Hacker News: fiatjaf

New comment by fiatjaf in "Bluesky April 2026 Outage Post-Mortem"

fiatjaf — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:17:01 +0000

Sorry, but this analogy is very misleading, no one browses websites through Google's servers.

For example, right now in my URL bar I read "news.ycombinator.com", not "google.com/profile/news.ycombinator.com".

If Google goes down now I can keep browsing this website and all the other websites I have in all my other tabs as if nothing had happened.

The Cloud won't save you. Owning your stack will – for less

fiatjaf — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 03:01:11 +0000

Article URL: https://fbo.network/en/articles/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq6wf24hjcdl0xen5ctygr7dw95r53wxwgey4dve7hmswlsf7jt9fqy28wumn8ghj7mn9wd68ytnwv4jxzmewvd5qz9rhwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjmcpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgqg5waehxw309a3xzumnwp5hxar0dshx7un8qyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvqqthg6r9943kcmm4vskhwmmwwskhxctkv5khjmm4vfypv6

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47421148

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

Grasp Protocol

fiatjaf — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:24:55 +0000

Article URL: https://gitgrasp.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363504

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by fiatjaf in "The Future Was Federated"

fiatjaf — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:42:59 +0000

X is bigger than ATProto and wasn't included either?

The Future Was Federated

fiatjaf — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:10:23 +0000

Article URL: https://news.dyne.org/the-future-was-federated/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46894761

Points: 4

# Comments: 4

New comment by fiatjaf in "Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension"

fiatjaf — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:19:38 +0000

See https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/#/pathological

New comment by fiatjaf in "Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr"

fiatjaf — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 01:56:04 +0000

It's quite simple:

- You publish to, say, 3 relays.

- I follow you or want to browse your content for any reason.

- I connect to your 3 relays and fetch your content.

If I want to follow someone else and they publish to other relays I fetch their posts from those relays.

If some of your relays start censoring you you can move to other relays, or run your own, and I'll start fetching your content from those.

There's an interactive animation demo at https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/#/outbox that explains it.

Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

fiatjaf — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:54:34 +0000

Article URL: https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/natures-many-attempts-to-evolve-a

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46225803

Points: 204

# Comments: 170

New comment by fiatjaf in "Nostr"

fiatjaf — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 19:38:56 +0000

Unfortunately this paper doesn't live up to its goal of being a cheap attack on Nostr.

The fact is that clients do verify signatures from events received from servers, that is in the protocol specification and should be obvious to anyone mildly honest.

The entire assumption of the paper is that clients don't do that and it is void. Yes, they did find a couple of clients 2 years ago that didn't verify signatures -- so much for a vulnerability in the protocol. I guess they wanted Nostr to have a code police arresting client developers who didn't finish their implementation?

Aside from that the attacks they demonstrated depend on a bunch of other absurd circumstances (like you have to manually and voluntarily type the URL of the attacker server in order to be attacked) but it's not even worth talking about them since the basic assumption is so completely false already.

The encrypted messages stuff is not even a core part of Nostr anyway, Nostr is a broadcasting protocol for public or semi-public content. Encryption can be added on top and there are multiple ways and proposals for how to do it, including an implementation of MLS and other methods and I personally mostly do not care about any.

I wish the paper authors were more honest and republished their work with the title: "the dangers of trusting a cryptographic signature without verifying it", but I imagine that it would have been too obvious and worthless if it was phrased like that.

New comment by fiatjaf in "Nostr"

fiatjaf — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:19:53 +0000

There is no blockchain, only basic cryptographic signatures on each message. And users are not tied to any servers, they can read from multiple or write to multiple. They can (locally) aggregate data from many servers or connect to a specific server, same for publishing, it's very flexible and different clients choose to do it in different ways and expose different interfaces to users.

New comment by fiatjaf in "Nostr"

fiatjaf — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:17:11 +0000

Yes, that makes sense and that can be used later by relays and clients in order to decide whether to store or display notes from identities. In fact that's a pretty good idea.

New comment by fiatjaf in "Nostr"

fiatjaf — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:12:02 +0000

You only read from the relays you want, relays have all the tools in the world to reject spam, therefore the solution is just to have clients that help the user enforce selecting only what they deem as "safe" relays in order to read replies from.

New comment by fiatjaf in "Nostr"

fiatjaf — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:09:04 +0000

This is cool but P2P doesn't work. Iroh also relies on "relays" in a sense. Nostr makes that explicit and gives relays identities so they can freely enact policies instead of having to hack that in weird ways.

New comment by fiatjaf in "Nostr"

fiatjaf — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:04:52 +0000

That's a misconception: you don't "use" relays (in the sense that you don't have to have a static list of relays you always use), you write to relays. When reading you connect to the relays of whatever the people you want to read from.

Some apps indeed use this method of selecting a static set of relays, and if that was the protocol you would be correct about centralization or bloat, but this is legacy from a naïve unfinished early implementation, most apps do the correct thing now and the rest is transitioning.

Djot is a light markup syntax from the creator of Pandoc

fiatjaf — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:51:12 +0000

Article URL: https://djot.net/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45174493

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by fiatjaf in "OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices"

fiatjaf — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:01:02 +0000

An easy-to-setup OpenWrt-based plugin to sell internet for satoshis: https://tollgate.me/

Zapstore, Android app store powered by your social graph

fiatjaf — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:03:59 +0000

Article URL: https://zapstore.dev/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892455

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by fiatjaf in "FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support"

fiatjaf — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:28:53 +0000

Thank you very much!

New comment by fiatjaf in "Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years"

fiatjaf — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 02:42:28 +0000

I see, I was under the impression that Carbon encompassed sales and factory floor too. Now it makes more sense. Thanks!

New comment by fiatjaf in "Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years"

fiatjaf — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 02:16:55 +0000

A stupid question from a layman: is it really how people do it?

I would have thought "manufacturing" was too generic and that you would need different software for each industry and so on.

But instead it looks like it doesn't matter if you're making shoes or cars or umbrellas or computer chips, everything uses the same software?