Blog post about nostroots HOT 2 CLOSED

OK I like your version more!

I'll drop my version here and continue with yours :)

In 2005 I came across an abandoned wiki I saved it from spammers and which later became Hitchwiki. This was around the 9 months or so that I was working on couchsurfing(tm), back when it wasn't (tm)ed yet, and I already wanted to do a lot more than just enabling people to share couches. This didn't change when we launched Trustroots, kickstarting it from Hitchwiki and the community around it. But there was no clear path towards enabling a wider, adventurous gift economy. An open API could have been nice but it would still have been quite centralized. About 2 years ago another danger of centralization appeared. After the main person left the project without any communication I was the only person left with access to the server and thus the database.

I made sure to share the keys to the castle with reliable long-time friends, but this is not enough to make sure Trustroots will be around 2 decades from now. So we started looking for ways to adding robustness to the project by (slow) decentralization. We looked at secure scuttlebutt, but anything built on that is barely even usable by geeks. We looked at the ActivityPub and Matrix protocols. But in the end both of these are federated and thus still rely on a person (or group of people) running one or more servers, which kinda boils down to the problem that we encountered which we wanted to solve. Gradually we want to take away the need to log into someone's server with a username and password.

Enter Nostr, "a decentralized network protocol for a distributed social networking system. The name is an acronym for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays". It's a protocol that gives control of identity and data back to the user and it doesn't rely heavily on domain names or specific servers. Now we don't have the illusion that we can completely migrate all that is Trustroots now onto Nostr in one year. But we don't need to. We can enable small parts of Nostr, which others can then build upon.

Concrete ideas

Through serendipity I met the person who started and who is still running bikesurf.org, a fantastic bike sharing project that runs in Berlin and a couple of other cities. Currently it is mandatory to upload a scan of your ID, and no one really likes this solution. We have been talking how we can enable people to "take their Trustroots trust" over into Bikesurf (thru NIP-05 and some tech that we have to probably come up with ourselves) instead of the ID verification.

Kenny has been living out of a backpack since 2007. He's also created various cool projects around traveling and more specifically hitchhiking. He's already hacked a little around the (not so open) Trustroots API to enable location sharing from an Android app. He's coming to the collective next month and I can imagine we can work out location sharing for folks on Trustroots in a way that can scale up. This can be great for hitchhiking, and for people who enjoy picking up hitchhikers. It can also create a more serendipitous form of hospitality exchange. For example, I'd love to get a notification if someone who is in my Trustroots circles is say within a 100km radius so I can invite them to come over for a meal or stay a couple of nights.

Other possibilities

There are already 100s of projects on GitHub, including some clients that can be an interesting starting point to quickly experiment with ideas, e.g. a forum thru satellite.earth, chat thru nostrchat.io or 0xchat-app. By adding geo data to notes, and turning circles into simple tags we can open up a lot more possibilities that anyone will be able to build upon.

from nostroots.

published https://ideas.trustroots.org/2024/04/10/moving-trustroots-onto-nostr/

from nostroots.