Nostr is an open social media protocol empowering lots of software such as this client. The experience is kind of like Twitter except that you control your own account, and you can post to many different independent places called "relays". People are finding many additional uses for nostr that go far beyond micro-blogging or chatting, but this client is focused on those.
- **Debian**: See the [releases](https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip/releases) area for a file named something like `gossip-VERSION-ARCH.deb.zip`
- **Microsoft Windows**: See the [releases](https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip/releases) area for a file named something like `gossip-VERSION.msi.zip`
- Gossip follows people at they relays they profess to post to. That means it has to discover which relays those are (see [https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/65.md](NIP-65)) and make smart relay selection choices based on things like which relays cover the most people you follow.
- Gossip handles private keys as securely as reasonable (short of hardware tokens), keeping them encrypted under a passphrase on disk, requiring that passphrase on startup, and zeroing memory.
- Gossip avoids web technologies (other than HTTP GET and WebSockets). Web technologies like HTML parsing and rendering, CSS, JavaScript and the very many web standards, are complex and represent a security hazard due to such a large attack surface. This isn't just a pedantic or theoretical concern; people have already had their private key stolen from other nostr clients. We use simple OpenGL-style rendering instead. It's not as pretty but it gets the job done.
- **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 passphrase 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 many 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 provides options to support privacy usage such as not loading avatars, not necessarily sharing who you follow, etc. We will be adding more privacy features.
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: decentbun13@walletofsatoshi.com == lnurl1dp68gurn8ghj7ampd3kx2ar0veekzar0wd5xjtnrdakj7tnhv4kxctttdehhwm30d3h82unvwqhkgetrv4h8gcn4dccnxv563ep