Gossip

NOTICE: If when you pull gossip it doesn't pull cleanly, I may have done a rare force-push. Run these commands to reset your master branch:

$ git fetch
$ git reset --hard origin/master

Gossip is a desktop client for nostr.

Nostr is a social media protocol and ecosystem, kind of like Twitter [^1] 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 just chatting, but this client is focused on chatting.

Nostr stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays."

[^1] and Mastodon, Gab, Post, Gettr, Farcaster, Truth social, BlueSky, Locals, Minds, Spoutable, etc, etc....

Points of Difference

The following features make gossip different than most other nostr clients so far:

• 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) 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), requiring a passphrase on startup.
• 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 far too complex and represent security hazards. We use simple OpenGL-style rendering instead. It's not as pretty, and we will never be able to prerender links, but it gets the job done.

Status

Gossip is still in development, but it's ready to use now if you wish. There are many known shortcomings and a few bugs, and the UI badly needs a makeover, but all things come in their own time.

Screenshot

Videos

First Gossip Video, 5 Jan 2023

Gossip Relay Model, 29 Jan 2023

Development Ideology

• 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 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:
  • OpenGL (via glium or glow)
  • OpenGL ES (via glow or wgpu)
  • WebGL (via glow)
  • Vulkan (via wgpu)
  • Metal (via wgpu)
  • DirectX 11/12 (via wgpu)
  • Browsers (via WebAssembly)
• 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.

nostr features supported

• NIP-01 - Basic protocol flow description
• NIP-02 - Contact List and Petnames
• NIP-03 - OpenTimestamps Attestations for Events [NOT PLANNED]
• NIP-04 - Encrypted Direct Message
• NIP-05 - Mapping Nostr keys to DNS-based internet identifiers
• NIP-06 - Basic key derivation from mnemonic seed phrase
• NIP-07 - window.nostr capability for web browsers [NOT APPLICABLE]
• NIP-08 - Handling Mentions
• NIP-09 - Event Deletion [PARTIAL]
• NIP-10 - Conventions for clients' use of e and p tags in text events
• NIP-11 - Relay Information Document
• NIP-12 - Generic Tag Queries
• NIP-13 - Proof of Work
• NIP-14 - Subject tag in text events
• NIP-15 - End of Stored Events Notice
• NIP-16 - Event Treatment
• NIP-19 - bech32-encoded entities
• NIP-20 - Command Results
• NIP-21 - nostr: URL scheme
• NIP-22 - Event created_at Limits
• NIP-25 - Reactions
• NIP-26 - Delegated Event Signing
• NIP-28 - Public Chat
• NIP-33 - Parameterized Replaceable Events
• NIP-36 - Sensitive Content
• NIP-40 - Expiration Timestamp
• NIP-42 - Authentication of clients to relays
• NIP-50 - Keywords filter
• NIP-56 - Reporting
• NIP-65 - Relay List Metadata

Building and Installing

Step 1 - Install Rust

If you don't already have rust installed, follow the guidance at rust-lang.org.

Step 2 - Install some dependencies

Most dependencies are probably already installed in your base operating system. Here are a few that sometimes aren't:

• build essentials like gcc and make (debian: "build-essential")
• cmake (debian: "cmake")
• pkg-config (debian: "pkg-config")
• openssl (debian: "libssl-dev")
• fontconfig (debian: "libfontconfig1-dev")

Step 3 - Clone this Repository

$ git clone https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip

Step 4 - Compile

$ cd gossip
$ cargo build --release

The output will be a binary executable in target/release/gossip

Everything gossip needs (fonts, icons) is baked into this executable. It doesn't need to find assets. So you can move it and run it from anywhere.

To make the binary smaller

$ strip gossip

This binary should be portable to similar systems with similar hardware and operating system.

If you want a binary optimized for your exact processor with the newest features enabled:

$ RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native --cfg tokio_unstable" cargo build --release

Step 5 - Do it all again

The master branch changes quickly. When you want to update

$ git pull
$ cargo build --release
$ strip ./target/release/gossip
$ ./target/release/gossip

Technology Involved

• Rust Language
• egui Rust GUI framework
• SQLite 3
• Tungstenite websocket library
• Tokio async task runtime
• Serde serialization/deserialization
• Many others

License

• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

Contribution

All contributions welcome.

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.

Follow me on Nostr

My public key is ee11a5dff40c19a555f41fe42b48f00e618c91225622ae37b6c2bb67b76c4e49

You can also my NIP-05 address of mike@mikedilger.com which will also hook you up with the relays I post to.

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).

Tips

You can tip me at my Bitcoin Lighting address: decentbun13@walletofsatoshi.com == lnurl1dp68gurn8ghj7ampd3kx2ar0veekzar0wd5xjtnrdakj7tnhv4kxctttdehhwm30d3h82unvwqhkgetrv4h8gcn4dccnxv563ep