So, there’s not really “a signup” to use Nostr. That would be similar to saying “the signup” for ActivityPub – it’s just not specific enough for me to understand where you found this signup thing.
But also, you don’t really need to sign up anywhere. You just need a keypair. You can generate that offline, or use a trustworthy site to generate it “offline” in your web browser with JavaScript so the private key is never sent over the wire.
No idea what the Google login thing was. If I had to take a wild guess, maybe you found some place that also offers some key management/signing features as a way to make things more user friendly?
If it helps, the first Nostr client I ever tried was Iris.to. I thinkPrimal might be the most popular though.
(This might be the extent of my Nostr knowledge. I was never a frequent user, and haven’t really thought about it in months.)
No idea what the Google login thing was. If I had to take a wild guess, maybe you found some place that also offers some key management/signing features as a way to make things more user friendly?
I’ll buy that. I just have trouble squaring things like that with things like gpg-agent and how they cache passphrases and keep them from swapping to disk, etc. I’d want to know more about it and whether it’s generated in the browser or on the server. I’m also not even sure how I’d go about doing some sort of review of the javascript algorithms or where their random numbers come from. I’m not throwing shade on them; I just don’t know.
I’d want to know more about it and whether it’s generated in the browser or on the server.
FWIW, most of these web-based Nostr clients are just static JS files. They’re SPAs that connect to the relay servers (via WebSocket, IIRC). You can open up your browser’s devtools, go to the “Network” tab, and see what’s happening.
I don’t think I’d trust one that does any server-side rendering. No particular reason (though I’m sure I could think of some) other than it just wouldn’t feel right for Nostr.
I’m also not even sure how I’d go about doing some sort of review of the javascript algorithms or where their random numbers come from
I’d guess they just use the native WebCrypto APIs, but I have not verified. More info on native crypto APIs available in JS here:
So, there’s not really “a signup” to use Nostr. That would be similar to saying “the signup” for ActivityPub – it’s just not specific enough for me to understand where you found this signup thing.
But also, you don’t really need to sign up anywhere. You just need a keypair. You can generate that offline, or use a trustworthy site to generate it “offline” in your web browser with JavaScript so the private key is never sent over the wire.
No idea what the Google login thing was. If I had to take a wild guess, maybe you found some place that also offers some key management/signing features as a way to make things more user friendly?
If it helps, the first Nostr client I ever tried was Iris.to. I think Primal might be the most popular though.
(This might be the extent of my Nostr knowledge. I was never a frequent user, and haven’t really thought about it in months.)
https://nostr.com/
I’ll buy that. I just have trouble squaring things like that with things like gpg-agent and how they cache passphrases and keep them from swapping to disk, etc. I’d want to know more about it and whether it’s generated in the browser or on the server. I’m also not even sure how I’d go about doing some sort of review of the javascript algorithms or where their random numbers come from. I’m not throwing shade on them; I just don’t know.
I’ll look.
FWIW, most of these web-based Nostr clients are just static JS files. They’re SPAs that connect to the relay servers (via WebSocket, IIRC). You can open up your browser’s devtools, go to the “Network” tab, and see what’s happening.
I don’t think I’d trust one that does any server-side rendering. No particular reason (though I’m sure I could think of some) other than it just wouldn’t feel right for Nostr.
I’d guess they just use the native WebCrypto APIs, but I have not verified. More info on native crypto APIs available in JS here:
(FWIW, every Node.js distro I’ve ever used leveraged OpenSSL for those, under the hood. I imagine other runtimes do too.)