Hello Stacker News! I'm new here, but I have been seeing a lot of posts about Nostr. Many of the posts seem to be related to Lightning Network stuff. So as a Lightning enthusiast, I thought that I would give it a try. For all of other new folks, I thought that I'd post my experience so far here. Maybe it will help someone, but the real experts are welcome to correct me!

I've been using Lightning Network for fast BTC payments wherever I could for some time now. My favorite Lightning wallet has been SBW, but active development may have ended. Fortunately for me, OBW has picked up where SBW left off. This ties in with nostr because the clients seem to easily integrate with LN payments and services. OBW Wallet: https://github.com/nbd-wtf/obw

Before I started with Nostr, I knew that I would need a key pair. This is like a username/password. Some clients will create one for you, but I read somewhere that there are also scripts that would generate thousands in search of a vanity nkey.. so that is what I did. I used nostrogen: https://github.com/tonyinit/nostrogen

Once I had generated an nkey that had the first few letters to my liking, I was ready to find a client. Since there isn't really any sign-up process for nostr, you just bring your keys to whatever client you use, it is easy to try out different clients. For now I've settled on:

Android - Amethyst: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitorpamplona.amethyst

Web client: https://astral.ninja/

After exploring nostr for a few minutes with the default settings, I noticed that the settings on both had a field for NIP-05 verification. This verification gives you a nice checkmark next to your profile image in most clients. Looking deeper into that I found that I could do the NIP-05 verification on a domain that I own just by creating a special file in the appropriate location on my web server. More info on NIP-05 verification on your own domain here: https://gist.github.com/metasikander/609a538e6a03b2f67e5c8de625baed3e

Also, despite my enthusiasm about Lightning, I somehow never heard about lightning addresses or LN-URLs, which are also available settings in the nostr clients that I've played with. Since I use a non-custodial wallet and don't run my own node on a server, I was at first discouraged that I wouldn't be able to participate in this exciting feature to allow strangers to send me sats without an invoice. If I was running my own node, I could host my own lightning address with something like: https://github.com/Bashy/phplightningaddress

BUT as it turns out, I don't need to run my own node and I can just have people send to my Stacker News wallet!

Even better than that, I can still look cool with my own domain for an ln-url and lightning address by just linking my Stacker News wallet to my own domain!: #31515

One thing to watch out for here is the CORS configuration. Make sure that you have the origin headers set correctly as described.

Once all of this was done, I could just use the same username@mydomain.com string for my lightning address AND NIP-05 identifier.

When someone sends sats to my username@mydomain.com lightning address, they show up in my stacker news wallet where I can withdraw them back to OBW.

After getting going on nostr, I decided to list myself on https://www.nostr.directory/ . With the credentials above and a few other steps I was able bump up my "web of trust" level.

From here, I was getting a little tired of the spam in the chats, so started using a few paid relays:  wss://eden.nostr.land wss://nostr.milou.lol wss://puravida.nostr.land wss://relay.orangepill.dev wss://nostr.wine

I was able to pay for these relays by first installing the nos2x chrome extension and just going to the http:// of the above domains. This gave me a lightning invoice that I could pay with OBW. There is probably a better way to find the payment links.. but this is what I did.

So far nostr has been fun and I'm looking forward to seeing more new and cool stuff on the Awesome Nostr list!:  https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr