‍This is an evaluation we did before pivoting our company's product to Nostr. These are my opinions after spending 5 years in the Secure Scuttlebutt community and 1 week in the Nostr community, so this is full of generalizations based on first impressions. It’s also worth mentioning that Nostr is very young and could change significantly. Indeed it will have to if it continues to grow. -Matt

Summary

Nostr is “The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global ‘social’ network once and for all.” Nostr is very young and the protocol is still in its infancy. It’s unclear whether its simplicity is naive or elegant, whether it can scale to millions of users both in technical performance and preventing spam and abuse. Nevertheless the protocol is easy to work with and has a vibrant community quickly growing around it.

The key difference at a protocol level is that SSB posts are signed and published to an ordered append-only log, while Nostr posts are just signed and sent to to relay servers. There are many other differences most of them hinge on this fact.

The main advantages it has over Scuttlebutt are:

 
• Onboarding is quick and easy.
 
• The protocol already supports editing, deleting, and ephemeral posts.
 
• You can use the same account with multiple devices.
 
• It is much easier to understand and implement.
 
• It has more active users, momentum, apps, and tools.

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The main disadvantages it has vs. Scuttlebutt are:

• There are not yet any good systems to prevent abuse on public relays. There is no way to block or hide abusive accounts or posts in most apps, there is no standard way to report abusive accounts to relay owners, there are no blocklists being shared by relay owners, etc.
• There is not yet any good solution to preventing spam on the network. The leading idea so far is adding a proof-of-work cost to publish a message, which is isn’t a great solution imo.
• Nostr messages are unordered. This is what gives the protocol its simplicity and power, but it creates some side effects:
• You can never know if you have all the messages from a given account, even your own.
• You can’t efficiently sync messages between relays (yet). This results in awkward flows where users may not be sure where their data is or how to move it.
• It may not be obvious when a relay is omitting some content on purpose.
• Faking the timestamp on a message is much easier.

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Here are some other contrasts that don’t fall clearly into advantage/disadvantage:

Technical Feature Comparison