Basic Nostr relay and client

Sharing and syncing text across different devices is a trivial task to accomplish with the usage of proprietary tools, closed source applications and technologies. Even though these are practical and useful strategies, sometimes the data at hand requires a more cautious approach, which means that sharing the text and content with a third party server could be annoying and even dangerous.

Some solutions in the FOSS community use bluetooth technologies or direct wifi connections to solve this issue. Nonetheless, sometimes these tools can present some challenges and cannot enable long-term storage of the shared data.

I propose a basic alternative to tackle one subset of use-cases, specifically the sharing of content across devices belonging to the same private network with the usage of a Nostr relay. This approach exploits some features of open protocols and is extremely extensible according to the needs of the user(s).

The project contains two elements:

• a basic client application, used to push and retrieve text notes from the relay;
• a basic nostr relay, which stores the text notes in-memory.

Both the client and the relay are implemented using the python monstr library, which is a work-in-progress library with possibly some missing features. As the upstream library will be updated, new features will be implemented in the project.

Warnings

Since the client and the relay are extremely basic and with no ecryption schemes implemented, it's suggested to not employ this product in adversarial contexts and with no sensitive or private information. A closed, private, non adversarial and safe network is the most suited environment to test this project as of now.

Future improvements

The current state of the Client doesn't enable interoperability between the basic client of this project and the Nostr-compatible clients out there. This feature will be enabled once the note formatting - as processed by the client - will be standardized. On the contrary, the relay is already compatible with the broader ecosistem of Nostr clients.

Client

• Box to insert custom relay in the user interface;
• Text content is deleted from the input form once the submission to the relay succeded;
• Subscription-based retrieval of data from relay (once monstr implements the proper handler features);
• Time limit on the retrieved data from the relay;
• NIP1-compatible formatting for shared notes;
• NIP-compatible encryption scheme for text notes, as described in the DM specs for Nostr clients;
• Better styling of the client application.

Relay

• SQLite integration for long-term storage of notes.

I'm Using GitHub Under Protest

This project is currently hosted on GitHub. This is not ideal; GitHub is a proprietary, trade-secret system that is not Free and Open Souce Software (FOSS). I urge you to read about the Give up GitHub campaign from the Software Freedom Conservancy to understand some of the reasons why GitHub is not a good place to host FOSS projects.

Any use of this project's code by GitHub Copilot, past or present, is done without our permission. I do not consent to GitHub's use of this project's code in Copilot.