I am still very bullish on “Rostra”, a new p2p solution. As of now it focuses on ‘social media’.
Rostra is much like Nostr and Blue sky, in that it is build on pubkey/prikey crypotography, so it gives you your own identity
Where it differs from them is the following points:
Iroh Library
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It is built on the ‘Iroh Library’, which allows two computers anywhere on internet to talk to each other directly. Iroh servers help them to discover each other, but these are open source solutions which can be deployed by anyone.
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So how Rostra uses Iroh is that in Rostra there are no ‘relays’ of Nostr, nor BlueSky’s “Personal Data Servers”. In Rostra, the main application itself is the client, and it is also the ‘distributor’ of your data. You run the client on your laptop, and anyone in the world will then ask it for your latest posts/events, using the Iroh network.
Pkarr
- To delve more into the discovery part, the actual discovery happens using Pkarr library, which in turn uses Bittorrent’s Mainline DHT. This is a long running decentralized network, which will remain there for decades to come. And no body is going to censor you from it.
Un-censorable
- So this means, you are not dependent on any server/Relay/Personal Data Store, anyone else. You run a application on your laptop and and based just on your pubkey ANYONE in world can discover you and ask you for your events. You are un-censorable.
Protocol Design
The protocol is pretty light weight. It is much much less complicated then Bluesky, and almost equal to Nostr in its design complexity. The only place where it is significantly more complicated than Nostr is that it does NOT use Json. But that makes its data packets more compressible.
Rostra is designed and written by DPC, who has created this 50 minute youtube video describing the design decisions in detail. Worth a watch if you are interested in this domain.
Using Rostra.me or localhost
To access Rostra, check the small section ‘where do I access Rostra’ here: https://github.com/dpc/rostra/discussions/44