comparison to iris.to

[VzxPLnHqr]

I do not yet have a telegram account, otherwise I would post this in there. Have you seen https://iris.to ? (seems to also be created by bitcoiners). I would like to know your thoughts as to why nostr is or will be better. Or perhaps they are quite similar in underlying design?

P.S. How close is nostr to being usable for bootstrapping itself? In other words, when will the primary support / dev channel for nostr being administered on nostr itself rather than Telegram?

[fiatjaf]

Well, we don't have any money and all the (many) interested parties are working on other things to pay the bills, including myself, so development is very slow. We have clients that work, but they're buggy so that's sad.

About Iris, I guess I'll add a section. It is similar in some aspects, but there are two major differences (although you shouldn't believe me as I don't know enough about it):

1. Iris is an social-networking app, not a protocol designed to be portable and usable for many use cases. You can do many things on Nostr, and it basically requires multiple implementations.
2. Iris uses Gun as its networking and database layer. We could almost say Iris is just a client to the global Gun distributed database/protocol. Gun, however, is probably unimplementable and I don't think it scales. As far as I understand you all pieces of data must be shared across a network between all peers, and they don't have any good routing algorithm or incentives for peers to transmit that data around. Despite Basically an app running on Gun will only work if you connect to an authoritative relay server directly with your client or with your own relay.

[VzxPLnHqr]

Thank you for your prompt reply and helpful clarifications. I did a little bit of research on it and came to similar conclusions. Iris is really cool, but I think Nostr is more what I am interested in. Given the taproot/schnorr upgrade, the use of schnorr signatures in Nostr was smart too I think!

I will figure out how to join the Telegram channel soon.

[VzxPLnHqr]

@fiatjaf is anyone actually running a nostr relay right now at the moment such that https://nostr.com sort of works?

[fiatjaf]

Hey @VzxPLnHqr, come chat on https://t.me/nostr_protocol about these topics.