Nostr Web Client

I feel the "at" symbol does make sense as an addressee within an address. It has multiple uses, but the fact that you're targeting someone within someplace is still true.

daniele 2y ago

'at' makes sense, in fact it has been a great pick for the email protocol.

The problem is actually the "multiple uses" with completely different goals. Try to explain to a casual user that your are giving him an email that does not work as an email, paired with a 65 chars password that cannot change... panic.

Should a Nostr identifier suffers this bootstrap weight? Or is better to start telling a new story with new rules?

I suppose that for this reason someone (maybe Alby?) started to propose to prefix the LN addresses with the emoji ⚡, to mitigate the problem and make them recognizable, by humans and programmatically.

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Discussion

James A Lewis 2y ago

I believe this is downstream of the domain name paradigm. We cannot get around the fact that our current system is set up with this user@domainname.tld system, not just for email but all sorts of protocols. User access and system login came before user-to-user-communication. Email is just the one protocol of which people think first when considering the "at" symbol. My point is @ is already very multi-use and is intuitive.

daniele 2y ago

You are right, the 'at' paradigm is present elsewhere, and it is always connected to the fact that the user is included, with his data, in that domain.tld system.

But Nostr is decentralized, the user identity and data are disconnected from the NIP-05 domain, this is just a proxy to the npub and some additional informations. Actually, I can have more NIP-05 too.

I don't know, I understand we are exiting a comfort zone, but I think it's worth thinking about now.

James A Lewis 2y ago

Right, we are trying to bridge from a user-domain paradigm to a un-domained key-pair paradigm. I don't know if a third way exists and would make for a reasonable and useful bridge.

NIP-05 is really just human readable pseudonym for an npub, by definition. I don't see a way to shorten or make human readable an npub without pseudonymization, so if already pseudonymous, what system would be more intuitive?