now | blog | wiki | recipes | bookmarks | contact | about | donate
* * * back home * * *
a friendly and open nostr client and relay
I have been using nostr since I first became aware of it a couple of years ago. Like the fediverse and activitypub, it aims to be a decentralized social networking protocol, allowing anyone around the world to use it and pariticipate in online discourse without the approval of a central authority.
While it has some similarities to the fediverse, such as being built around an open protocol and aiming for decentralized social discourse, it also differs in quite a few ways. You see, the way nostr itself is setup is a little different. On the fediverse, you sign up to an instance with a username or email address, and your identity is tied to that server. While you can migrate instances, it can be a hassle and all of your data might not make the transition properly. Because of this, you have to trust your instance admins not to shut down randomly, or better yet, run your own instance (like we are doing with neighborli).
On nostr, instead of signing up with an individual server and domain, we generate a keypair. We get a public key to share with others, and a private key to authorize nostr events. It works similarly to Bitcoin in this way, and because of how it works, once you generate your keypair and save it somewhere safe, you can interact with any nostr client you want with only that keypair, no need for a username and password.
Nostr clients are similar to fediverse instances - they are online platforms where you can sign in with your nostr key and interact with other people on nostr! Glyyph is a nostr client, and it also runs a nostr relay. I had originally planned on experimenting with building on nostr by building a minimal client from scratch, which I still might do in the future for the fun of it, but then I found ditto, a nostr setup originally put together by our friends at soapbox. We used to use the soapbox frontend when neighborli was built on pleroma, so I am quite familiar with how it works, and I found this project to be an exciting way to jumpstart running a nostr client and relay.
Glyyph isn't setup just yet, but we do have the domain. Sometime very soon, I am going to set aside a weekend and get this running, and begin building on top of it. I am excited to experiment further with nostr, and I think building up glyyph is going to be a fun way to do it.
Glyyph will aim to be a simple nostr platform that anyone can use and begin to understand how the nostr protocol works, and we will build on top of it as well to create a fun experience for everyone on nostr!
When Glyyph is up and running, we will update this page here so folks can help us test it out!
Here is a bit of the tech stack behind glyyph:
Glyyph source code can be found here.
It is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3+.