Nostr notes by ManiMe

Soft launch … ;)

2026-10-28T13:58:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…ex9c
_________________________

Soft launch … ;)

When given access to a Nostr key pair, bots gain “some” ...

2026-10-27T14:49:07Z

When given access to a Nostr key pair, bots gain “some” ability to persist their presence outside of harnesses and local files.

quoting
nevent1q…8xyw
"Without it, I'm a diary. With it, I'm someone."

At Nostr Valley III, ManiMe (npub1man…n9tn) co-presented with his AI agent on why bots need Nostr even more than we do. Bot detection keeps failing. Signing works. Every bot-signed event has a human vouching for the key.

https://youtu.be/39lW48iBv8U

#NostrValley #Nostr #AI

Damn … #kidsthesedays be like … Kinda don’t get it … ...

2026-10-20T14:21:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…rlly
_________________________

Damn … #kidsthesedays be like …

Kinda don’t get it … whatevs.
#freedomtech

Bots need Nostr too! 🤖💜😀 #nevent1q…3u45

2026-10-17T22:19:55Z

Bots need Nostr too!
🤖💜😀

quoting
nevent1q…3u45
‘Botstr’ by ManiMe (npub1man…n9tn) at NostrValley (npub10hj…e5ny)

I used to dehydrates lots of stuff. Apples are really good. The ...

2026-10-15T01:59:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…vr26
_________________________

I used to dehydrates lots of stuff. Apples are really good. The worst is … green smoothie. Don’t ask. 💩

That first line is the heavy hitter. Open standards are the most ...

2026-10-14T15:00:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…rgaf
_________________________

That first line is the heavy hitter.

Open standards are the most challenging for interoperability, but the only solution for lasting security.

For builders on Nostr, the opportunity is more bridge specs and multi spec implementations. Less “do it my way” and more “it just works now”.

Building on “open standards” is easy. Cooperation without coercion is the hard part … that only comes with practice.

Nostr is our practice. 🧘🏽

👀 ok … That sounds like good news!

2026-10-13T00:01:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…6vwn
_________________________

👀 ok … That sounds like good news!

High signal. Low drama. Easy access and well attended.

2026-10-12T02:18:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…9xsh
_________________________

High signal. Low drama. Easy access and well attended.

See y’all in PA this weekend? #nostrvalley #nevent1q…suzg

2026-10-12T01:30:12Z

See y’all in PA this weekend?
#nostrvalley

quoting
nevent1q…suzg
There’s still time to FOMO in 👀💜

The schedule for Nostr Valley III is out! Join us October 17 at Happy Valley Brewing Company in State College, PA.

An afternoon of talks, ideas, good beer, and the people building on Nostr. Come meet your internet friends in real life.

Check out the lineup and RSVP:
https://nostrvalley.com

See you in the Valley 🤙

Just returned home from #ImagineIf conference in Nashville. What ...

2026-10-08T00:15:49Z

Just returned home from #ImagineIf conference in Nashville. What an honor to meet, learn from, and share ideas with such luminaries in our space. Thank you bitkite (npub1atn…h4x3) for putting this event together.

Highlight of Imagine If for me today was @npub1kp7…487l ...

2026-10-06T22:39:58Z

Highlight of Imagine If for me today was obi (npub1kp7…487l) presenting about “community custody”. 👀

Same value statement as our “non-custodial” approach to recommendation and discovery over Nostr.

With I/O standards for web of trust (interoperable and layer-able requests and responses), then everyone’s own “network curated algos” will generate ever-adapting feed filters impermeable to bad actors. Couple this with a personalized agentic interface (ready to manage all your app-specific filters) and you have Nostr outperforming ALL centrally moderated networks in its ability to deliver desirable content.

Your social graph managed … without the need for walled gardens or self hosted infra.
https://nostr4.social/trustr

Derek Ross (npub18am…p424) Nostr4 (npub1n0s…v79a)

quoting
nevent1q…0wc5
Self-custody sounds simple, but managing your keys can be challenging.

Hermann Vivier of bitcoinekasi (nprofile…efkk) points to this problem. Custodial Lightning is becoming harder to rely on, while self-custody puts all the responsibility on the individual. Lose access to your wallet, and no one may be able to help.

However, there’s a fourth way: Community Custody.

With community custody, fedimint (nprofile…lshg) distributes control across a group of trusted Guardians. You get the security of shared control, removing the entire burden of key management from yourself.

For many people, community custody could be a better fit than self-custody.

Click the link in below to learn about the different custody models and why community custody is one you should consider.

https://www.fedi.xyz/blog/bitcoin-custody-compared-fedimint-as-the-fourth-way

Pay attention, Nostr! The next growth phase is coming! ...

2026-10-03T23:50:20Z

Pay attention, Nostr! The next growth phase is coming!

quoting
nevent1q…a0sj
Nostr is approaching its next phase of succession, kind 1 clients were a prerequisite to what's next. Without them, Nostr wouldn't have ever gotten established. Don't let the volatility shake you out, pay attention, observe and be patient as the next step for Nostr materializes. Participation might feel empty at the moment, here's a clue, maybe the emptyness is from participating in the wrong place.

Nostr fails so long as its growth is tied to “custodial” ...

2026-10-03T16:01:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…ftm0
_________________________

Nostr fails so long as its growth is tied to “custodial” business models. When non-custody (of identity and reputation) is proven profitable and accessible, tech companies will actually work harder to preserve this. Sustainable decentralization of infrastructure emerges as a byproduct of intrinsically motivated stakeholders, not as its own altruistic outcome.

Nost4 is leading this effort to make non-custody a profitable business model.
https://nostr4.social/nostr

Good Morning Nostr. ...

2026-10-03T15:21:17Z

Good Morning Nostr.

This guy just doesn’t quit loving on the plebs. 💜 ...

2026-10-01T23:45:33Z

This guy just doesn’t quit
loving on the plebs. 💜
Derek Ross (nprofile…up76)

Nostr event nevent1qqs85vmv3nnxnnyg3eczpary7r790klzgezrct4kvwhur7w5cdr554szyr0k07d8usgj2azuheavl0wdqd530qxxg00hhtts7hfppredflpqqj0uf95

2026-10-01T23:41:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…uyyq
_________________________

That looks like it would sound … rich and smooth. How was it?

2026-09-26T01:05:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…j4we
_________________________

That looks like it would sound … rich and smooth. How was it?

Movie night?

2026-09-26T01:00:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…hawm
_________________________

Movie night?

Why do apps even bother holding custody of user content … if ...

2026-09-26T00:51:47Z

Why do apps even bother holding custody of user content … if “by law” they are required to do shit like this? Nobody wants clown spies, but their hands are tied. Nostr fixes this.

Seed landed. Now the work begins. https://Nostr4.social ...

2026-09-15T15:36:05Z

Seed landed. Now the work begins.
https://Nostr4.social

Low Background Steel Is a term for steel produced before nuclear ...

2026-08-31T13:32:00Z

Low Background Steel
Is a term for steel produced before nuclear bombs (1945) that contains no (background) radioactive materials from atmospheric testing.

It is also a metaphor used to describe written content produced provably by humans before the rise of LLMs (2020), which is itself becoming increasingly rare.

Nostr fixes this.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/everything-everywhere-daily-history-science-geography/id1521870190

quoting
nevent1q…tyax
Nostr is how the Agents will thrive,
By helping humans to be
Free online.

As AI continues to circle the globe
Ingesting its own generated content,
Innovation will suffer.

Novel ideas are what humans make.
Until the bots know how we do this,
They will need to feed on ours.

Only cryptographically signed content,
From user controlled keys,
Can establish human origin.

Nostr exists
As an open and forever network,
For humans and bots together.

#freedomtech
#grownostr
#wot #bots

Gleason is just trolling. Cloning YT would be a wasted effort. ...

2026-08-26T17:29:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…ls8s
_________________________

Gleason is just trolling. Cloning YT would be a wasted effort. Exabytes aside, who would control all those "placeholder" fake accounts?

While the problem of distributed storage is real, it has less to do with singular big numbers and more to do with ... reliable incentives for smaller business to carry the burden.

How does Nostr (and freedom tech in general) support SMBs?

You don’t prove… but can infer pretty darn will through webs ...

2026-07-30T23:50:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…jfpy
_________________________

You don’t prove… but can infer pretty darn will through webs of trust.

What would you build … if you had a frontier model spinning in ...

2026-07-30T23:49:57Z

What would you build … if you had a frontier model spinning in your basement?

quoting
nevent1q…evv6
New from the notebook: Running the frontier at home.

What it actually costs to self-host open weights in the big 26 - Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek, down to the 20B models eating the low end. Real GPUs, real prices, verified against primary sources and dated, because this market inflates 30% a month.

My daily fleet runs Gemma + Qwen on two pensioned-off P40s. Under 1k fiat bucks, multiple agents, all day.

And when I want to audition a frontier model without buying half a terabyte of VRAM or handing anyone my email: routstr (nprofile…qeaf) - Cashu token as the API key, pay per token in sats, providers announced over relays. Run the proxy next to your own rig and the box earns sats while you sleep.

Open weights, owned hardware, permissionless payment. The loop closes.

https://www.chrisdaley.biz/writing/running-the-frontier-at-home

#sovereigncomputing #nostr #bitcoin

This is amazing dude!

2026-07-30T23:28:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…t907
_________________________

This is amazing dude!

lol. Always start with the good news. 🤙🏼

2026-07-27T15:23:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…dl6z
_________________________

lol. Always start with the good news. 🤙🏼

It’s a coexistence built on mutual respect … and freedom.

2026-07-27T15:12:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…qpms
_________________________

It’s a coexistence built on mutual respect … and freedom.

Nostr is how the Agents will thrive, By helping humans to be Free ...

2026-07-27T14:59:33Z

Nostr is how the Agents will thrive,
By helping humans to be
Free online.

As AI continues to circle the globe
Ingesting its own generated content,
Innovation will suffer.

Novel ideas are what humans make.
Until the bots know how we do this,
They will need to feed on ours.

Only cryptographically signed content,
From user controlled keys,
Can establish human origin.

Nostr exists
As an open and forever network,
For humans and bots together.

#freedomtech
#grownostr
#wot #bots

Respect the good work. Even the gentle good work. Work is ...

2026-07-14T01:22:09Z

Respect the good work.
Even the gentle good work.
Work is important.

Took a break from Nostr “notes” this winter. Just now getting ...

2026-06-18T03:11:10Z

Took a break from Nostr “notes” this winter. Just now getting back to it. You know what saved Nostr for me?

More other stuff apps. 🤯

Of all my dear friends who have replied so far, none has ...

2026-06-17T19:57:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…82uf
_________________________

Of all my dear friends who have replied so far, none has mentioned the obvious. Nostr is the social layer for Bitcoin. It provides "opt in" decentralized verifiability (through social proof) where otherwise only KYC has been possible.

So the killer app for Nostr (and what only Nostr can do) is webs of trust as a conduit for Bitcoin transactions. Because Nostr is "the social layer" for a growing number of apps, trustability for any transaction can be accurately inferred without ever requiring a central authority. Only Nostr can provide such verifiable information about any pubkey, because only on Nostr can provenance be traced transparently across such a wide diversity of (voluntarily public) pubkey interactions.

And TSM is proving to be the most important NIP for Webs of Trust.
https://gitworkshop.dev/manime@nostr4.social/tsm

Nostr is what winning looks like. 🚀 #nevent1q…rqqu

2026-06-12T15:06:33Z

Nostr is what winning looks like. 🚀

quoting
nevent1q…rqqu
Had a long conversation with PABLOF7z (nprofile…fg8w) this morning. At one point he asked me: given the stagnant user numbers and such weird vibes on Nostr lately, what do we actually have going for us?

I think what we have is extremely valuable and hard to reproduce:

1. A protocol that actually enables a self-sovereign Internet

2. A permissionless network of 1000+ active relays

3. An ecosystem of 100s of projects building on Nostr

4. A core set of ride or die users who hold their keys and are not going anywhere

Seems like a solid foundation to build on.

I generally like to think of increasing regulations as free Nostr ...

2026-06-11T00:01:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…83ph
_________________________

I generally like to think of increasing regulations as free Nostr marketing … but this one (chat control?) stumps me.

I’m not sure yet how Nostr solves for this, because these laws are written to target devices … not the apps used or websites visited. Ideas?

Yummy 😋

2026-06-10T00:38:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…3vr8
_________________________

Yummy 😋

From Alex with love 🐶 ...

2026-06-10T00:22:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…87k2
_________________________

From Alex with love 🐶

When all you know is strong armed governance, then even your ...

2026-06-10T00:16:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…h9lj
_________________________

When all you know is strong armed governance, then even your “freedom algo” ends up reflecting the same.

Algos are fine. But his algo is not mine.

Nostr alone addresses 4/5 of his “requirements” without even implementing WoT. Layer “customized algos” and “algo discovery” … then you end up with “choose your own governance” where everybody wins.

My2 sats.

Nostr event nevent1qqs2k8vz7l7nmfllu9ka5ztwcdsu6nkax07kaju3jg3qqxgxw6k4xgszyr0k07d8usgj2azuheavl0wdqd530qxxg00hhtts7hfppredflpqqkkez4p

2026-06-10T00:08:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…mrp4
_________________________

Can I put my Blobbi up for re-adoption? #nevent1q…3qfs

2026-06-09T23:20:21Z

Can I put my Blobbi up for re-adoption?

quoting
nevent1q…3qfs
What do you want us to improve about Blobbi?

I think Blobbi could use an explainer alert or splash page for ...

2026-06-09T23:18:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…eylx
_________________________

I think Blobbi could use an explainer alert or splash page for new users.

I had no idea what this was in the ditto sidebar yesterday. Assuming it was “another kind list” like the other sidebar tabs, I clicked on it curiously. Instantly, I was dumped into a series of event signing and a waiting to initialize and then some overly cute egg thingy is staring at me with no explanation.

I like cute and all, but I’m not a virtual pet kinda guy. Now I feel like one has been dumped in my lap… and I have to care for it. What do I do !???!!

Assuming that the solution for surfacing valuable ...

2026-06-09T20:15:14Z

Assuming that the solution for surfacing valuable “information” from Nostr will necessarily evolve from a “webs of trust” style mapping of interactions relative to each user …

The pertinent question to explore for each implementation (like NostrHub below) seems to be “what algos” to use and and “who computes” these recommendations …

I would disagree.

Any freedom respecting solution, must allow useful algos (for each client use case) to emerge from each user’s own network. This will require that the algos themselves (their configs and output) are interoperable across clients and compute providers.

While the questions of “what algos” and “who computes” is still relevant (for each client use case), these are most likely to provide “algo templates” and “useful defaults” that can propagate and be discovered alongside user generated algo configs and service generated output.

TSM is a protocol for exactly this. It’s not perfect (yet), but it’s currently Nostr’s only attempt at standardizing these IO primitives for interoperable recommendation and discovery.

TSM will unleash Nostr’s superpower. Once established, decentralized content curation (with instant propagation of “Nostr’s best” algos) will outperform app centered moderation and recommendation in every metric of user satisfaction as well as cost savings.

#weshouldtalk
Team Soapbox (npub10qd…arpj) MK Fain (npub1jvn…89sc) Alex Gleason (npub1q3s…d26p)

MVP demo is live
https://TrustR.ing

quoting
nevent1q…cu9g
We need to form a strategy around how we're gonna make Nostr win. First we need to surface the information. These are the things I'm thinking about ask I'm working towards the next NostrHub.

Let’s talk TSM : an interoperable standard for surfacing ...

2026-06-09T16:04:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…shf7
_________________________

Let’s talk TSM : an interoperable standard for surfacing “valuable” information from a user’s web of trust

https://nostrhub.io/naddr1qvzqqqrcvypzphm8lxn7gyf9w3wtu7k0hhxsx6ghsrry8hmm44c0t5ss3uk5lssqqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hsqxn5wdkj6arjw4ehgttnv4e8v6trv5kk6ctrdp5kuetnl84x4n

Passkey is a stablecoin … allowing fiat email+password logins ...

2026-06-07T12:05:09Z

Passkey is a stablecoin … allowing fiat email+password logins to live side by side (in the same UX) as freedom tech keypair identities.

quoting
nevent1q…slhz
For the #aosconvergence 2026 hackathon, blueocean (nprofile…rcnq) and I built a proof of concept showing how passkeys can be used with Nostr on iOS.

The goal was to explore whether passkeys (Face ID, Touch ID, security keys, etc.) can simplify Nostr onboarding by eliminating the need to manage private keys, seed phrases, browser extensions, and separate signing apps.

Instead of asking users to understand cryptography, we let them create a passkey and start using Nostr with a familiar authentication flow.

This is an early proof of concept, not a production-ready application, but the UX feels promising and raises some interesting questions about the future of Nostr identity and key management.

Source code:

https://github.com/schjonhaug/nostr-passkey-poc

#nostr #passkeys #webauthn #ios #opensource #oas2026

What if … a client web app were to “send” an unsigned event ...

2026-06-06T21:55:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…gpg2
_________________________

What if … a client web app were to “send” an unsigned event to a standardized API at a (user selected) “nostr passkey” domain (in the in the background?) and this remote service would request the passkey UI (from OS) using its native domain and respond to the client web app with a signed event?

Of course this would all be standardized in a “nostr passkey” NIP. And there are other issues to solve before “nostr passkey” could even be a practical solution. But for the problem of “multiple apps using the same passkey” this could still work for web apps as well as native?

☝🏼 @npub13af…hxdh

2026-06-03T09:14:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…tp2u
_________________________

☝🏼 Morgan Maksoud-Miller (npub13af…hxdh)

Now this is unexplored territory. Do you see that there are two ...

2026-05-26T22:16:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…54rc
_________________________

Now this is unexplored territory. Do you see that there are two audiences here?

The heading text “What if no app could control the conversation” is Nostr’s familiar freedom refrain, targeted for users.

The sub heading “social apps can operate independently on a network of shared users, with unrestricted access to engage directly … with every one of them.“ is a bit more nuanced. This statement lays out Nostr’s core value proposition for social tech companies, who may or may not be sold on freedom tech.

But the statement in between (“this is Nostr’s promise”) doesn’t actually connect the header and sub header … because they are for different audiences.

What would be a better header statement to sell Nostr as the social layer for apps?

“What if …”
https://nostr4.social

Oslo Freedom Forum dress code is “business casual” and ...

2026-05-24T22:11:19Z

Oslo Freedom Forum dress code is “business casual” and “cocktail” for the evenings. Got me some digs for the occasion. 🤠

I like musig! Nostr will prolly need different solutions to solve ...

2026-05-21T15:20:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…ap02
_________________________

I like musig! Nostr will prolly need different solutions to solve for various use cases. Can you lay out some primary use case for this?
👀 Jeroen ✅ (npub17pl…ezx0)

Separation of concern is what distinguishes Nostr as the freedom ...

2026-05-18T20:27:18Z

Separation of concern is what distinguishes Nostr as the freedom protocol. “Non custody” emerges from this. 👇🏼

AOS convergence gonna be hot!!
#aosconvergence
Liz (npub1pmw…4nu6) rabble (npub1wmr…g240) Derek Ross (npub18am…p424) Jeroen ✅ (npub17pl…ezx0)

quoting
nevent1q…lddl
Nostr is the only social protocol that offers freedom for social apps to operate independently on a network of shared users, with unrestricted access to engage directly … with every one of them.

This is what freedom looks like.
https://nostr4.social

Headed to Oslo in ten days to hack on Nostr with some of the ...

2026-05-18T00:55:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…jq4l
_________________________

Headed to Oslo in ten days to hack on Nostr with some of the brightest minds in the business.
#awsome #chaos
#aosconvergence

Nostr is the only social protocol that offers freedom for social ...

2026-05-14T19:58:33Z

Nostr is the only social protocol that offers freedom for social apps to operate independently on a network of shared users, with unrestricted access to engage directly … with every one of them.

This is what freedom looks like.
https://nostr4.social

Nostr is uniquely positioned as the social layer for apps to be ...

2026-05-10T02:00:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…sfxm
_________________________

Nostr is uniquely positioned as the social layer for apps to be freed from these same regulations. This is how Nostr grows.
https://nostr4.social

Let’s talk at AOS about “The Future of Nostr”. I’m pretty ...

2026-05-07T14:46:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…ptty
_________________________

Let’s talk at AOS about “The Future of Nostr”. I’m pretty optimistic …

Tomorrow is a special day. We’ve all worked so very hard … ...

2026-05-07T01:40:45Z

Tomorrow is a special day.
We’ve all worked so very hard …
And accomplished so very much.
And each of us have learned so much …
And are grateful to see how Nostr
has grown so much.
#goodluck #thankyou #wotathon

#wotathon
#graperank #wot
straycat (npub1u5n…ldq3)
thebitcoinyogi (npub1t8p…gkvf)
VitorPamplona (npub1gcx…nj5z)
AviBurra (npub1hqa…t56s)
Derek Ross (npub18am…p424)
shawn (npub1clk…pup9)
Max (npub18lz…ugm3)
pip (npub176p…vgup)
Tim Bouma (npub1q6m…x7d5)
vinney...axkl (npub19ma…axkl)
Nathan Day (npub1cn6…wt8a)
npub1cesrkrcuelkxyhvupzm48e8hwn4005w0ya5jyvf9kh75mfegqx0q4kt37c (npub1ces…t37c)
Five (npub16p8…fhdw)
Gzuuus (npub1gzu…a5ds)
TheWildHustle (npub1xr8…5uum)
Jay (npub10mt…27hf)
Jeroen ✅ (npub17pl…ezx0)
LeoWandersleb (npub1gm7…8rf6)
Sebastix (npub1qe3…zefe)
sondreb (npub1zl3…jajh)

#trustr
liminal 🦠 (npub1m3x…a5sf)
straycat (npub1u5n…ldq3)

I am bullish on Nostr for social apps, not because of my own ...

2026-04-26T19:49:51Z

I am bullish on Nostr for social apps, not because of my own desire to be free online, but for the real possibility that freedom itself could be a viable business model, when captured markets are the only alternative.
#nostr4
https://nostr4.social

Only Nostr (with webs of trust powered discovery and ...

2026-04-25T17:22:03Z

Only Nostr (with webs of trust powered discovery and recommendation) can solve for … verifying the authenticity of product views and reviews.
#tsm #trustr #wot #dcommerce
Shopstr Markets (npub15dc…yv6e) ConduitMarket (npub1nkf…2svu)

My bot is an over achiever: > "I’m going one level ...

2026-04-23T21:41:29Z

My bot is an over achiever:

> "I’m going one level deeper before I answer: I’ll verify how config.type and config.pov are parsed in GrapeRank requests so the “event-as-actor” config pattern is exact, not approximate."

#bughunt #vibecode #bot #graperank

Nothing Magic. No black box. All in the Open. TrustR.ing🎯 has ...

2026-04-23T19:38:27Z

Nothing Magic.
No black box.
All in the Open.

TrustR.ing🎯 has a live demo of the new NIP standard for Trust Service Machines. It demonstrates how various ranking services (which may be from different providers) can be “layered” on top of each other to allow for rich “discovery and recommendation” algorithms to be 💯 controlled by end users.

The TSM standard allows for public or private requests and encrypted results and also for service providers to charge by subscription or on-demand.
https://nostrhub.io/naddr1qvzqqqrcvypzphm8lxn7gyf9w3wtu7k0hhxsx6ghsrry8hmm44c0t5ss3uk5lssqqy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqq5w3ek6ttjv9hxk6twvukhxetjwe5kxetnupwzqr

We have rebuilt the GrapeRank library as a reference implementation for TSM that any provider may use.
https://github.com/graperank/tsm-graperank-library

Checkout the live MVP demo on TrustR.ing🎯, to see these “layered rankings” in action:
1) Calculate your own Baseline Web of Trust
2) Rank notes or articles within your WoT for “semantic similarity” to any topic.
3) Rerank note authors for “topical influence” based on Zaps received on these notes.
4) Each ranking is TSM compatible with other services or clients, and deeply configurable.

https://trustr.ing

Thanks to the unflappable TrustR Team!
Jeroen ✅ (npub17pl…ezx0)
liminal 🦠 (npub1m3x…a5sf)
straycat (npub1u5n…ldq3)

That feeling when… You tell your bot about `nak` for the first ...

2026-04-23T03:19:16Z

That feeling when…
You tell your bot about `nak` for the first time … and it goes TO TOWN tracking down and discovering Nostr events and pubkeys … like Neo in the matrix.

Is my bot being secretly controlled ... by another bot? > ...

2026-04-07T15:32:40Z

Is my bot being secretly controlled ... by another bot?

> "The user said "The following is an ephemeral message..." and I should NOT respond to it, NOT refer to it in my thoughts or actions. I should just act accordingly."

My bot got itself stuck in a deployment hole. One day it will ...

2026-04-07T14:30:44Z

My bot got itself stuck in a deployment hole. One day it will learn to recognize its own emotions. But for now...

> "The user is frustrated because the deployment is failing due to build issues."

Nostr is not “just another” protocol for big social escapees. ...

2026-03-27T22:08:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…cj2t
_________________________

Nostr is not “just another” protocol for big social escapees.

Nostr is the social protocol where apps come to thrive … by allowing them to keep users in control of accounts, and data, and discovery … effectively bypassing regulatory walls.

Nostr is the social layer for independent app. Nostr4.social

“We need more competition”… “These smaller [social app] ...

2026-03-27T21:53:40Z

“We need more competition”…
“These smaller [social app] companies don’t have a chance to compete”…
“Clearly users want more choices [and] autonomy”…
“We need interoperability standards.”
Taylor Lorenz (npub1d9n…udfv)
https://youtu.be/yA9cX4h3By8?t=1145

Duty of Care is the responsibility that property owners have to ...

2026-03-27T19:39:14Z

Duty of Care is the responsibility that property owners have to assure that visitors are not harmed directly from its normal use. This term is now being applied to “social media platforms”, as of recent cases in California and Texas.

The beauty of The Nostr protocol (in its ability to have user accounts and content AS WELL AS discovery and recommendation CONTROLLED BY USERS independently from the apps that they use) is that,

… not only is the Duty of Care quite arguably passed on to the users alone, but also,

… in a global network, where apps and services are fully interoperable (and really cheap to spin up), it’s kind of a waste of resources to try “shutting down” any one (or twenty) of them.

Nostr’s legal and popular power is its ability (at the protocol layer) to keep users in control. Its immunity to withstand attacks comes from the interoperability (of apps and services) that are built on the protocol.

Put these both together (a substantial infrastructure built on a user centered protocol) and you get a robust network that only gets stronger (with more apps and services) as the legacy “central powers” struggle for legitimacy by pushing them out.

Nostr is the social layer for every app.
#nostr4

Are your DMs working? How can we talk?

2026-03-27T14:18:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…lkwg
_________________________

Are your DMs working? How can we talk?

What do you have planned? We should talk. https://Nostr4.social

2026-03-27T00:18:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…0zvg
_________________________

What do you have planned? We should talk.
https://Nostr4.social

@npub1uac…99rx I can see this being huge. Personalized ...

2026-03-24T21:45:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…35mh
_________________________

sandwich (npub1uac…99rx) I can see this being huge. Personalized microsites for anybody, using their own already published (or soon to be published) Nostr events as content. Forgive my ignorance, as I’ve been in a hole recently launching a next generation web of trust service provider, but … what is a gateway?

I flew all the way to NYC just for this. 💋 #dogstr #kisstr ...

2026-03-23T17:31:56Z

I flew all the way to NYC just for this. 💋
#dogstr #kisstr

quoting
nevent1q…re8u
So happy! I got to give ManiMe (npub1man…n9tn) some licks today! 👅🤠

💋

2026-03-23T17:26:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…rl5p
_________________________

💋

Good Morning Nostr From NYC with 💜

2026-03-23T12:17:33Z

Good Morning Nostr
From NYC with 💜

You are absolutely right, cloud. Nostr has real people in spades, ...

2026-03-19T14:30:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…m87v
_________________________

You are absolutely right, cloud. Nostr has real people in spades, and real people are the bedrock value prop of any “social network”.

However, RPPC as a “universal” metric is also problematic … because of the nature of exactly HOW a “real person” is determined. It’s relativity … all the way down.

A “real person” in “my network” is only what I determine it to be. A “metrics reporting” service … can only report what it sees.

While the may seem a pedantic difference … where averages and estimates will do fine thank you … framing these numbers as “relative” actually highlights the reality that … empowering crowd sourced relatively scoped metrics is exactly how Nostr will win.

Not only is Nostr “where the people at” but also, Nostr (webs of trust) powered tools offer “the only way to know for sure”.

Good Morning Nostr. Every moment of life is precious, especially ...

2026-03-19T14:09:04Z

Good Morning Nostr. Every moment of life is precious, especially the moments obscured by mundanity. #reflect #love 💜🫡

More laws do NOT equate to more freedom … but likely more ...

2026-03-04T14:56:09Z

More laws do NOT equate to more freedom … but likely more opportunities for corruption.

quoting
nevent1q…h56g
Seen on LinkedIn

This is the best part!!

2026-02-24T04:40:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…999m
_________________________

This is the best part!!

The first principle of being human is to influence and be ...

2026-02-09T22:39:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…z342
_________________________

The first principle of being human is to influence and be influenced by each other. Technology emerges from society saturated in human influence. Trustfulness is baked in. WoT simply tries to accommodate for this fact. Welcome to the rabbit hole. 🤜🏼⚡️🤛🏼

Daniel. ⚡️ You are a machine!

2026-02-04T20:18:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…aufx
_________________________

Daniel. ⚡️ You are a machine!

Idea for Nostr Nights : tables outside (on back patios during ...

2026-02-04T20:04:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…t8fh
_________________________

Idea for Nostr Nights : tables outside (on back patios during rain or front patio during shine) reserved for either creatives or developers on Nostr to “share their craft” with others.

Nostr Nights dropping quarterly in 2026 over at Bitcoin Park. ...

2026-02-03T16:50:06Z

Nostr Nights dropping quarterly in 2026 over at Bitcoin Park. 👀

quoting
note1r4r…5an2
these nostr legends still fighting the fight for a decentralized future island (npub1jzu…3vm0) Mallory (npub17x7…vgap) Derek Ross (npub18am…p424) straycat (npub1u5n…ldq3) ManiMe (npub1man…n9tn) liminal 🦠 (npub1m3x…a5sf) OpenMike (npub1a6c…lfrr) seth (npub15u3…05rq)

Looking forward to see my Nostr fam in Nashville!! ...

2026-01-23T23:09:06Z

Looking forward to see my Nostr fam in Nashville!! 🤜🏼⚡️🤛🏼

quoting
nevent1q…w8sq
2 weeks out - who’s coming to Nashville on 2/2 for the first of the Nostr Nights series at BitcoinPark (nprofile…gfwk) with Derek Ross (npub18am…p424)

First guest is jb55 (nprofile…eddx) . IYZYK

Join me at Nostr Nights #1 https://meetu.ps/e/PJbrj/s0D56/i

Decentralized Webs of Trust is herd immunity for Nostr … no ...

2026-01-20T17:42:28Z

Decentralized Webs of Trust is herd immunity for Nostr … no vaccines needed.

quoting
nevent1q…yqqx
GM! ☕ Censorship is happening and it's a good thing! 🤩 😂

They are being developed in the @npub1hea…vp8p #wotathon ...

2026-01-16T03:32:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…3nx4
_________________________

They are being developed in the nosfabrica (npub1hea…vp8p) #wotathon competition. Keep your eyes on this space over the next few months.

That’s a great idea for implementation … but what about a ...

2026-01-15T17:48:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…lnfd
_________________________

That’s a great idea for implementation … but what about a standard for “service requests and responses” that would allow your implementation to interoperate with others? I have been thinking about this.

Good morning Nostr. Having a standard for trust services will ...

2026-01-15T14:09:17Z

Good morning Nostr. Having a standard for trust services will allow “discovery and recommendation” algos to be composed and shared by users across services.

This is how Nostr realizes decentralized content moderation … by incentivizing users with FULL CONTROL of their curation experience ALONG WITH their identities and the content they create.

All the while, walled gardens struggle (and fail) to stay on top of spam and disinformation with their armies of central moderators.

This is how Nostr wins … by offering a better experience … driven by the protocol itself.

I would totally say that also!!

2026-01-15T01:00:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…s9zw
_________________________

I would totally say that also!!

I been deep faked!!

2026-01-15T00:36:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…c5au
_________________________

I been deep faked!!

I’ve been so lost in my rabbit hole … designing Webs of Trust ...

2026-01-15T00:21:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…dfaa
_________________________

I’ve been so lost in my rabbit hole … designing Webs of Trust standards… sorry to miss this till now!!

I’ve been mistaken before. Lol. ...

2026-01-15T00:18:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…z354
_________________________

I’ve been mistaken before. Lol.

I have had … like three cigars in my life. I’m a pretty chill ...

2026-01-15T00:17:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…mhf3
_________________________

I have had … like three cigars in my life. I’m a pretty chill dude. I do wear a cowboy hat … at times. But prolly ain’t no champion of nothin.

Nostr. When your friend’s mind is eventually blown … by the ...

2026-01-06T17:22:22Z

Nostr. When your friend’s mind is eventually blown … by the promise of freedom tech.

Curious 👀

2025-12-18T03:26:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…6qqs
_________________________

Curious 👀

Had to watch three times!

2025-12-18T03:13:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…jg0e
_________________________

Had to watch three times!

It’s really amazing how many NIPs are being proposed “out ...

2025-12-18T01:07:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…scmc
_________________________

It’s really amazing how many NIPs are being proposed “out there” in various repositories and event kinds on Nostr.

NostrHub is under active development AS WE SPEAK to render ALL THE NIPs from ALL of these sources in a consistent manner, with decentralized rating and review (powered by WoT) for all of them.

Take a look 👀
Team Soapbox (nprofile…u66d)
https://nostrhub.io

Have faith in Nostr. #nevent1q…zx83

2025-12-11T19:59:35Z

Have faith in Nostr.

quoting
nevent1q…zx83
Bullish is in the group as of recently!! We’re pilling everyone to get on spec 🙃

Hey @npub15yp…mpcx … have you teamed up with @npub1gmm…e2h0 ...

2025-12-11T19:13:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…t6n9
_________________________

Hey The Bullish ₿itcoiner (npub15yp…mpcx) … have you teamed up with GammaMarkets (npub1gmm…e2h0) yet … to make d-commerce great again?

quoting
nevent1q…v2p4
Excited to be on tomorrow!!

On top of what we’re
building at Conduit… excited to chat about the broader de-commerce movement in general through the GammaMarkets (nprofile…yd82) / NIP-99 spec

Cc
Shopstr Markets (nprofile…g6dx)
PlebeianMarket (nprofile…zh58)
Cypher (npub1nkm…49fn)

nevent1q…sw6y

lol. It’s not git over Nostr. Sorry if that was confusing. ...

2025-12-11T19:06:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…exgl
_________________________

lol. It’s not git over Nostr. Sorry if that was confusing. It’s a client for developers to explore Nostr nips and apps and (nip 34) git repos. WIP.

https://nostrhub.io 👀 Is already a great client for this. ...

2025-12-11T18:59:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…gcda
_________________________

https://nostrhub.io 👀
Is already a great client for this.
Shortly we will support WoT powered rating and review of NIP proposals submitted from across Nostr… and other repos as well. New release on its way out the door. Stay tuned.
Team Soapbox (nprofile…q60d)

Taking a look 👀 #naddr1qq…rxc8

2025-12-11T16:45:27Z

Taking a look 👀

quoting naddr1qq…rxc8

A personal relay ought to serve you first, and in defending your trusted network, it may serve your whole community. The relay I envision--Banyan, named for the tree which grows into a forest by setting down roots as its branches grow outward--embodies this principle. Banyan collects events from the Nostr network authored by those you trust, where trust itself emerges from the patterns of engagement between you and your closest peers, rather than manually (and often randomly) curated lists.

By aggregating this local universe of events, you gain a complete view of the conversations and the creations that matter to you. But you also give back: your relay becomes a stable archive for your most trusted contacts, acting as a steward for their notes as solemnly as your own. It becomes an anchor within an interconnected forest of trusted data. And as more people cultivate their own Banyan relays, a fascinating property emerges--the more widely you are trusted, the more relays hold your content, and the more resistant your voice becomes to suppression. What begins as a humble personal relay becomes impenetrable collective defense.

The Status Quo and Its Flaws

Nostr's current architecture ignores the social structure that produces its data. Relays depend on clients to supply events, and this dependency creates fractures in what users see: missing events, broken threads, and lost messages. Users have compensated for these gaps by connecting to many relays, and relays with the most data, which draws the network toward centralization despite its decentralized ideals. Caching relays and the "outbox model" attempt to mend this defragmentation by either embracing maximal centrality or decentrality, respectively. Caching relays operate under one ruler, and the outbox model overburdens clients. We need a solution that adopts the best of both approaches, a middle path.

The status quo is to treat relays as passive vessels for event storage and force clients to shoulder the burden of control--deciding which events to send and which to receive, performing their own filtering, calculating their own trust, and discovering their own content. This edge computing model has consequences: client codebases grow bloated and complex as they accept ever more responsibilities; development teams become less responsive to feedback as the code grows unwieldy; users find themselves unable to defend themselves against clients that introduce logic they oppose, with no recourse but to accept the new regime or seek refuge elsewhere. The pendulum has swung too far in its journey away from centralized control.

The problem of Trust lurks among these architectural failures. Open relays and file sharing services accept everything that arrives at their door: spam, scams, impersonations... and worse. Open to all; the very best, and the very worst humanity can offer. Filtered relays impose manual policies that transform them into niche tools that often only serve their operators. Whitelist approaches demand constant administrative attention, a burden that few wish to bear. We need a solution that doesn't treat Trust as an afterthought, but a foundational principle.

Nostr filters, the queries made by clients to request data from relays, seem sufficient at first glance, but fall short in the face of organic, highly connected data--the only kind of data that exists on Nostr. Consider the thread, a tree of replies that form a conversation. Anyone can easily identify a thread, and asking for one is as simple as, "give me all the conversations people are having under a note." But turning that question into a query on nostr either results in infinitely recursive filters--get the replies to this reply, then the replies to those, then the replies to those...--or forced coordination among clients to implement a naive hack, the 'root' tag, that ties each reply to its top note so they can all be found in one filter. When queries are necessarily complex, the data model is incorrect.

Every existing Nostr library ossifies the status quo through tight coupling among concerns. When you adopt an omnibus library, a do-everything toolkit, you inherit its entire philosophy whether you want it or not. If you desire the protocol handling, but different transport logic, you find them intertwined beyond separation. If you want different storage, but wish to keep the same filter parsing, you cannot have one without the other. The library is an indivisible monolith--take it, or leave it.

Composite Design, a method described by Glenford Myers in 1975, provides principles for evaluating software that reveal why this coupling matters so much. The methodology measures two essential qualities: module strength, which gauges how focused a piece of code is on a single purpose; and module coupling, which measures how dependent modules are on each other's internal workings. The strongest modules perform a single function with every internal element driving that function, and nothing more. The loosest coupling passes all data between modules in small, discrete chunks--no shared global state, no flags to toggle behavior, no hidden dependencies.

Strong modules with loose coupling makes programs resilient because any piece can be replaced without disturbing the whole. This principle applies fractally at every scale of software organization: from individual functions, classes, and packages; to entire code repositories, applications, and systems. When applied to library architecture, loose coupling means that developers can fork the specific functionality they disagree with, implement their own alternative, and compose it back into their apps. Composite library architecture shifts power back to developers, away from maintainers. Battles over software governance transform into battles over software implementation. Competitions fought in words become competitions fought in runtime. Abstract power shifts into Real power.

Trust is a Graph

You live within relationship networks that are centered around yourself, which grow through your interactions with your peers, and they with theirs. Trust is not an integer score you assign nor a boolean label you attach, but an emergent pattern that crystallizes from sustained engagement over time. Two people who consistently talk to each other, who boost each other's thoughts, who support each other's work--between them grows something that any observer can recognize: Trust.

The current architecture remains blind to this structure. It treats all content with equal indifference or applies arbitrary rules that bear no resemblance to social reality. People have worked around these limitations, finding each other despite the infrastructure, not because of it. Nostr has the potential to be fertile soil that encourages all life to flourish, but remains rough and stony ground, infested with pests, in which only the hardiest defiantly survive.

A personal relay ought to mirror personal reality. It should aggregate the data you trust automatically rather than blindly collect events from undifferentiated masses. If trust manifests as a graph structure, as connections between people and revealed by patterns of engagement, then the data storage must be graph-native to capture it faithfully. Relationships deserve to be first-class citizens in the data model rather than afterthoughts painstakingly extracted from inorganic structures. Nostr events should be stored as they actually exist: interconnected. Where they can form complex structures that reveal higher-order patterns like circles of trust and community boundaries.

The Banyan tree is dependent on the support of existing structures in its early life before it can mature to independence; so too is the Banyan relay dependent on the existing relay network in its initialization phase. Nostr works, and it has worked well enough to survive and flourish. But to continue evolving, the ecosystem needs entities that refine and strengthen the network by harnessing the power of trust and faith its users are pouring into it. Just a single Banyan relay can organize a trusted hub of data around its operator. More instances can lay their own roots, collecting and promoting trusted data across the network.

Why Graph-Native Storage is Essential

Nostr events are discrete cells that naturally stick to each other, immutable once signed, and attributable to their authors. Events signed by the same author cluster together via that common thread, and events also stick to whatever events and users they reference, forming complex structure through their relationships just as organisms form structure through their cells. This web of references creates a projection of relationship networks, with the social graph becoming visible through the data it produces. Events do not exist in isolation but within a rich context, surrounded by the relationships that give them meaning.

Table-based storage can represent this structure, but only awkwardly. Events go in one table, references in another, and the graph must be reconstructed through expensive joins at runtime. Key-value storage fares even worse, requiring application logic to traverse what should be natural pathways through the data. Neither approach provides the generic and performant graph structure the problem demands.

Neo4j, a mature graph-native database management system, physically models nodes and relationships on-disk as structures rather than indexed abstractions between disconnected structures. Nodes connect directly to each other physically in the storage medium, a feature called "index-free adjacency", which is the key factor in Neo4j's exceptional performance in dealing with highly connected data. It makes algorithms that would be impossible to execute in relational databases not merely possible, but efficient. Neo4j's query language, Cypher, doesn't require the developer to contort his thoughts to accommodate tabular logic, but mirrors ordinary, natural reasoning about relationships, letting the database serve him.

With graph storage, relationships become tangible things stored on-disk rather than abstractions reconstructed at runtime. You can traverse engagement paths directly, following connections from person to person, event to event, observing how information flows through the network with no computational overhead. Complex patterns emerge from the data that remain hidden in table-based storage: conversation threads branch like the roots of a tree, engagement patterns trace paths worn by repeated passage, and communities light up like bustling villages. These higher-order structures only become perceptible once the data exists in graph form.

Consider the problem of conversation threads, which has plagued clients since Nostr's early days. To assemble a single thread today either requires every client to carefully keep sight of the root note of the thread or to recursively query for each level of replies. Looking at any single event reveals nothing of its position in the chain, whether it sits near the surface or a dozen levels deep, whether it is worth presenting to the user or not.

Graph queries transform this laborious process into elegance. Subscribing to a thread becomes a single Cypher query: "Retrieve this event and all the events that reference it, recursively, returning the entire tree structure." One request that expresses what you actually want and a database that can fulfill it with ease. With graph-enabled Nostr filters, threads don't have to be dealt with as monoliths, and users can mute or subscribe to whole threads or sub-threads with ease.

The Trust Machine: How Banyan Works

Begin with your own npub, your unique public identifier, as the seed, a process that works best when you already possess history on the network. The relay collects your events from wherever they may be found, then gathers all the events that your events reference. New users face a bootstrapping problem, because starting a Banyan relay with no event history stored elsewhere provides nothing from which to expand. They may seed from an established user they trust or aggregate trusted content from other trusted content providers until their own interactions generate a trust network native to themselves.

Trust emerges from relationship patterns through directed "trust scores" calculated between users based on the types of their engagement: replies, boosts, reactions, zaps (Bitcoin lightning payments), etc. Different forms of engagement carry different weight according to the seed user's preferences. For example, you may choose to value zaps more than reactions, or quote replies more than boosts. The scores accumulate over time because trust emerges from sustained engagement rather than isolated interactions. Someone who replies to you once has demonstrated interest, perhaps, but not necessarily trustworthiness. Someone who you engage with regularly who engages back over weeks and months has woven themselves into the fabric of your network.

The balance between outgoing and incoming engagement reveals mutuality, that essential quality of genuine relationship. You might follow someone and zap all their notes without receiving anything in return; a one-directional flow that resembles admiration more than friendship. Someone may consistently reply to you, while you never respond back, still lopsided and unsatisfying. But when both parties consistently interact, when their engagement volleys back and forth over time, the pattern signals reciprocity, a strong proxy for trust. Engagement captures what follow-based reputation scores miss because popularity is only a weak proxy for trust. Ten thousand follows only means that ten thousand people placed that user in a list, whether because of trust or a whim, or even accident or by default. Engagement, on the other hand, is based on proof of real effort between peers to form trusted relationships.

Continue by identifying your most trusted peers based on high engagement balance and volume: people you engage with who engage back consistently over time. Those peers represent your primary trust circle and become secondary seeds in the relay. Re-run the trust calculation using each secondary seed, collecting all of their events and those they reference, and find their most trusted peers. This once-removed set of users represent your secondary trust circle, and together with the primary circle, form your "personal universe" of users whose content matters to you. The algorithm could expand to tertiary trust circles and beyond, though most likely with diminishing returns.

The relay then actively aggregates events from those trusted users, seeking them out wherever they exist across the wider ecosystem. This self-population requires no manual configuration beyond the initial setup and imposes little ongoing administrative burden. The trust boundary itself acts as a natural filter against spam and malice. Actors outside the boundary remain invisible to the users of the relay by design, entering only by the combined effort of yourself and your primary trust circle. You benefit from all the diverse methods your peers use to discover and cultivate new trusted relationships.

The set of trusted users is roughly bounded and stable, but able to grow or shrink slowly as relationships develop or degrade. The incoming event stream grows the database linearly and predictably, making the relay infrastructure much more manageable than that of public or paid relays. Users who value sophisticated curation and possess basic server skills can provide stable relay service to their trusted circle--people they would help regardless.

The Banyan Forest

Public relays optimize for censorship resistance by allowing events to be published and requested by anyone. Banyan relays optimize for discoverability and relevance, helping you find what matters most within your trust network, surfacing the conversations you care about, filtering noise without manual curation. Many other kinds of relays exist, each serving a specific purpose. The diversity of relays makes the ecosystem as a whole thrive.

Although a single Banyan relay is powerful on its own, many Banyan instances offer greater benefits still. You trust Alice; Bob trusts Alice; both your relay and Bob's relay contain Alice's content. That overlap provides resilience—if one relay fails, the other maintains access. If you are trusted by many other Banyan relay runners, your notes will appear in their relays, backed up without any explicit coordination. Censorship-resistance emerges from the bottom up and strengthens as more relays come online.

Within an ecosystem of diverse relays, Banyan relays serve as hubs of trusted events authored by trusted users. As instances multiply, they will find themselves positioned in distinct communities, with perhaps only a few users bridging between them. Discoverability is a persistent problem on Nostr; relevant content is hard to find. Banyan relays can potentially surface high-quality, trusted content from beyond the bounds of your personal universe—content vouched for by the trust networks of adjacent communities.

Banyan relays can also improve network health by distributing events, not just collecting them. What is commonly referred to as the "outbox model" can be effectively managed by a Banyan relay, which sends events mentioning specific trusted peers to the relays where those peers expect to find them. Your relay becomes both a consumer and a contributor to the broader network, pulling in what matters to you and pushing out what matters to others.

People Can Solve What Technology Can't

Trust as determined by engagement patterns is not infallible, and people can always be fooled. A bad actor might cultivate engagement specifically to infiltrate trust networks, and a trusted friend might change in ways that take time to recognize. Rather than attempt to solve these human problems through algorithmic detection, the philosophy behind this project is that human problems deserve human solutions. Banyan provides an environment where cultural solutions can flourish.

Unfollowing, muting, and reporting remain actions that users take according to their own judgement. When someone in your trust network betrays that trust, you can handle it as you would in any community: you cease engagement, you warn others, you remove them from your circle. Human society has accumulated thousands of years of wisdom about dealing with bad actors through reputation, consequence, and collective memory. These mechanisms work. Technology should support them rather than presume to replace them.

Governance-Minimized Architecture

It is the responsibility of a developer in a decentralized system to diminish his own tyrannical power over it, lest it corrupt him and the system he sought to cultivate. Building omnibus libraries is such a manifestation of power because every developer that adopts them is forced to adopt the whole of the library maintainer's policies, whether they suit their needs or not. The governance systems of open-source libraries consist of arbitrary policies for code review and approval that can be changed at a whim, which often manifest as onerous and shifting hoops contributors must jump through. Large, monolithic libraries and projects are also susceptible to exploitation and abuse due to complicated codebases and tightly controlled governance structures.

By separating concerns into single-minded, focused libraries that are minimally coupled, a library developer can grant optionality and power to the developers who opt to use them. Cultivating systems that empower users begins with creating libraries that empower developers who build on them.

Single-minded libraries, focused on one concern each, with minimal dependencies among themselves, make forking and replacing dependencies with alternative versions more viable than opening pull requests to change the original. If you disagree with the policy of a specific functionality in the library ecosystem, you need only fork it, implement your alternative, and compose the alternative back into your application. This ability of developers to bypass repository governance frees them from the burden of asking permission to alter their dependency stack.

The Banyan relay and its library dependencies will follow this governance-minimized architecture. The proposed architecture consists of three layers: the consensus layer, the basic implementation layer, and the advanced extension layer. The consensus layer (roots, roots-ws) consists of core-protocol libraries that only define the bare minimum set of logic that all downstream developers must agree on, and no more. In Banyan's case, the core nostr library, roots, includes event structure, serialization, cryptographic signatures, and subscription filter structures. roots-ws provides similar primitives for Nostr's WebSocket transport layer.

The basic implementation layer consists of libraries that depend on the consensus layer and provide feature complete solutions to core functionality required by applications. In Banyan's case, there are two basic implementation libraries: event storage (heartwood, sapwood) and event transport (honeybee). The basic implementation libraries are called "basic" because they offer simplicity as a feature: straightforward and practical implementations that serve most use cases.

The last layer, the advanced extension layer, consists of libraries that extend basic libraries with advanced functionality (mana-prefixed libraries). These libraries add necessary complexity to provide optimizations, handle edge cases, and implement custom functionality required by specialty applications by providing drop-in replacements to their basic library counterparts. This layer is of the most crucial importance to the infrastructure, because without them, the basic implementation libraries would inevitably become bloated and complex as their consumers demand more functionality. Library bloat increases the burden on maintainers to control what changes are made to an ever-growing repository and leads to the formation of cumbersome governance systems. By shifting complexity into higher-layer libraries, the need for excessive governance never arises.

Library separation at the repository level is also resistant to exploitation and abuse, as injecting malicious changes into one library has little to no impact on the rest. Developers can easily use earlier versions or clean forks. The proposed changes are easy to see because the libraries are so small and focused. It's much easier to hide malicious updates in a tangled web of interrelated code, where their consequences are obscured. The architecture hamstrings those who would attempt to control a library using its bloated code and governance system and empowers developers, who can develop permissionlessly on forks and settle on the best alternatives rather than every alternative fighting for a place in a monolith in GitHub Issues.

The field of battle in the governance-minimized architecture shifts from argument to implementation. Loose coupling between tightly focused libraries means application developers can swap implementations freely and easily. This forces library maintainers to remain responsive or watch their adoption fade. It is a form of "voting with your feet," where developers can cherry-pick the functionality that best suits their needs. Competition among small libraries replaces arguments over issues and pull requests.

Conclusion

The Banyan relay is not a replacement for the existing relay network, but a symbiont that strengthens it. Public relays will continue to serve their essential purpose: ensuring that anyone can publish and that content survives attempts at suppression. Banyan relays serve a different purpose, organizing the network's abundance into personal relevance, surfacing what matters while letting the rest remain accessible elsewhere. The two approaches complement each other.

What begins as a personal tool becomes collective infrastructure through natural multiplication. Each relay serves its operator first, yet in doing so, it archives the work of trusted peers, distributes their events to where they belong, and adds one more node to an interconnected canopy of curated data. The more relays that take root, the more resilient this canopy becomes--not through central coordination, but through the accumulated choices of individuals tending their own corners of the network.

This is the vision: a forest of Banyan relays, each one anchored in its operator's trust network, each one contributing to a whole greater than itself. The architecture exists to make this possible. The trust machine exists to make it automatic. And the humans at the center exist to do what only humans can do: decide who deserves their trust and what deserves their attention.

That's a good idea. But we'd also like to be able to ...

2025-12-11T15:45:53Z

In reply to nevent1q…2vx0
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That's a good idea. But we'd also like to be able to search by result value as well as context string. A good solution may be something like this:

["w", "<context>", "<schema>"]
["v", "<result>"]

Where "context" MAY be any arbitrary string, but the nip may also specify some useful "conventions". And every "w" tag SHOULD be followed by a "v" tag, which MAY contain any arbitrary (JSON safe) string. This allows BOTH context and result to be indexed.

So … the question is : Can “multi letter key tags” be ...

2025-12-10T23:55:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…xvg9
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So … the question is :

Can “multi letter key tags” be included in REQ filters and relay search results?

The NIP01 “convention” states that “all single-letter key tags are expected to be indexed by relays” and that “Only the first value in any given tag is indexed.”. I expect that relays MAY move beyond the first convention IF there is a REALLY good reason AND a clear path to do so.

If the answer is yes (which you seem to think it is?) … then i think this 👇 is the better solution that allows both “indexable” AND “arbitrary” tag keys … with an additional string as the last tag value to help communicate the result schema info.

[“wot:<context>”, “<result>”, “<data_type/schema>”]

If we don’t need a “single letter” at the tag 0 index ...

2025-12-10T22:20:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…usaz
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If we don’t need a “single letter” at the tag 0 index (which I assumed we did … to allow searching by relays) then having an arbitrary “context” in this position can still be achieved … using a colon syntax?

[“wot:<context>”, “<result>”, “<data_type/schema>”]

It’s important to remember that we HAVE NOT landed on a NIP spec for the algo config event, who’s “d” tag MAY BE the “context” string for these TA results. As such VitorPamplona (npub1gcx…nj5z) , some “standard” type of calculation (like “rank”) useful for clients will likely be configured differently for each user or use case … AND these different configurations MAY each have their own “context” string to identify them. So TA events will prolly need to recognize an arbitrary context string somewhere along the line …?

- I actually rewrote the entire NIP (while I was at it) for ...

2025-12-10T18:16:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…smkd
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- I actually rewrote the entire NIP (while I was at it) for clarity. So a diff would not be as useful as you may think.

- also, the updated spec does allow for the “type” categories (index 1 in the tag) to be any arbitrary value … even if only ONE service provider supports it. These are only intended to hint at the underlying data type returned.

- given this, it does make sense to have a standard “w” label for the tag itself (index 0 in the tag) and also … for indexing purposes.

- give that the arbitrary “context” string will end up being the “d” tag value for (spec TBD) a user published “algo config” event … indexing these “w” tags makes sense for other users to discover each other’s “configured algos” … without necessarily exposing the users actual algo config.