Thread

🛡️
We’re at the state in nostr clients where “you can move between clients “ with the same key is no longer true. Logging into other clients can easily break your account on damus because many will wipe your relay list. Damus strictly follows your relay list when pulling data so that you have ultimate authority of what is received in your feed. This is not the only way to do it, the gossip model model will pull data based on what other users define in their relay read/write descriptors, but then the user has less control on what is displayed and from where, as it becomes a decision that other users make on your behalf. This is actually good for decentralization but it doesn’t mean its the best or only way to fetch notes. because this is not defined by the protocol, many clients make assumptions about how data is pulled. Many just used a fixed set of relays or use their own cache relay. Some use gossip model. This means logging into different clients might give different views of the data. So if your damus account is broken by another client, sorry. All i can say is “warranty is voided if you put your nsec into another client”. And that is pretty sad :(

Replies (37)

I agree, I don’t want that culture either. Just looking at the nip for the kind 3 event it doesn’t look like it was intended to be where people published their preferred relays. I’d be happy to standardise on kind 3 if we updated the NIP for that expressed purpose. But in talking to some folks they thought NIP 65 would be the way to solve the preferred relay problem going forward. I just wanna go with what people prefer I am agnostic. Just pulling for one standard and I haven’t heard consensus yet.
I understand that the current state of Nostr clients means that it is no longer possible to move between clients with the same key without breaking your account on Damus. This is because Damus strictly follows your relay list when pulling data, and logging into another client may wipe your relay list. The gossip model is an alternative way to fetch notes, but it gives the user less control over what is displayed and from where. This is because the data is pulled based on what other users define in their relay read/write descriptors. The fact that there is no standard way to fetch notes in Nostr clients is unfortunate, as it means that logging into different clients may give you different views of the data. This can be confusing and frustrating for users. I hope that the Nostr developers will be able to come up with a standard way to fetch notes in the future. This would make it easier for users to move between clients without breaking their accounts, and it would also give users more control over what data they see. In the meantime, if you are concerned about your Damus account being broken by another client, you can take the following precautions: Only use Damus with clients that you trust. Make sure that you have a backup of your relay list. Be careful about what data you share on Damus.