Stegstr

Nostr

Identities, relays and what Network on means

Stegstr speaks Nostr, the open protocol of signed events and relays. You can use it without ever touching a relay, or turn Network on and join the wider network.

Identities

Every identity is a Nostr keypair generated on your device. A Local identity never publishes; its posts travel only inside images. A Nostr identity publishes to relays when Network is on. You can convert one to the other from the Identity page, and the app asks before it does.

Network on

With Network on, a Nostr identity's posts, reactions, follows and direct messages are signed and published; the feed fills from the relays; received events are signature-checked before they are shown. Reconnection is automatic, and the app reports how many relays actually confirmed a publish rather than assuming success.

Relays

The default relay is wss://relay.stegstr.com, run by the makers of Stegstr; the app fetches its starting list from stegstr.com/config/relay.json. Public relays are listed as optional secondaries and can be added or removed in Settings. Relays keep events on their own schedule and may or may not honour deletion requests.

Direct messages

DMs are encrypted to the recipient (NIP-04) before they leave the app, so a relay stores ciphertext. A DM can also be carried inside an image sealed to that recipient, which needs no relay at all.

Posts inside images

An embedded image carries signed events, so a post extracted from an image is the same object it would be on a relay: same id, same signature, verifiable by anyone. In Robust locator mode the image carries only a pointer and the post itself is fetched from relays when Network is on.

Compatibility

Events follow NIP-01; DMs use NIP-04; media uploads authenticate with NIP-98. Events published through Stegstr appear in other Nostr clients like any other post.