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
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:
The main disadvantages it has vs. Scuttlebutt are:
Here are some other contrasts that don’t fall clearly into advantage/disadvantage: