Derek Ross

A recap of Nostr Valley III in State College, PA: eight talks and a panel on meeting people where they are, Nostr as infrastructure, bots with keys, protecting user data, and getting out of the echo chamber. All ten videos are on YouTube.

At Imagine IF, I explained Nostr to a key-management expert and never mentioned social media. Here is what Nostr as infrastructure means, the building blocks (relays, Blossom, nsite, napps, napplets, ngit, GRASP, FIPS), and how they fit together.

Replies to Nostr notes are moving from kind 1 to NIP-22 kind 1111 comments. It breaks things, and the people pushing back have real points. I went through the specs, the client code and the relay data. It's still worth doing, as long as we do it deliberately.

In high school I mocked Prince for changing his name to a symbol. At Paisley Park last weekend I finally got it. Own your name. Own your work. Own your money. No gatekeepers. That's the Bitcoin ethos. That's the Nostr ethos. Prince would have been one of us.

There was no Nostr signer for the Linux desktop, so every app and script wanted my nsec. Opal is a small daemon and a gem in the Omarchy bar that keeps the key in the keyring, signs for apps under rules I set, and brings notifications and status along.

I write in Omawrite now. Carnelian adds a Publish to Nostr entry to the Omarchy Share menu that uploads my images to Blossom, signs the article through Opal, and sends it to my own relays. One key, one dialog, done.