nostr is an Open-source Twitter Alternative
Nostr is a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter that operates on an open protocol. It does not rely on trusted central servers and is based on cryptographic keys and signatures for tamperproof security. Users run clients and can publish posts by signing them with their key and sending them to relays. Users can follow others by querying relays for posts from specific public keys. Clients fetch data from relays, display it chronologically, and can handle various types of structured data.
Features
- There are two components: clients and relays. Each user runs a client. Anyone can run a relay
- Every user is identified by a public key. Every post is signed. Every client validates these signatures
- Clients fetch data from relays of their choice and publish data to other relays of their choice. A relay doesn't talk to another relay, only directly to users
- To "follow" someone a user just instructs their client to query the relays it knows for posts from that public key
- On startup, a client queries data from all relays it knows for all users it follows (for example, all updates from the last day), then displays that data to the user chronologically
- A "post" can contain any kind of structured data, but the most used ones are going to find their way into the standard so all clients and relays can handle them seamlessly