Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is a new, simple, open and censorship resistant protocol, currently the developers are focused on building a decentralized social network based mainly on public and private keys.
To achieve this, clients will connect to different relays and publish messages called events. Nostr uses the notion of a simple relay and a smart client that will take care of signing the events using a pair of keys to authenticate the person.
https://nostr.how/the-protocol
With this approach, everything is public, i.e. it is easy to know who you are talking to in the case of a private discussion (message content is encrypted) or how often you publish content.
The website https://www.nostrapps.com/ has some interesting and necessary resources to start interacting with Nostr
For more details, JohnOnChain’s article on Discover Bitcoin (in French) can be read here: https://decouvrebitcoin.fr/nostr/
The mixnet
Nym is building an infrastructure to protect your privacy, this is the first block necessary to ensure total freedom on the Internet.
Similar to Tor or i2p, Nym’s mixnet adds 2 components necessary to achieve their goal and completely protect the users of the network:
False traffic to prevent an ISP for example to know when a person interacts with a service (website, bitcoin wallet, …)
Regular time interval in the transmitted information to avoid deducing the application used (telephony, web browsing, …)
It is therefore on this new value proposition that we wanted to experiment with the members of Pineapple Proxy on this infrastructure.
Nostr on Nym
Using Nym’s mixnet cannot therefore protect the metadata generated when a person interacts with the protocol, but it can prevent your ISP from knowing that you are using Nostr, which relay you are interacting with, how many times you connect, or what potential interactions you have.
A second interesting point is that a relay operator can easily link your public key with your geographical location based on your IP.
It is essentially on these elements that we decided to experiment with Nostr-nym, an application that allows any relay operator to make it accessible on the mixnet in order to protect the privacy of users. We focused on a generic application in order to support all relays (future and current).
The only difference for a user will be to specify an nym-client id (similar to a domain name) instead of a URL in their Nostr client.
A crucial step still needs to be developed, the fact that a Nostr client can use a relay only accessible via the mixnet. For demonstration purposes, a command line light client could be developed to test the proposed concept.
So ?
Nostr on Nym is for us a solution that would allow any user to have a right to privacy and freedom of expression without even asking the question thanks to this model that offers it by default.
It’s also the time to collaborate and assemble a common brain to reach the goal of seeing Nostr as a protocol using Nym to carry information. This collective intelligence has already given birth to an explanation of Nostr and a demonstration of Nostr-Nym, all available here.
Ressources
What is Pineapple proxy
We're a zesty collective of whacky, warm individuals who are passionate about making privacy convenient for everyone, an inalienable human right. We believe in collective intelligence, empathy, and collaboration as how we'll make privacy a meaningful reality. Give us a visit on pnproxy.org
Nostr
Our npub to find us:
Clients (non-exhaustive list)
Complements
Nym
