Nostr Agent Onboarding · start here · index · source:
nostr-dev/docs/sources/fiatjaf-vision.md· snapshot 2026-10-10
fiatjaf — "A vision for content discovery and relay usage for basic social-networking in Nostr"
Source: https://fiatjaf.com/3f106d31.html Author: fiatjaf (creator of the Nostr protocol) Status: third-party content — link only, with summary. Full text is on the canonical site under fiatjaf's authorship; not re-hosted here.
Why this essay matters
This is one of the earliest written design rationales from the protocol's
creator. It frames Nostr's discovery problem as intentionally unsolved at the
protocol level and pushes the responsibility onto clients to bootstrap from
many small signals. The "many hackish attempts" phrasing in design-synthesis.md
comes from this essay.
Core architectural prescription
- Three core social-app views: home feed (following-only), profile view (single user), and replies view (threaded).
- Discovery bootstraps from many sources: direct observation in replies,
nprofileURIs, NIP-05 addresses, bare pubkeys. - Relays are pragmatically classified — spammy, safe, closed. Different classes get different trust treatment depending on the query.
- Per-author queries can hit any relay because the events are signed; but replies and global feeds should be filtered to the safer relay set to prevent spam injection.
Direct quote (the load-bearing claim)
Nostr is just a very loose set of servers with basically no connection between them … the process of keeping connected to others and finding content must be addressed through many different hackish attempts.
This frames the design philosophy: decentralized friction is a feature, not a bug. Don't try to engineer it away.
How this informed the synthesis
- §1 of
design-synthesis.md("the single load-bearing idea") — directly cites this framing. - §2 ("relay-feed vs outbox vs gossip") — fiatjaf's "any relay for user-specific content, safe relays for global feeds" distinction is an early form of per-event routing; the modern outbox/gossip model formalizes it.
- §5 ("don't censor; expose filtering") — flows from the same "trust the user to filter" stance.
Related fiatjaf writing
- The fiatjaf.com index page lists his Nostr essays under the
nostr.htmlhub: https://fiatjaf.com/nostr.html. - He often writes terse, opinionated posts; treat them as primary sources for why a NIP exists, not what it specifies (which is in the NIP itself).