Introducing Nostr cross-posting

Similar to my announcement last month about supporting Bluesky, we’re adding Nostr cross-posting to Micro.blog starting today. You can enable it under Account → Edit Sources & Cross-posting:

Screenshot with Nostr icon and add link.

Nostr might have the most uncertain future among recent up-and-coming social web protocols. I’m fascinated with the architecture because it’s so different than ActivityPub, RSS, and IndieWeb protocols. I think it’s interesting and worth tinkering with. I’ve been personally using it through Micro.blog for about a week, so why not let other folks play with it too?

Nostr is quite technical. If you don’t want to be on the edge, feel free to wait. It’s so early that using Nostr feels like testing a prototype, letting your blog posts loose into the wild west of the internet to float between Nostr “relay” servers.

To get started, you will need a Nostr account. Unlike every other social network, in Nostr you don’t actually register on a specific server. Your account is just a private key, which you will paste into Micro.blog. For iOS, I suggest using Damus or Nos. For the web, check out Coracle.

These apps and others will create your private key, name, and profile photo. Make sure to save your key in a password manager. If you lose it, you lose access to your account.

Micro.blog’s support for these emerging protocols is essentially one-way, pushing your blog posts out to people on other platforms. Later we will consider federation, where posts and replies from other platforms and brought into Micro.blog, like we already do for Mastodon and ActivityPub. I’d like to see how much traction there is before we do more.

Manton Reece @manton