nostr101

Nostr, explained properly

The material already exists. The NIPs are on GitHub, there are resource pages and awesome-lists pointing everywhere, and a newcomer arrives, finds ninety-odd numbered proposals and a directory of forty clients, and leaves. This is the path through it.

This site adds almost no new information, and saying so is the point. What it adds is an order, a plain-language line against every NIP, and a few small instruments you can click rather than read about.

It also covers what Nostr is bad at. Discovery genuinely is worse without a server that has seen everything; key management has no reset; spam is priced rather than prevented. A guide that only sells is less useful and less credible, and this audience notices.

Foundations track · 6 pages · about 51 min

Six pages, in order, from what a key is to why your relay set decides what you see. No client needed until page five.

  1. 01 What Nostr is not clears the four things people assume it is before anything else lands not written yet
  2. 02 Everything on Nostr is an event one data structure, and the rest of the protocol is a catalogue of uses for it 11 min
  3. 03 Keys are the account npub, nsec, and what recovery means when there is no recovery 8 min
  4. 04 Relays, and why your set decides what you see the reason two people disagree about what a thread contains not written yet
  5. 05 What a NIP actually is turns the numbered list into something you can navigate not written yet
  6. 06 Zaps, and the Lightning underneath them the one place Nostr and Lightning meet, and the receipt that proves it not written yet

The NIP index

Every Nostr Implementation Possibility with a number, a status and one line of plain language — 95 of them, regenerated daily from the repository, each row with a stable anchor you can link to directly.

28 rows carry a description written here. The rest show the NIP's own opening sentence, marked as the NIP's words, and a dash where a status would be — because a guess about a document nobody here has read closely is worth less than an admitted gap. Read the index.

Never paste your key

There is one thing on this site worth learning before anything else: your nsec is your identity, it cannot be reset, and it should never be typed into a website. Including this one.

The key explainer here works on real keypairs generated when the page was built and printed in public, which is exactly what makes them worthless. There is no input field on it and no key-derivation code in the page, so nothing here can accept a key even by accident. See what a keypair actually is.