Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) continues to gain traction and spread like wildfire. For those hearing about it for the first time, Nostr is a fully decentralized microblogging protocol (and not a platform, the way Mastodon is). It divides right down to the user account level, governed by an asymmetric key pair, which makes it even client agnostic (meaning you can take your keys and jump from one client to another in a way that is largely frictionless).
We first wrote about it here, and since then we’ve rolled out easyNostr – a NIP-05 identity endpoint for Nostr. The NIP-05 spec defines a way to map your public key like
npub1elwpzsul8d9k4tgxqdjuzxp0wa94ysr4zu9xeudrcxe2h3sazqkq5mehan
…and map that to a NIP-05 identifier that in the above case looks like markjr@bombthrower.com
It looks a lot like an email address, and some NIP-05 endpoints are starting to add mail forwarding for identifiers (I know that’s on the roadmap here).
We’ll get there soon, but first – we’ve added some domains everybody is free to create NIP-05 identifiers under, including:
We also wanted to make it possible to add NIP-05 identifiers under your own domain. We’re somewhat constrained by the protocol spec on how to do that (separate story and ongoing battle there 😉 – but for now, it’s a rather simple matter of creating a CNAME from your hostname to our endpoint and you’re in business:
NIP-05 endpoints require https, so we’re using Lets Encrypt to roll you one when you add a hostname or domain to the system. Once you add your domain, go to your trusty DNS provider (whoever that is) and set it up. If you want to use your zone apex and can’t CNAME it where you are, take a look at our zone apex aliasing (ANAME) which can do that for you.
Once the DNS is in place (our side will keep checking) the whole process should take about 90 seconds, and fire you an email when it’s done.
This is still a skunkworks project (coded by yours truly with help from ChatGPT), so if you run into problems, hassle me, not the main support desk.
There’s an easyNostr Telegram setup and you can follow @easyNostr on Nostr.
Lots more on the way, including:
- LUD-16 LN url support for static Lightning payment identifiers (easy to piggyback on NIP-05)
- Gated email forwarding from your NIP-05 id
See also:
- The NIP-05 specification
- Nostr.net for a curated list of Nostr resources
- My article for Bitcoin Magazine that talks about using scoped TXT records to make all this easier
Leave a Reply