a test message only through my single relay turned out to be convenient via the Snort client, syncing relays is convenient via Amethyst on Android, and Nostria knows how to broadcast an arbitrary event as raw JSON, and so on.

The purpose of a personal relay is to store a full archive of my publications, private messages, and everything else, as well as the content of those I follow. This is a good step toward local autonomy, although still far from the ideal I described in the third “Notes on Decentralization”. I still have to figure out backups and content management, and then, perhaps, it will come to providing this relay for use by the local community. And if it proves to be in demand by the community, then it will be, again, a step toward centralization: someone bothers with their own server, and someone uses shared ones—why not.

At this rate, I’ll even properly connect a wallet to Nostr (currently it only works conveniently for receiving), set up a Lightning node, or even start “vibecoding” something…

Readers are also pleasing me with their examples of using neural networks. For instance, one of them opened a resource where they post AI-narrated books for free, including those on libertarianism/Austrian Economics. Of course, a certain amount of cringe remains in AI narration, but it is so much cheaper that it’s a sin not to use it. For those who find it easier to listen than to read, welcome: website, Telegram bot. By the way, the AI narrations of my two books are already there (I’ve already added direct download links to my book pages: Ancap, War).

I suggest investing in Nostria

In brief

Sondre Bjellos, an activist in two communities, the Norwegian Liberstad and the Montenegrin Montelibero, with extensive experience in building decentralized systems, is launching a startup called Nostria. Until May 31, anyone interested can invest in it at the pre-seed stage on quite favorable terms. For participants of the Montelibero tokenomics, there is an opportunity to form an investor pool to gain greater control over the project.

Now in more detail

Nostr is a decentralized protocol for exchanging “notes and other things” via relays. I have been using it for quite a while now to publish my notes; I see great potential in it and am always glad when someone takes it upon themselves to develop it.

The idea of the Nostr protocol is that relays store their users’ content in JSON format and provide it to other relays upon request. Such content can also be a Bitcoin payment transaction via the Lightning protocol; thus, Bitcoin payments are natively integrated into Nostr, allowing for the decentralized provision of both content monetization and storage monetization (it is precisely in the area of monetization, for example, where the nearest analog to Nostr, the ActivityPub protocol, has its weak point).

The startup Nostria intends to:

  1. Develop its own client for the Nostr protocol
  2. Create a network of several relays in different parts of the world to ensure fast ping and wide bandwidth for its users (performance speed is the bane of decentralized systems)
  3. Promote, at the protocol level, the idea of specialized relays for storing only user metadata, which will offload large relays by distributing users more evenly across relays, and drastically speed up the collection of all messages related to a particular account and their delivery to clients.
  4. Monetize its service through premium services, offering users dedicated relays, a connection to a dedicated Lightning node, a human-readable name tied to a public key, media content storage, and other perks.
  5. Keep all code open on GitHub, as is proper for decentralized systems.

In this video, Sondre talks about his plans:

Those who prefer text over video can check out the pdf.

For now, Nostria’s medium-term goal is to catch up and surpass the struggling Bluesky. In the longer perspective, it should result in a decentralized solution that one wouldn’t be ashamed to migrate to from Telegram, once Durov finally declares that state security is incomparably more important than user convenience and security.

To launch the MVP, a pre-seed investment round is taking place until May 31. Putting it in plain language: Sondre wants to raise 30 thousand dollars by the end of May, and then spend ten thousand a month throughout the summer to bring the project into commercial operation. First month – hardware deployment. Second – software refinement. Third – marketing. In the autumn, when the project is ready to be shown to more serious investors, fundraising for global expansion will continue, and those who invested at the preliminary stage will have a preferential right to reinvest to maintain their share in the project, and their preliminary investments will be credited to the share capital with a coefficient of 1.15.

By default, investments are attracted in Bitcoin using the decentralized crowdfunding service Angor. Sondre has also released a separate video showing how the investing process works.

Important: the project founder can only unlock the collected funds after confirming the completion of the stated development stage. Until that moment, an investor can request their investment back at any time. All these features are implemented through the relatively simple smart contract mechanism that exists in Bitcoin and do not require the interference of a third trusted party.

However, the entry threshold for these investments is currently quite high: the minimum amount to receive any bonuses is 1000 dollars. Therefore, a solution suggests itself: participants of the Montelibero tokenomics can gather a pool of small investments and invest jointly as a large entity. I want to organize such a pool. My benefits: I will receive various non-monetary bonuses such as a premium account subscription. The benefits for co-investors, besides the financial return on investment: through me (or directly, if agreed upon), they will have convenient feedback with the developers, which means influence over the future functionality of both Nostria and, indirectly, the entire Nostr protocol.

Therefore, I have created a pristine Stellar account, issued the NostriaPre token on it, and created an order to sell it for EURMTL. You have until the end of May to buy this token; then I will also buy as much as possible, close the sell order, and transfer all collected EURMTL to Sondre. In the autumn, Sondre will set up an official Stellar account for his startup and create an order to sell official tokens for NostriaPre tokens at a rate of 1.15. When the startup begins to generate income from premium account services, the distributable profit for token holders will be accrued monthly proportional to the number of tokens.

To purchase the NostriaPre token, you must first open a trust line to it. Your Stellar wallet should have this capability. Token name: NostriaPre. Issuer’s public key: GABAZTSE4DOD4JKFPWQYK5QPUSW57QNZBJBREU2K2UFSGWPHBHNYF46A

This is, for example, how the trust line opening dialog looks in the Sunce
wallet.

Soon, the trust line will also be possible to open via a direct link.

I don’t want to overload the post with detailed instructions on using various types of Stellar wallets, as I assume the pool will be joined by those who already participate in the Montelibero tokenomics (an instruction is even posted on my website, but it is very outdated and I haven’t gotten around to updating it). But if you want to jump in from scratch in “Shut up and take my money” mode, please ask questions in the comments or via DM.

Nostr, first impressions

After the release of the post about regular automatic payments via Lightning using the Nostr protocol, it was quite logical to try and understand what this protocol is, what it can be used for, and what its prospects are.

To start, I familiarized myself with a selection of materials from Tony and the official description on GitHub from the protocol’s author. In short: Nostr is a protocol for the decentralized exchange of small texts (more precisely, scripts in JSON format).

  • Any server owner can run their own relay, which will receive such messages, store them, and forward them.
  • Any developer can write their own client that connects to one or more such relays, receives messages from them, filters and beautifies them if desired before showing them to the user (for example, loading media where there were links to it in the message), and sends the user’s messages to the relay.
  • Any user can download a client, configure which relays it connects to (if the client allows), and enjoy life.

On GitHub, it is easy to find Nostr libraries for several languages, clients (one could make a fork adapted for Montelibero), and relays (again, one can run their own relay for Montelibero’s needs).

To set up a Nostr account, it is sufficient to generate a pair of private and public keys; after that, the private key is stored, and the public one can be shared far and wide (here is mine: npub1jj4xxj47j9yjthhrd2kwklx5vl9j45ruvhl0ftdfamf7v6nx799ssf45q3), just as the creators of asymmetric encryption intended. Keys can be generated directly within a particular Nostr client (I generated mine in the Alby browser extension), via a special service, or for security, one can use a completely custom script if they have the expertise (I do not). However, I managed to link my Nostr public key to the name ancapchan@getalby.com (so-called NIP5 verification), create my own Lightning address ⚡ancapchan2018@gmail.com (which masks the address ⚡ancapchan@getalby.com), as well as link this browser extension to my website, so now, if you have it installed, its icon on the ancapchan.info website changes from yellow to blue, and when you click it, you will see an invitation to send a donation:

In general, Lightning is natively integrated into the Nostr protocol as a means of transferring value. For instance, social network clients based on Nostr offer “zaps” instead of likes, which are accompanied by the sending of a small amount of satoshis. In addition, money in the system can be used for paid relays that offer additional functionality, such as spam filters.

Overall, the protocol seems promising to me. I hope it will soon acquire a sufficiently convenient infrastructure, more people will join, and it will gradually be able to draw the attention away from current centralized solutions. I also hope that the collective intelligence of the developers participating in the Montelibero project will be enough to create their own Nostr-based solutions: their own relay, a bridge to Telegram, and much more that hasn’t even occurred to me yet.