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Comment by hugs

2 days ago

(fwiw, I'm not the creator of this, but am a casual user of Nostr...)

tl;dr: the answer you're looking for is probably in the explainer doc [1].

At its core, Nostr is simple: it's "just" JSON over WebSockets. But there are dozens of optional proposals to add additional functionality. And a few of those proposals are related to encrypted DMs, specifically, NIP-04 [2], and NIP-17 [3]. Most of the online criticism of encrypted DMs on Nostr is about NIP-04 (which is why it's deprecated.)

White Noise is using a different encryption standard: MLS (Messaging Layer Security) [4]. They explicitly say in their docs: "White Noise is an implementation of the NIP-EE spec." [5]. The NIP-EE proposal itself is on GitHub [6]. The explainer doc [1] I first mentioned is linked to from the proposal [6].

This is all to say: given all the links I posted here, an AI chatbot could probably give you a better answer using the prompt: "How is NIP-EE (Messaging Layer Security for Nostr) different or better than NIP-04 or NIP-17?"

(I'm a little surprised that wasn't already in the FAQ for the project.)

  [1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/001c516f7294308143515a494a35213fc45978df/EE.md
  [2]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/04.md
  [3]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/17.md
  [4]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9420.html
  [5]: https://github.com/parres-hq/whitenoise?tab=readme-ov-file#the-spec
  [6]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1427

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hugs

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