The shortest private messages NIP (Simplex)

[MaxHillebrand]

This PR is (only somewhat of) a joke.

NIP4 is an elegant hack for somewhat private messages, but its design has many flaws in the details. There have been numerous proposed patches and workarounds to make NIP4 slightly less bad.

Maybe, we don't have to write a new standard this time?

Simplex seems to be a private messaging protocol that takes care of many thread vectors, and it's "smart client, dumb relay" architecture design is even similar to nostr.

Maybe all that's needed in this repo, is a reference to the simplex protocol?

Simplex Website: https://simplex.chat/

Simplex Client: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat

Simplex Messaging Protocol (the crypto magic, could maybe be used with nostr relays too): https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/blob/master/protocol/simplex-messaging.md

Simplex Architecture Overview: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/blob/stable/protocol/overview-

[Egge21M]

I might just not be familiar enough with SimpleX but this sounds a lot like kind 4 with throwaway keys (that are exchanged off-protocol) and NIP-42 protected kind 4 events, no?

[fiatjaf]

It has some similarities, yes, but it seems to be much more well-fleshed and sane. I just wanted it to be easier to integrate, have more libraries and clients. Would be nice to plug it into Nostr clients that want to do DMs.

[Egge21M]

It has some similarities, yes, but it seems to be much more well-fleshed and sane. I just wanted it to be easier to integrate, have more libraries and clients. Would be nice to plug it into Nostr clients that want to do DMs.

Understood. It does look promising, but then again much more complicated and there seems to be less tooling around (unless you are into Haskell). I feel like we could have a very similar flow based on what we already have today.

We are definitely going to explore this though.

[paulmillr]

This can be closed, discussions are better suited:

#658