Show HN: Nstart, a Nostr's Onbarding Tool

23 pointsposted 7 days ago
by dtonon
(start.njump.me)

4 Comments

egypturnash

7 days ago

Damn and people complain about Mastodon being hard to get started on, "okay now download this text file and look at it to make sure it matches some of this text" followed by "Now you have the possibility to split your nsec in 3 using a technique called FROST and distribute each shard to an independent trusted remote signer" is just absolutely incoherent to anyone who is not a programmer.

I did that and a progress bar popped up over the "activate the bunker" button and now when I hit it the bar goes backwards and then refills and then there's just the "activate the bunker" button to press and that happens again, I do not think Nostr is anywhere near ready for prime time.

And now I unchecked the checkbox in that screen and skipped activating this "bunker" and it's showing me some random techbro-looking dudes and asking if I want to clone their follower lists? Who are these dudes and who are they following? Can I look at their feeds before making this decision? Evidently not?

And now it's telling me I need to go to yet another place to actually sign in, okay lemme try this Coracle thing, it's the first app in the list, how do I sign in here, what's a "remote signer", or I could download a "signer app", or I could just close the tab, I think I'm just gonna close the tab. Goodbye Nostr, you are absolutely incomprehensible.

dtonon

4 days ago

Thank you for the feedback, I know there are still several rough spots to be fixed.

Nostr is a protocol that has a lot of potential, but there are tradeoffs, it now has a large ecosystem and requires learning some new paradigms, and being completely decentralized the terminology is also becoming more standardized and consolidated over time.

This onboarding system is meant to try to explain them, certainly not for people who want to quickly enter an email and a password and start using a specific app. For that one can precisely download an app and use the built-in onboarding, often apps create a profile without asking for anything and invite afterwards to save the credentials.

These are different paths for different needs, the good thing is that with Nostr you have a choice, and when you have created your digital identity, you can use it anywhere.