Nostr gets the idea of a portable identity right, but I think I prefer the Urbit method of owning an NFT for membership is better. It’s also portable (in a sense) but includes a monetary penalty to lose it which gives skin in the game. Just having to click “new key pair” is even less friction than signing up on Twitter or a Fediverse server.

They try to work around this with a verifier tied to a web server, but that’s not really a useful addition, it’s clearly just a work around.

They also want to integrate with lightning for Bitcoin tipping, despite the lightning core devs being idiots that have never gotten their product to a real usable state. They’re off chain processing that requires trust and they’re inherently untrustworthy with this tech.

Because it’s a protocol and new there’s no clients that support everything. People keep making new stuff to layer on top so the current idea is that you just use different clients to do the different things. Which I guess, but it just stinks of immaturity.

I do like that the relays are dumb and thus you can route around shitty activists that ban clients or otherwise try to control the signal. I think client-side-only verification mixed with the many-clients model opens up a lot of room for poor implementations and bugs.

I’d say I’m not sure it’s going to go anywhere, but I’m sure Jack and his awkward tech pals will throw enough money at it to get some clout.

Anyhow, that’s my Nostr review.