How does Nostr work?

Relays are the critical components in the Nostr protocol. They are backend servers that allow various social media platforms to send messages to one another. Relays can store user posts and messages, enabling seamless interaction across platforms.

Users can connect to multiple relays to save their account details, posts, and social interactions. Connecting to several relays ensures that a user always has access to their data in case a relay goes offline or gets censored. Nostr also allows users to run their own private relay to remove doubts about becoming censorable. At the time of writing, 218 Nostr relays were online.

Each user account on Nostr has a public-private key pair. You can think about public keys as usernames with which you can search for your friend’s Nostr profile. Your private key is your password. 

Users can jump between various decentralized social applications built on Nostr using their public-private keys. If you get kicked out of platform ABC, then you can move all your posts, messages, and followers to another platform XYZ and carry out business as usual.

Although there are a lot of similarities between the Nostr protocol and blockchain protocols, Nostr is not a blockchain. It is simply a set of rules. Nostr, however, does draw inspiration from blockchain protocols like Bitcoin in championing decentralization and interoperability.

Just like the Bitcoin network, Nostr is not owned by any corporation. Changes to the protocol are pitched, discussed, and approved by the community in the form of Nostr Implementation Possibilities (NIPs) on GitHub.

According to Greg Heartsfield, “Nostr tries to solve the problem of publishing short notes (“and other stuff”) on the Internet.”