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Nostr Compass #15
Pip, Abh3po, Pete and Max join Nostr Compass Podcast #15 to walk through the biggest stories from [Newsletter #15](https://nostrcompass.org/en/newsletters/2026-03-25-newsletter/), from Primal's new Follow Packs and BigBrotr's relay-scale nsec leak analysis to nostr-vpn, peer-to-peer DOOM, and a dense week of client and protocol releases.
The second half of the episode moves from weekly updates into a longer retrospective, tracing what happened in Nostr each March from 2021 through 2026. That arc runs from fiatjaf making two protocol commits in March 2021 to a March 2026 ecosystem where VPNs, games, signers, CI pipelines, and agent proposals all coexist on the same event-and-relay model.
## Full Show Notes
### News
- **00:00 Intro**
Opening setup for the week, the guests, and the main themes from Newsletter #15.
- **00:16 Primal adds Follow Packs, zap enrichment, and deep links**
Primal Android follows last week's 3.0 wallet work with Follow Packs for onboarding, zap enrichment for wallet context, and a `primalconnect://` deep-link protocol for cross-app navigation. The discussion also touches the parallel TestFlight work landing on iOS.
- **03:18 BigBrotr maps exposed private keys across the relay network**
BigBrotr scans 41 million events across 1,085 relays looking for exposed nsec strings, then separates bot noise from real user exposure. The segment covers the NIP-90 leak checker, npub.world profile warnings, and why the result is both a security story and a Nostr-native service story.
- **09:03 Nostr VPN launches as a Tailscale alternative**
Martti Malmi's nostr-vpn uses Nostr relays for signaling and WireGuard for encrypted tunnels, replacing centralized account-based coordination with Nostr keypairs. The conversation covers its rapid release cadence, LAN pairing, Windows support, and the broader idea of Nostr as infrastructure rather than only social media.
- **11:14 Open-source DOOM runs peer-to-peer over Nostr**
Vector's P2P DOOM uses Nostr for discovery, Marmot for encryption, and Iroh for low-latency QUIC transport. This chapter digs into why the stack matters: Nostr coordinates the session, but the actual gameplay moves onto a transport layer built for real-time performance.
- **12:42 FIPS v0.2.0 ships Tor transport, reproducible builds, and sidecar examples**
FIPS v0.2.0 adds Tor transport for anonymized mesh links, reproducible builds, a sidecar example that connects through a Nostr relay, and OpenWrt workflow improvements. The wire format changes, so the hosts also note that v0.1.0 nodes do not interoperate with v0.2.0 without upgrading.
- **14:29 Nostrability Schemata goes multilingual**
Nostrability expands from JavaScript-only packages into Rust, Go, Dart, Swift, and Python, while the interop tracker adds a What's New feed and better filtering. The broader point is that event kind validation is becoming a reusable cross-language building block instead of copy-pasted app logic.
### Releases
- **15:11 Amethyst v1.06.0 and v1.06.1**
Poll support lands with weighted voting based on [NIP-85](/en/topics/nip-85/) (Trusted Assertions), plus redesigned poll cards. The follow-up point release fixes concurrent modification crashes introduced along that new path.
- **16:30 Amber v5.0.0 and v5.0.1**
Amber promotes its recent relay-auth, Tor, permission-scoping, and encrypted PIN work into stable, then removes internet permission from the offline build flavor in v5.0.1. The hosts frame this as signer hardening reaching production maturity.
- **17:13 Mostro v0.17.0 and Mostro Mobile v1.2.2**
Mostro continues building out buyer and seller reputation data as Nostr events, while Mostro Mobile stays aligned with the latest protocol changes on the client side.
- **17:39 Shosho v0.14.0**
Shosho Shop adds storefront surfaces to profiles, browse flows, and live streams. The open question is whether the implementation maps onto [NIP-99](/en/topics/nip-99/) listings or a separate event model.
- **18:13 Applesauce v5.2.0**
Applesauce ships fixes and new helper APIs across six packages, including `AndroidNativeSigner`, [NIP-42](/en/topics/nip-42/) auth challenge tracking, duplicate event reference helpers, and Blossom server resolution. Because it sits under multiple web clients, the impact reaches well beyond one app.
- **19:15 Wisp ships 16 releases in one week**
Wisp's release sprint adds multi-account support, zen notifications, drafts, scheduled posts, safety filters, and other UX improvements. The hosts use the run to talk about what raw release count does and does not tell you about a project's momentum.
- **21:03 Manent v1.2.0**
Manent adds camera capture, image resizing before upload, and pinch-to-zoom for reviewing encrypted notes and files stored across relays.
- **21:37 diVine 1.0.7**
diVine adds a playback watchdog that auto-resumes stalled videos, targeting the remaining failure path after its earlier test infrastructure and direct MP4 work.
- **21:46 Alby Extension v3.14.2**
The Alby browser extension adds Lightning address QR display and Schnorr signing support, tightening its alignment with Nostr's native signature scheme.
- **21:55 NoorNote v0.6.5 through v0.6.11**
NoorNote introduces Follow Packs, NDK v3 migration, picture notes, and a cleaner relay connection flow over seven rapid releases.
- **22:31 nak v0.19.1 and v0.19.2**
nak continues its steady CLI iteration after last week's group-forum UI addition, reinforcing its role as the Swiss army knife for relay queries, signing, and encoding work.
- **22:45 Calendar by Form* v0.2.1**
Calendar fixes a notification template problem affecting reminders and offers another concrete example of [NIP-52](/en/topics/nip-52/) calendar events as reusable protocol primitives.
- **25:45 NYM v3.50 through v3.53**
NYM adds Nymbot, relay management features, and a hardcore mode that rotates to a fresh keypair for every message. The tradeoff between anonymity and persistent identity becomes the center of this segment.
### Project Updates
- **26:29 Ditto adds Bluesky bridge and Wikipedia integration**
Ditto pushes beyond Nostr-only consumption by rendering Bluesky threads inline through [NIP-73](/en/topics/nip-73/) external content IDs and by turning Wikipedia into a first-class content source. The app starts to look more like a multi-protocol aggregator than a single-network client.
- **27:12 Pika builds a NIP-34 forge CI pipeline**
Pika's self-hosted forge receives patches as [NIP-34](/en/topics/nip-34/) git events, runs lane-based CI, and reports status back through Nostr events. The hosts treat this as one of the clearest examples yet of Nostr-native development workflows moving past basic patch exchange.
- **27:51 Nostria adds communities, code snippets, and voice event handling**
Nostria expands into [NIP-72](/en/topics/nip-72/) communities, syntax-highlighted code snippets, voice replies, DM payment flows, better media handling, and more. This segment is about the app surface area that modern clients are expected to cover.
- **28:54 Comet automated builds**
Comet ships over 40 automated alpha builds in a week, showing constant active development even if the raw build count overstates user-visible feature velocity.
### NIP Updates
- **29:35 NIP-AA: Autonomous Agents on Nostr (PR #2259)**
A proposal for how autonomous agents identify themselves, discover services, and coordinate over Nostr. The conversation frames it as part of the broader shift from user apps to agent-capable infrastructure.
- **29:52 NIP-50 (Search): Sort extensions (PR #2283)**
Search relays may gain top, hot, zaps, and new sort modes, moving more result ranking into relay-supported search instead of client-only sorting.
- **34:00 NIP-A5: WASM Programs (PR #2281)**
A proposal for publishing and discovering WebAssembly programs over Nostr, raising questions about executable distribution, trust, and portable app surfaces.
- **35:16 NIP-CF: Combine Forces interoperable napps (PR #2277)**
Interoperable napps aim to let different clients and services compose around shared conventions rather than isolated product silos.
- **38:03 Snapshots NIP (PR #2279)**
A relay snapshot proposal for synchronization and backup.
- **38:24 Checkpoints NIP (PR #2278)**
A companion proposal for known-good relay state markers.
- **38:45 NIP-58 (Badges): Badge Sets refactor (PR #2276)**
Badge collections may be reorganized to make issuer and badge-set relationships cleaner and easier to reference.
- **40:12 NIP-11 (Relay Information Document): Extensions (PR #2280)**
Additional relay metadata fields would make [NIP-11](/en/topics/nip-11/) more useful for machine-readable discovery and feature negotiation.
### Five Years of Nostr Marches
- **40:30 Five Years of Nostr Marches**
The episode shifts from weekly reporting into a historical retrospective across six March snapshots.
- **40:44 March 2021: Two Commits**
Four months into Nostr's existence, March 2021 produced just two protocol commits, one of which merely added `kind` to filter definitions. The scale contrast with 2026 sets the frame for the whole retrospective.
- **41:35 March 2022: Pre-Damus Building**
The protocol repo was quiet, but client tooling kept moving. Branle and more-speech represent the small builder culture that existed before the Damus App Store breakout.
- **42:52 March 2023: Post-Explosion Infrastructure**
Nostr absorbs its growth wave with 28 merged NIP PRs, the birth of NDK, and the creation of NWC. This segment focuses on the libraries and protocols that made the next phase of app development possible.
- **45:55 March 2024: Protocol Maturation**
[NIP-34](/en/topics/nip-34/) dominates the month, with debates over decentralized git collaboration showing how far the protocol had moved beyond simple social posting.
- **48:03 March 2025: Infrastructure Expansion**
[NIP-66](/en/topics/nip-66/) finally merges after a long gestation, while MCP servers, code snippets, and new grants show the ecosystem broadening its technical surface area.
- **55:15 March 2026: Convergence**
The retrospective lands in the present: VPNs, games, signers, CI pipelines, release distribution, commerce surfaces, and agent proposals all building on the same core event-and-relay model. March 2026 feels less like isolated experiments and more like separate lines locking into a larger system.
View all episodes
By Nostr CompassPip, Abh3po, Pete and Max join Nostr Compass Podcast #15 to walk through the biggest stories from [Newsletter #15](https://nostrcompass.org/en/newsletters/2026-03-25-newsletter/), from Primal's new Follow Packs and BigBrotr's relay-scale nsec leak analysis to nostr-vpn, peer-to-peer DOOM, and a dense week of client and protocol releases.
The second half of the episode moves from weekly updates into a longer retrospective, tracing what happened in Nostr each March from 2021 through 2026. That arc runs from fiatjaf making two protocol commits in March 2021 to a March 2026 ecosystem where VPNs, games, signers, CI pipelines, and agent proposals all coexist on the same event-and-relay model.
## Full Show Notes
### News
- **00:00 Intro**
Opening setup for the week, the guests, and the main themes from Newsletter #15.
- **00:16 Primal adds Follow Packs, zap enrichment, and deep links**
Primal Android follows last week's 3.0 wallet work with Follow Packs for onboarding, zap enrichment for wallet context, and a `primalconnect://` deep-link protocol for cross-app navigation. The discussion also touches the parallel TestFlight work landing on iOS.
- **03:18 BigBrotr maps exposed private keys across the relay network**
BigBrotr scans 41 million events across 1,085 relays looking for exposed nsec strings, then separates bot noise from real user exposure. The segment covers the NIP-90 leak checker, npub.world profile warnings, and why the result is both a security story and a Nostr-native service story.
- **09:03 Nostr VPN launches as a Tailscale alternative**
Martti Malmi's nostr-vpn uses Nostr relays for signaling and WireGuard for encrypted tunnels, replacing centralized account-based coordination with Nostr keypairs. The conversation covers its rapid release cadence, LAN pairing, Windows support, and the broader idea of Nostr as infrastructure rather than only social media.
- **11:14 Open-source DOOM runs peer-to-peer over Nostr**
Vector's P2P DOOM uses Nostr for discovery, Marmot for encryption, and Iroh for low-latency QUIC transport. This chapter digs into why the stack matters: Nostr coordinates the session, but the actual gameplay moves onto a transport layer built for real-time performance.
- **12:42 FIPS v0.2.0 ships Tor transport, reproducible builds, and sidecar examples**
FIPS v0.2.0 adds Tor transport for anonymized mesh links, reproducible builds, a sidecar example that connects through a Nostr relay, and OpenWrt workflow improvements. The wire format changes, so the hosts also note that v0.1.0 nodes do not interoperate with v0.2.0 without upgrading.
- **14:29 Nostrability Schemata goes multilingual**
Nostrability expands from JavaScript-only packages into Rust, Go, Dart, Swift, and Python, while the interop tracker adds a What's New feed and better filtering. The broader point is that event kind validation is becoming a reusable cross-language building block instead of copy-pasted app logic.
### Releases
- **15:11 Amethyst v1.06.0 and v1.06.1**
Poll support lands with weighted voting based on [NIP-85](/en/topics/nip-85/) (Trusted Assertions), plus redesigned poll cards. The follow-up point release fixes concurrent modification crashes introduced along that new path.
- **16:30 Amber v5.0.0 and v5.0.1**
Amber promotes its recent relay-auth, Tor, permission-scoping, and encrypted PIN work into stable, then removes internet permission from the offline build flavor in v5.0.1. The hosts frame this as signer hardening reaching production maturity.
- **17:13 Mostro v0.17.0 and Mostro Mobile v1.2.2**
Mostro continues building out buyer and seller reputation data as Nostr events, while Mostro Mobile stays aligned with the latest protocol changes on the client side.
- **17:39 Shosho v0.14.0**
Shosho Shop adds storefront surfaces to profiles, browse flows, and live streams. The open question is whether the implementation maps onto [NIP-99](/en/topics/nip-99/) listings or a separate event model.
- **18:13 Applesauce v5.2.0**
Applesauce ships fixes and new helper APIs across six packages, including `AndroidNativeSigner`, [NIP-42](/en/topics/nip-42/) auth challenge tracking, duplicate event reference helpers, and Blossom server resolution. Because it sits under multiple web clients, the impact reaches well beyond one app.
- **19:15 Wisp ships 16 releases in one week**
Wisp's release sprint adds multi-account support, zen notifications, drafts, scheduled posts, safety filters, and other UX improvements. The hosts use the run to talk about what raw release count does and does not tell you about a project's momentum.
- **21:03 Manent v1.2.0**
Manent adds camera capture, image resizing before upload, and pinch-to-zoom for reviewing encrypted notes and files stored across relays.
- **21:37 diVine 1.0.7**
diVine adds a playback watchdog that auto-resumes stalled videos, targeting the remaining failure path after its earlier test infrastructure and direct MP4 work.
- **21:46 Alby Extension v3.14.2**
The Alby browser extension adds Lightning address QR display and Schnorr signing support, tightening its alignment with Nostr's native signature scheme.
- **21:55 NoorNote v0.6.5 through v0.6.11**
NoorNote introduces Follow Packs, NDK v3 migration, picture notes, and a cleaner relay connection flow over seven rapid releases.
- **22:31 nak v0.19.1 and v0.19.2**
nak continues its steady CLI iteration after last week's group-forum UI addition, reinforcing its role as the Swiss army knife for relay queries, signing, and encoding work.
- **22:45 Calendar by Form* v0.2.1**
Calendar fixes a notification template problem affecting reminders and offers another concrete example of [NIP-52](/en/topics/nip-52/) calendar events as reusable protocol primitives.
- **25:45 NYM v3.50 through v3.53**
NYM adds Nymbot, relay management features, and a hardcore mode that rotates to a fresh keypair for every message. The tradeoff between anonymity and persistent identity becomes the center of this segment.
### Project Updates
- **26:29 Ditto adds Bluesky bridge and Wikipedia integration**
Ditto pushes beyond Nostr-only consumption by rendering Bluesky threads inline through [NIP-73](/en/topics/nip-73/) external content IDs and by turning Wikipedia into a first-class content source. The app starts to look more like a multi-protocol aggregator than a single-network client.
- **27:12 Pika builds a NIP-34 forge CI pipeline**
Pika's self-hosted forge receives patches as [NIP-34](/en/topics/nip-34/) git events, runs lane-based CI, and reports status back through Nostr events. The hosts treat this as one of the clearest examples yet of Nostr-native development workflows moving past basic patch exchange.
- **27:51 Nostria adds communities, code snippets, and voice event handling**
Nostria expands into [NIP-72](/en/topics/nip-72/) communities, syntax-highlighted code snippets, voice replies, DM payment flows, better media handling, and more. This segment is about the app surface area that modern clients are expected to cover.
- **28:54 Comet automated builds**
Comet ships over 40 automated alpha builds in a week, showing constant active development even if the raw build count overstates user-visible feature velocity.
### NIP Updates
- **29:35 NIP-AA: Autonomous Agents on Nostr (PR #2259)**
A proposal for how autonomous agents identify themselves, discover services, and coordinate over Nostr. The conversation frames it as part of the broader shift from user apps to agent-capable infrastructure.
- **29:52 NIP-50 (Search): Sort extensions (PR #2283)**
Search relays may gain top, hot, zaps, and new sort modes, moving more result ranking into relay-supported search instead of client-only sorting.
- **34:00 NIP-A5: WASM Programs (PR #2281)**
A proposal for publishing and discovering WebAssembly programs over Nostr, raising questions about executable distribution, trust, and portable app surfaces.
- **35:16 NIP-CF: Combine Forces interoperable napps (PR #2277)**
Interoperable napps aim to let different clients and services compose around shared conventions rather than isolated product silos.
- **38:03 Snapshots NIP (PR #2279)**
A relay snapshot proposal for synchronization and backup.
- **38:24 Checkpoints NIP (PR #2278)**
A companion proposal for known-good relay state markers.
- **38:45 NIP-58 (Badges): Badge Sets refactor (PR #2276)**
Badge collections may be reorganized to make issuer and badge-set relationships cleaner and easier to reference.
- **40:12 NIP-11 (Relay Information Document): Extensions (PR #2280)**
Additional relay metadata fields would make [NIP-11](/en/topics/nip-11/) more useful for machine-readable discovery and feature negotiation.
### Five Years of Nostr Marches
- **40:30 Five Years of Nostr Marches**
The episode shifts from weekly reporting into a historical retrospective across six March snapshots.
- **40:44 March 2021: Two Commits**
Four months into Nostr's existence, March 2021 produced just two protocol commits, one of which merely added `kind` to filter definitions. The scale contrast with 2026 sets the frame for the whole retrospective.
- **41:35 March 2022: Pre-Damus Building**
The protocol repo was quiet, but client tooling kept moving. Branle and more-speech represent the small builder culture that existed before the Damus App Store breakout.
- **42:52 March 2023: Post-Explosion Infrastructure**
Nostr absorbs its growth wave with 28 merged NIP PRs, the birth of NDK, and the creation of NWC. This segment focuses on the libraries and protocols that made the next phase of app development possible.
- **45:55 March 2024: Protocol Maturation**
[NIP-34](/en/topics/nip-34/) dominates the month, with debates over decentralized git collaboration showing how far the protocol had moved beyond simple social posting.
- **48:03 March 2025: Infrastructure Expansion**
[NIP-66](/en/topics/nip-66/) finally merges after a long gestation, while MCP servers, code snippets, and new grants show the ecosystem broadening its technical surface area.
- **55:15 March 2026: Convergence**
The retrospective lands in the present: VPNs, games, signers, CI pipelines, release distribution, commerce surfaces, and agent proposals all building on the same core event-and-relay model. March 2026 feels less like isolated experiments and more like separate lines locking into a larger system.