Oddbean new post about login | logout GM Nostr! 🌞 I'd love to hear what your most painful experience using Nostr is right now. All aspects are fair game; keys, clients, relays, data usage, speed, search, etc. Bring me your horror stories!
For me it's only painful that Nostr doesn't have more users yet
That I did not write down my initial password. Totally my mistake. But you asked.
Initial password? Do you mean your nsec (private key)?
👀 Which app @SavageWhit ?
Data usage. That’s all :)
We can currently zap, then tap the ⚡️ button again to cancel. Would be nice if we had 10 seconds to do the same with posting a note, so we don’t need to post a new note to correct the typo.
Nostur does this
Mainly use Damus. Sometimes Primal. But really, all the clients have things I like and things I don’t. Wish there were a way to just get everyone working together instead of separately. Never tried Nostur, but I will today!
Nostur is a clean client functionality wise, not a fan of the UI - def has some hidden gems I’d like to see Damus and Amethyst implement.
I like it at first glance.
Has a lot of functionality to explore. There’s a neat feature I’ve used in the past that restores followers that may have been removed or synced incorrectly from another client - there’s a lot good ideas and functions in there.
Not sure how to zap there yet, lots of things lacking too, which all have an onboarding process which takes patience and lots of effort from users
Definitely, that was one caveat I saw to it. I feel like clients aren’t really friendly to onboarding in general because of those friction points. There has to be an easier, secure, and functional way to onboard the average netizen.
The strength of nostr comes from the fact that we can all work on different clients. If we were to combine efforts we would turn into Bluesky: A smooth experience at the expense of everything that matters.
Trying to build a following only to see like 30-35 disappear suddenly without any explanation. Happened 4 times so far.
Which nostr apps have you used with your private keys? In what order?
Damus
If you havent used your keys with another client, the follower count issue is known. Since your follows are stored on relays, if a relay is down or slow to respond the follower count may vary. 1.7 Damus update will allow for more accurate follow counts. 1.7 is currently in Testflight sorting out a few bugs.
Thank you !!!
Flat-earthers.
For me it's been lack of reliability in clients. Something is always not working, even though devs are at it 24/7 trying to make it work. It just seems like relays introduce a level of complexity that makes everything more painful.
Agree. Things feel pretty fragile much of the time. I wonder how we would go about pinpointing issues in an aggregated way. 🤔
@Karnage which app(s)? When does the fragility happen?
I want to say all. I don’t think I’ve had a smooth experience in any app.
Fair. I think it’s important to keep in mind if the expectation is a twitter like experience twitter has million engineering hours head start. And nostr has unique characteristics, that devs are figuring out as we speak. These characteristics carry performance and experience consequences. nostr:note1vlga0muszzagcfqkr9yl8f89cgskp9v4vj4fqrv6ucvc25whqqaqyf5mze
ok switch to mean mode- clients on iOS: damus works, image & video exploring sucks, suhail's zap plugin not stable. primal works, not showing indirect reply, can't select words which sucks. nos social & nostur not works. feed only shows my events and reposted ones, relays connections good.
Great feedback. That indirect replies thing with primal kills me too.
stopped using Primal after the first shadow ban incident. Could be a bug, could be shadow bans, could be whatever but the trust is gone and they don't support the most common nostr events either. like naddr which is just lame.
GM @JeffG Clearing cache in Amethyst everyday sucks. I am on #nostr most the day tho. https://image.nostr.build/5ea99debeb728fe0cef9316a8f877a3861f760ceadb69903beebd3c16185e8ae.jpg#m=image%2Fjpeg&dim=1049x718&blurhash=rRKKB3sb%24TbXXLNWxVawrrTgoxjdr%5DaPaPnlaxWT%3FwV%3DM%7BV%40r%3Fn-RjoMWVS8V%5DNHW%2CX5k8S2oMn%2Cu5R%25bbo%23fmsoxFadkRR%3Ds%3AoNt5X5j%3Bf%23WBoc&x=6b8676c5646fd3414ad57e446813ae216b0aa13e9daf9f362aee72ae590f6741
How much does your cache grow each day before you clear? How much of the storage is freed when you clear cache?
Good questions, i am not 100% sure of the answers but i am 100% sure amethyst runs better for me after i clear the cache
Following more people than on Twitter, but having fewer posts to read. Not being able to search.
The biggest benefit of nostr - that you can bring your follower graph to a new app - is massively constrained because people are hesitant to put in their nsec. On web the browser extensions like Alby help with this but it still adds so much friction to onboarding when you’re essentially asking people to signup to 2 separate services, and on mobile these extensions don’t work. The oauth like nsecbunker signup / login flow that @PABLOF7z has been working on seems like it can solve this problem - but we need more examples that work seamlessly with good ux. “Login with Nostr” needs to be as seamless as “Login with Apple / Google” on both web and mobile.
Most annoying for me is when I tap to open a note and read its comments. When I tap the back button to go back to the home feed, it 'forgets' that post's location in the home feed and sends me back to the top of the page, effectively making my home feed only fit for reading the most recently posted notes. This is something I've experienced on virtually every alternative social (both native app and PWA), regardless of client, seems to happen more often on mobile. Only real workaround I've found is to basically use Nostr in 'stalker mode', visiting each follow's profile page directly to see their notes.
1. Not getting clear messages as to why when relays reject or filter a note. 2. Not having a single sign on solution (secure private key management that works across all clients) 3. Not easily seeing the reach and distribution of notes and user info / no good network wide search. I spent a lot of time trying to find and connect to some friends by their NPUBs at first without knowing which relays to use. Why not implement a relay level DHT index of note/user hashes <-> owning relay that could deliver a federated search across participating relays? (https://libp2p.io/implementations/)
Gm ☕️🤙 Rn - just client consistency. Some clients do weird stuff others don’t 🤷♂️
I think that’s a feature, no? Would be boring if all clients worked exactly the same
I agree - to clarify context, I would love to see features in Nostur implemented in Damus or Amethyst, for instance. It would be boring if all clients worked the same, but I’d like to see one that has an amalgamation of features from others while still being unique.
What exactly do you want to in Damus or Amethyst?
The feature Nostur has to restore followers from clients that deleted followers or incorrectly synced has been a life saver - don’t know or haven’t seen anything like that on Damus or Amethyst. Other small things, like editing a note on Nostur for a small duration of time, haven’t tested that one but saw the feature for it. Maybe that’s not possible on clients on Damus or Amethyst, and there’s things on Nostur that could use some things from Damus/Amethyst.
I'm new here. It's not hard to understand what keys and relays are, and how to use it. For me problem is bad internet connection, and as a result broken clients. I tried most of the clients for desktop and web clients recommended on Nostr.com, and only Nostter is working for me now. clients look different. sometimes you can’t even find where your profile is and where the settings are. Some client offers to select relays, subscribe to someone, but after you choose, nothing is saved. Absolutely all of the ones I tried cannot really show who I follow and who follows me. Somewhere there is a zaps, somewhere they seem to be hidden or missing. In addition to poor loading when the Internet connection is bad, some web clients periodically crash with a 500 error or something like that. And I couldn’t set up identity verification on the free domain, which is probably more good than bad.
Nothing horrifying, but a few frustrations: Some accounts that I follow suddenly disappear from my feed and it turns out I'm not following them anymore. I wish I knew how that happened or at least had a way to track it. I often can't see replies to posts. At first I assumed that it was because of accounts that I've muted, but I've only muted 2 and this happens a lot. Then today I did a search for a post and I saw the answer show up in my search, but I can't see it in the thread.
tagging. typing a note out and trying to tag someone, then realizing you cannot, copying all of the entire note to an external app, visiting nostr.band to copy the npub, then going back to the note, pasting the npub in, and then finally completing the note in app to post it. sometimes you can get away with just copying the note text, visiting the in-app search, typing their name, visiting their profile, then going back to the note creation screen and tagging them correctly without having to visit nostr.band. tagging is still the hugest pain in the asshole 12 months later. we can't be social if we can't even mention the people we want to be social with.
So relatable
Damus solved this so long ago I can’t even remember this experience.
You can tag everyone? Even someone you haven't seen active in a while?
You are asking for a hellthread aren’t you 😆
Check it out https://v.nostr.build/8ABX.mp4
Couldn't find @Cameri in a normal reply. Had to visit search to find him. Now I can tag him properly. https://i.nostr.build/Pdv7.jpg#m=image%2Fjpeg&dim=1080x2400&blurhash=%5BVI5Y%3DobRkj%3F00WBt7WV%7EqawWDj%3F-%3BWBs%3Bay4naxofj%3FxuayWBfj%25Ma%23offRE0j%40RjoLt5a%23oea%23&x=c2e191387ba8eac12d15d59f086764feff0d5e688cac456aafdb1a06ddf6af6f https://i.nostr.build/W6x3.jpg#m=image%2Fjpeg&dim=1080x2400&blurhash=%5BOIX%7E*San%3AWS00WAxuWB%7EpsrM_s%3B-%3AoNk7j%5D00j%3Dofj%3F%25MayRjay-%3BWCt6a%23D%25awWEj%3FxbWBt7a%23&x=ae86409d8eaf6b5c12acb3db587fff1f0bce6acd560fe823e48e9c1b825de7ca
for some weird reason my ios clients will erase all relays then ill have to go into a web client and add them again as they cannot be added via ios anymore.. this happens on a weekly basis
Which apps have you used, and in what order?
ios: damus, primal, plebstr…. i’ve tried to see if it’s app dependant but seems like it’s an iphone thing
There’s a known issue of using your private keys with multiple clients causing relay and/or contact list loss
how?
threaded conversations are almost useless... maybe it is better to have just one thread and tag people that you reply to withing the thread (the way twitter was originally designed)
Last I cared, I noticed that nostr verification did not work over tor. I've since disabled tor because I stopped caring and now I see bad verification signals on accounts that I'm pretty sure are valid so I tend not to care about it at all now. Am I a bad person?
discovered that some replies to my notes are missing in @primal and this resulted in the wrong person winning a contest I was doing a few days ago. I shared a screen recording of the issue yesterday. nostr:note1pf765wwufq8hp2euvuhks6xn24trwmud3qrdzmkkcs2f2c6eztfq7vqzsh
that things get started, but after a while improvement stops ... adhd like jumping from one idea to the other, but not really doing the (often boring) work, which is needed to make things fly, is spoiling the experience a bit
I have a problem with connecting to various relays depending on what isp I'm using at a given moment or which towers I'm on with cellular. I cover a broad geographical area on a normal day & connect to 3, sometimes 4 different isps. It took months of screwing around with what to shut off/turn on for where I was, to get a fairly consistent experience across locations.
This thread has turned into an absolute treasure trove of opportunities to build! Anyone want to volunteer to bring all the thoughts together in a coherent doc? nostr:note1993353nnqysydcx3k4nrse3xqqxnarpacduqfpcs0qjye8khhdqssmzvzv
i might
So many typos 😭 I’m a perfectionist when it comes to writing and now I have to live with my typos FOREVER 😭
Having to set zap amounts and like emojis again every time after I login with my nsec again, isn't there a nip to save application specific data to fix this? @Vitor Pamplona
There is but you will have to setup the Nostr wallet connect anyway because it would not be safe to store that info on a relay.
communities need a lot of work
I can’t in good conscience onboard normies until there’s a better answer than “and then you paste your private key into yet another app and hope it’s not leaked or stolen”. We need NIP07 for native apps and nsecbunker is cool but too complicated for most people.
How do you feel about custodial nsecbunker?
Sometimes not being able to view the parent or the whole thread of a note to gain context
yeah, this is a pain too. very long threads, or threading in general need some work.
I write this note few seconds ago 😄 https://primal.net/e/note1dhaupzwdax4awq3g2h7k6churae9vpj2cdvntlk5xukx7zg5eaasdwszw9 This is my concern.
All of a sudden my follow list disappeared!!!! I was using astral_ninja. I still like that Client having to build a follow list again was a bit of a pain!
Check out https://listr.lol or https://kind3.xyz/ You can back your follow list up with those tools.
Not a horror story, but would love some way to have multiple private keys. One which is used for everyday posting, stored in an insecure location (browser or app), and one which is stored in a more secure location and can issue new keys or revocation certs for existing keys.
Good morning Jeff 🌅
Bahah oops my damus is behind 4 days all of a sudden 😅 glitch
