Nostr is a social media protocol and ecosystem, kind of like Twitter [^1] except that you control your own account and nobody can silence you so long as some relay operator somewhere allows you to post. People are finding many additional uses for nostr that go far beyond just chatting, but this client is focused on chatting.
Gossip is currently alpha-quality code and I do not recommend using it as your main client at this point. But it is getting close to the point where I will be able to remove that reommendation to not use. So adventurous souls may try it out to see what it will be like.
Also, the GUI sucks. It looks horrible. And isn't smartly designed. But form follows function, and only after the function is sufficiently complete will I work on the GUI. Also, the GUI tech may still change entirely if egui isn't up to the challenge. So don't be put off too much by the ugliness. We will have hinted fonts and full color emoji support one way or another as a high priority.
- [x]**Follow people** by user@domain (NIP-05) or by public key (hex or bech32) plus a relay where they can be found, or by finding them in the feed, clicking their avatar, and choosing to follow them on their page... and unfollow people.
- [ ] Content of posts being rendered well (references, images, videos, etc)
- [ ] Controlling which relays the client may connect to (currently it will dynamically find relays and connect if it thinks those relays have the event it wants, and you can't configure it to not do that)
- **High user control**: The plan is for the user to be in control of quite a lot of settings regarding which posts they see, which relays to talk to, and when to fetch from them, but with some sane defaults.
- **Key Security**: Private keys need to be handled as securely as possible. We store the key encrypted under a passphrase on disk, and we zero out any memory that has seen either the key or the password that decrypts it. We also keep the decrypted key in just one place, the Signer, which doesn't provide access to the key directly. Eventually we will look to add hardware token support, probably first using programmable [Solo keys](https://solokeys.com/) because I have a few of those.
- **Portable** design intended for the **desktop**: This is intended to run on desktop computers, but not limited as such. The platform must be supported by rust (most are), and SQLite3 needs to store its file somewhere. The UI will run on anything that runs one of these backends:
- **High-enough performance**: Generally the network speed should be your limiting factor on performance, not the UI or any other part of the code. It doesn't matter too much how fast the code runs as long as it is always faster than the network, and I think that's definitely true for gossip.
- **Easy-ish on CPU/power usage**: We can't achieve this as well as other clients might because we use an immediate-mode renderer which necessarily recomputes what it draws every "frame" and may redraw many times per second. We are working hard to minimize the CPU impact of this hot loop. Try it and see.
- **Privacy Options**: in case someone wishes to remain secret they should use Gossip over Tor - I recommend using QubesOS do to this. But you could use Whonix or even Tails. Don't just do it on your normal OS which won't do Tor completely. Gossip will provide options to support privacy usage such as not loading avatars, having multiple identities, not necessarily sharing who you follow, etc.
- [ ] NIP-04 - Encrypted Direct Message: I doesn't believe this is a good idea to do encrypted messaging this way, as it leaks metadata and has a cryptographic weakness. But it is in common enough usage.
Gossip doesn't use web technology (except for Websockets and HTTP GET). There is no JavaScript, no HTML parsing, no automatic fetch of other resources in order to draw the page, and no HTML/CSS-based layout. Because of this, there are no suprises, no XSS vulnerabilities, no JavaScript attack vectors, no CORS errors, and especially no fetching of page-referenced resources that you never intended to fetch.
Anyone interested in replacing the GUI with something much better, or keeping it as egui but making it much better, would be greatly appreciated.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, shall be licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.
I'd prefer if you trusted `mike@mikedilger.com` higher than my public key at this point in time since key management is still pretty bad. That is the inverse of the normal recommendation, but my private key has not been treated very carefully as I never intended it to be my long-term keypair (it just became that over time). Also, I fully intend to rollover my keys once gossip supports the key-rollover NIP, whatever that is (or will be).
You can tip me at my Bitcoin Lighting address (lud16): lnurl1dp68gurn8ghj7ampd3kx2ar0veekzar0wd5xjtnrdakj7tnhv4kxctttdehhwm30d3h82unvwqhkgetrv4h8gcn4dccnxv563ep
