An Empirical Analysis of the Nostr Social Network#

Yiluo Weil; Gareth Tyson (HKUST Guangzhou)

• Why: Nostr is a rare production system where identity is purely cryptographic (public keys and signatures, no central accounts) and storage is delegated to interchangeable relays — a live, at-scale experiment in key-based decentralized identity and data replication, which touches your identity interests from an angle you wouldn't have searched for.
• What: The first large-scale study of Nostr, covering relays and post-replication strategies across 100M+ posts. Findings: Nostr achieves better decentralization than Fediverse alternatives, but relay availability is a persistent problem driven by free-to-use relays' financial unsustainability, and aggressive replication improves censorship resistance at significant overhead. The authors propose and evaluate two improvements to trim replication overhead without hurting availability (from abstract only).
• How: Longitudinal measurement of relay ecosystems and replication behavior, followed by data-driven evaluation of proposed mitigation strategies.
• Where applicable: Decentralized/peer infrastructure design — the relay-sustainability and replication-cost findings are early evidence on the operational economics of key-centric, server-agnostic architectures.