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2026-10-30 20:13:06 UTC

Sebastix on Nostr: Submitted 🤞🏻 ...

Submitted 🤞🏻
quoting

The 2025 submission: https://drive.proton.me/urls/NCW923YGA8#ro5h5d6sLViA

The 2026 submission: https://drive.proton.me/urls/R01N7WDQ7G#vzh9PJV5BBpO

This is the submission for a Nostr stand at FOSDEM 2027:

Project name

Nostr

Description

Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is an open, decentralized protocol for signed data. Users own a keypair instead of an account; they sign events and publish them to independent relays, and every client can read them. There is no central server, no company, no token.

Most people know Nostr as a decentralized Twitter alternative. The protocol is far more general: the NIPs (Nostr Implementation Possibilities) define over 180 event kinds, implemented by independent clients, relays and libraries in many languages. At this stand, maintainers and developers show the "Other Stuff":

The protocol's reference repository has around 15,000 stars and 1,200 forks across its two main repos, and over 200 people have contributed to the specification.

Project website

https://github.com/nostr-protocol

Source code

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips (Nostr Implementation Possibilities)

Project Theme

World Wide Web

Do you want a stand for the entire event or just for one day?

Entire event

Do you like to be placed next to a specific project?

Other social networking projects or communication protocols

Why do you want to be at FOSDEM?

We want to be at FOSDEM because it’s the perfect place to connect with like-minded developers and open-source enthusiasts who share our passion for decentralization, innovation, and building open, permissionless technologies. FOSDEM fosters collaboration and the growth of community-driven projects, and Nostr is a good fit as a grassroots project with an open protocol and a commitment to building communication technology with resilience and simplicity in mind.

Nostr has no company, foundation or central team behind it. The protocol grows through the people who implement it, and FOSDEM is where we find them: developers who self-host, care about open standards and are able to criticize approaches and technologies in well-founded arguments.

We want to show a side of Nostr that is rarely seen. It is not a Bitcoin project and not a Twitter clone, but a general protocol for signed data, now used for git collaboration, file storage, encrypted group chat, mesh networking and publicly funded education infrastructure. It needs no blockchain, no token and no payment to work.

Because identities are keys and content can live on any number of independent relays, no single operator can lock users out or take their data with them. We think that matters for open communication.

We also would like to talk with the other open communication protocols at FOSDEM, such as Matrix, XMPP, ActivityPub, ATProto and Delta Chat, about shared problems like spam, moderation, identity and interoperability.

Why do the people that comes to FOSDEM may watch your project?

FOSDEM visitors care about owning their tools, self-hosting, and open standards. Nostr provides them with all three for social and communication software. At our stand, people can try it hands-on: create a keypair and see the same identity, follows, and posts appear across independent apps, or push to a Git repository through ngit without any central forge.

We will also show Nostr beyond decentralized and censorship-resistant microblogging, e.g., file storage with Blossom, encrypted group messaging with Marmot, mesh networking with FIPS, or TEPP, an approach to building child-safe access to the internet, and answer questions around these projects.

Nostr provides a small set of shared building blocks: signed events, relays, subscriptions, and conventions that applications can extend. The people at the stand maintain libraries, run relays, and develop apps, so visitors can ask the people building directly and get an idea of where to start if interested.

What is the relation between the project and the primary contact?

Sebastian is an independent creative/full-stack web developer and the maintainer of the Nostr-PHP library, which was supported b a one-year OpenSats grant in 2024. Besides this project, he also contributes by developing Nostr modules for Drupal. Sebastian is also one of the co-founders of the nonprofit Web of Trust Foundation, based in the Netherlands, which is building the TEPP protocol and a YouTube Kids reference application: https://kubo.watch. Another project is Nyves (https://nyves.nl), which aims to bring back Hyves, a Dutch social network with more than 9 million profiles, using Nostr.

“Since I first went online in 1998, I've been highly interested in online communities, social networking, and new ways of digital interaction. The internet has changed radically in the last decade, and that change is not serving our interests. It's fair to say the web is broken in many ways. With Nostr, we can fix this.”

What is the relation between the project and the secondary contact?

Steffen works on open education infrastructures and connects education-related services and platforms using Nostr. He is the lead developer and maintainer of Edufeed (https://edufeed.org, source: https://git.edufeed.org/edufeed/edufeed-app), a decentralized platform for open educational resources, articles, wikis, calendar events and communities built on Nostr. The approach of connecting education infrastructures via Nostr has been funded several times by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMBFSFJ, [ComCal], [edufeed], [KI-NOPE]). Steffen also develops nope-mcp (https://git.edufeed.org/edufeed/nope-mcp, live at https://mcp.edufeed.org), an MCP server that lets AI agents search and cite more than 100,000 openly licensed educational resources published on Nostr relays. Edufeed's own development happens on Nostr: issues and pull requests go through ngit (https://gitworkshop.dev/laoc.xyz).

Anything else you like to add?

We would like to attend with a group of volunteers from different Nostr projects, as we did in 2025.

Since Nostr is often associated with Bitcoin or with individual investors, we want to be clear about this: Nostr is not a blockchain project. There are no tokens and no fees, and using it requires no payment. No company owns the protocol or its specification. Development has been supported by donations from several sources, including private donors and nonprofit grant programs such as OpenSats, and by public funding for projects built on Nostr. Payment features such as Bitcoin can be added by applications, but they are optional and not part of the core protocol.

Please reach out to us if there are any questions. We are looking forward to presenting Nostr as a protocol at FOSDEM.

Author Public Key
npub1qe3e5wrvnsgpggtkytxteaqfprz0rgxr8c3l34kk3a9t7e2l3acslezefe