mewj
Bartholomew Joyce⚡️🇫🇷

https://bartholomewjoyce.com/

Software developer at nostr.land — working on better privacy on Nostr

Public Key

npub1fzdvtqluxr8macqfthtndmzxg6864zcc0cc3lknzd8zwrq5ya5xq4yz4dv

NIP-05 Address

mewj@elder.nostr.land

NIP-57 Address

mewj@getalby.com

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsy3xk9s07rpna7uqy4m4eka3rydra23vv8uvglmf3xn38ps2zw6rqppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qyv8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnwdaehw6r9wfjjucm0d5fhcr9f

Publishing to

nos.lol

relay.noswhere.com

Author Public Key

npub1fzdvtqluxr8macqfthtndmzxg6864zcc0cc3lknzd8zwrq5ya5xq4yz4dv

Show more details

Last Notes

2023-07-13 15:51:18

- reply

Yeah that’s what I’m doing for emoji as well. When rendering text I check through the text for emoji Unicode and pass all the regular text to the default renderer of NanoVG, and for the emojis I have a texture atlas. If the emojis not already in the atlas I call out to CoreText on iOS to render them for me

2023-07-13 15:15:36

@npub1xts…kk5s I worked on a client a couple months back that renders everything through NanoVG in C++, similar to your chosen stack for NoteDeck. I managed to add support for emoji rendering by writing some OS specific code (CoreText for iOS, out to HTML canvas for web, etc…).
Would you like me to try porting it to NoteDeck?

2023-07-12 17:38:49

#note1keh…z3dj

2023-06-30 10:57:19

- reply

I added support for this in Damus, but only did the decoding part of it. At that time (maybe different now) Damus didn’t have seem to have a simple way to make relay URLs interactive. Would be nice if you could tap and then have an option to add it to your list of relays. But currently it just shows the URL

2023-06-01 10:45:56

- reply

#[1] thank you for the boost!!

2023-06-01 10:42:01

Hey, I’m looking for work!
Have you got a big new Nostr-related idea for an app or feature that you need help developing? I’d be more than happy to lend my skills to your ideas
I’m a dev with a strong background in full-stack web, native iOS/desktop app development, and systems programming whose fallen down the Nostr rabbit hole since Nostrica and am happy to take calls to hear about your project :)
Here’s my development portfolio 👇🏻
https://bartholomewjoyce.com/
Help me out by boosting or sending this note around to people who should see it! pv

2023-04-30 12:51:41

My technical analysis of NIP-95 and file distribution over relays:
First, why do people want to distribute files directly on relays?
Well, the motivation is pretty straightforward: we want to be able to treat files like notes, meaning:
1. We can verify their authenticity
2. We can distribute them to multiple locations, and re-distribute them if the locations change
3. We can link to them without having to link to a particular hosting provider (that may go down or stop serving the file in future)
In all honestly, I agree that relays (or relay-like systems) are a perfect fit for this type of need, and I think it’s inevitable for relays to eventually start offering some form of file hosting service. Not all, but certainly paid relays might.
NIP-95 is one proposed way to get relays to host files. Dead simple: get the file contents and stick it in a Nostr event, and you’ve got files on relays! Certainly, it satisfies all three needs I mentioned earlier, so what’s wrong with it?
Well, it doesn’t appreciate how different files and notes actually are. Consider these particular behaviours that apply to files but not to notes:
1. Streaming
Files on the web are streamed in, meaning that you can see a low-resolution image well before you’ve finished downloading the full file, or you can watch the beginning of a video or beginning of a sound file without downloading it in its entirety.
If files are embedded as base64-encoded strings inside note content, a lot of this streaming behaviour that is taken care of by the browser needs to be handled manually by clients. You’ll need a streaming JSON parser and a streaming base64 parser, and if you’re lucky the note fields stream in in the right order that you can start showing the note as it’s streamed in (which is not guaranteed).
2. Seeking
Continuing along the streaming idea, files are also seekable. You can fetch a part of a file and download just that.
Again, Nostr notes don’t have such functionality at all. You get them in their entirety from beginning to end. What’s more, video files include seeking metadata at the beginning that tell a video player at what byte offset in the file they can find what second of video, enabling seeking to work. Even if you could request a specific range of a note, you’d have to play some tricks to find the right byte offset in the base64-encoded note contents that corresponds to the right byte of the file. Again, here, this is all work that comes for free in a browser, and it now is left to clients if they want to offer a good user experience.
(For those who are curious about the technical side of this, on browsers who support the MediaSource extension, you can pass a video element your own buffers of video data. So in theory clients could stream in note contents, decode them, and pass them to a video player. However, the MediaSource extension is crucially not supported on iOS, who exclusively permit Apple’s HLS streaming format.)
3. Request cancellation
Finally, to make all this magical video and file streaming work browsers frequently open requests, get what they need, and then drop the request before it’s completed. It’s the final essential behaviour that make the streaming user experience good.
How do you cancel an incoming websocket message? You have to close the websocket.
You’d have to close the websocket, re-open it, re-sub to all the things you wanted from the relay and hope to dear god that you haven’t accidentally re-subbed to the file.
To Conclude
It might sound to some like my critique here is missing the point entirely of NIP-95 files: they’re not supposed to cover all use cases for files and are generally just small images.
And that’s where I’m just not so sure. I think if NIP-95 is spec’d to only be for small files that won’t really upset relays, and that won’t really need streaming, then it’s already lost a lot of its appeal to me. Because that means it will only ever be able to solve for a subset of the problem, and the problem of actual file distribution remains open. What makes Nostr great right now is that everyone is shipping and testing lots of new wild ideas, and we all have a willingness to try and see what works, and adapt, and evolve. What’s more, there’s a certain anti-tradition mentality where nobody’s shy of questioning the established ways of doing things and that’s something that makes me really love developing for this ecosystem.
That applies just the same for file distribution. Maybe the way it’s been done traditionally isn’t THE way to do it, and novel solutions should be considered. But we risk taking steps back by not being aware of how these kind of problems have been solved traditionally and why. HTTP file streaming is very very capable, and we should try to craft something that can preserve all the great benefits of the old method while adding decentralisation and trustlessness.
And for that, I think we need to bring NIP-95 back to the workshop and give it another go. I suggest:
- file delivery happens outside of web sockets over regular HTTP (easy for clients)
- relays who host file attachments can signal to clients inside the protocol where they can go to download them
- files are hashed with a j-hash (shameless plug https://github.com/bmewj/j-hash-node), so that their contents can be verified progressively without having to download the entire file (i.e. when streamed or seeked)
Ok! That’s all. Thanks for reading! :)
Tagging a bunch of people I admire to engage (if they want) in the discussion:
#[0]
@npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj
#[1]
#[2]
#[3]
#[4]

2023-04-20 01:26:45

- reply

Oh wow I tapped the “Post” button in the thread view multiple times thinking it didn’t work, but apparently it did but the notes showed up later. And once they did finally show up the next message I was typing got cleared. Maybe the input/post button needs to be disabled while you’re sending a note?

2023-04-20 01:18:41

- reply

Nos is starting to look and feel great, man!

2023-04-20 00:45:16

- reply

OH MY GOD IT WORKS

2023-04-20 00:44:42

- reply

...testing?

2023-04-20 00:44:14

Testing testing...

2023-04-15 19:34:25

- reply

Wow 🤔

2023-04-08 10:31:24

nostr-pow: A little npm Node module for finding Nostr event nonces.
On my Mac mini 3.2GHz 6-Core i7 I’m getting about 10 megahashes/second. Curious to see what others are getting 🤔
https://github.com/bmewj/nostr-pow

2023-04-04 18:39:14

- reply

BitTorrent gets a whole bunch of things right, but it’s core fault (which I think is just an unfortunate case of its design predating cryptocurrencies) is that it doesn’t distinguish people who want to consume from people who want to provide.
This is something that Nostr gets right, and why it’s got a better chance of scaling vs scuttlebutt. There are people who run relays and there are people who use clients. And it’s possible economically because relay operators can charge for the service they provide.
For the BitTorrent network to be healthy users must try to balance what they take from the network by giving back to the network. This is hardly ever the case, so you end up with leeches on one side ruining the network, and lawful users who suffer for their good will.
If you can incorporate a currency to bridge the gap between consumers and providers you have yourself a much healthier system.

2023-04-04 12:40:00

- reply

I still use it for undo and I hate it

2023-04-04 08:15:09

Incognito DMs, let’s go!
After a week of back and forth between #[0] and I we have fine-tuned and finished a first draft for NIP-32 incognito DMs.
I have created a PR for the NIP to open up our idea to discussion and feedback. We will be publishing a reference client implementation for the NIP later this week, forked from #[1] ’s Hamstr client.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/410

2023-04-03 19:00:54

#[0] Not exactly sure what you meant regarding separating the testing and code and tlv parsing into their own functions, but for now I’ve moved all the code out to a separate file to clean things up.

2023-03-29 18:41:07

Testing NIP-27 entities in Damus
@npub1fzd…z4dv
#note1w0t…rezw
@nprofile…hlsv
#nevent1q…n0h7
#naddr1qq…2nng

2023-03-29 18:30:29

- reply

With Apple HLS support?

2023-03-28 12:41:20

- reply

I wonder which clients are supporting this currently? Working on extending support of nostr:note1 and nostr:npub1 to Damus. Is this working in your client?

2023-03-28 12:26:57

- reply

Pick me! Pick me!!

2023-03-28 08:14:16

- reply

Yes, we considered this, but to derive keys from your private key would require direct access to your key which isn’t supported through window.nostr and would require support from signing devices. Not impossible but a little harder.
And further more, if you never send invites it’ll be harder for clients to find open conversations. You’ll have to query a bunch of keys of people you follow to find conversations. So each variant comes with its own set of compromises

2023-03-27 20:27:04

- reply

Is this filtering happening on the client level? If so could the client accept DMs from unconnected pubkeys provided they contain a signed invite from someone in your network?

2023-03-26 22:49:08

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tldTGhcVWX8
Here’s a video demo of “Incognito Direct Messages” - showing a forked version of Hamstr that can send private NIP-04 DMs where no metadata is leaked to the public (no more inbox peeking).
#[0] #[1] and myself developed this as part of the Nostr Hackathon organised by Hard Yaka, Universal Names and #[2].
The main idea was developed by Anton and #[3] (developer of Hamstr.to). The essential idea is to create new disposable identities for each conversation you create, you exchange these identities with your peer secretly, and then the entire conversation takes place away from your public identity. It’s very simple, it works, there are some weaknesses (you have to trust relays), but it’s a step in the right direction.

2023-03-23 23:18:30

- reply

And then imagine timestamped replies mmm. Could become a lil audio-only subculture in the nostrverse

2023-03-23 23:17:43

I would love Nostr voice notes honestly

2023-03-21 18:26:25

Testing .ts video files: https://bartholomewjoyce.com/hls/video.ts

2023-03-08 14:21:09

- reply

Yeah, I don’t think many relays support note deletion yet 😬 it’s rough out here

2023-01-19 12:49:01

Here’s how much Spotify pays independent musicians per stream. Once the VC money runs out the real amount Spotify is willing to pay becomes evident
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fm1gqtGXEAIrLo2?format=jpg&name=medium

2023-01-18 19:51:33

- reply

Brilliant, and thanks! I’ll try out Wallet of Satoshi

2023-01-18 19:50:27

- reply

What’s to stop someone from sending and resending the same sats multiple times to inflate the perceived value of one of their notes?

2023-01-18 19:48:43

- reply

Haha, true. Okay, I’ve added one. But I’m using Muun and it only gives me lightning invoices that expire after 24h :(

2022-12-27 20:24:53

If anyone is interested in some recommended reading material during the holiday season: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sovereign-Individual-James-Dale-Davidson/dp/0684832720

2022-12-27 15:59:29

How will Nostr be able to avoid the fate of email?
It started, like Nostr, as an open protocol. Anyone could set up SMTP servers, but most didn’t, opting instead for managed email services (you can imagine something similar happening with Nostr where people would opt for managed clients that offer better UX).
Over time the managed email services made up the majority of traffic, and in their fight to prevent spam, they took ever more heavy-handed approaches to filtering. Emails originating from untrusted non-managed SMTP services were deleted on receipt, never to be seen again. Try starting a new mail service today. It’s not possible. Email has become a walled garden, an oligopoly.
How do we build the right incentives into the operation of relays and clients such that spam, bots and all kinds of fowl play are dealt with in a way that doesn’t compromise on the open access and censorship-resistance of the protocol?
#[0]
#[1]
#[2]
#[3]
#[4]