Nostr

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 4 years (2023–2026), in 9 threads.

People raised many different problems with Nostr, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 11 complaints

Users must manage their own cryptographic keys, which is a hard experience2026-02-21
Key management is too hard for average users to do correctly2026-02-17
Security design makes apps unusable in practice2025-12-18
Setting up keys, relays, and finding accounts is confusing, and discovery surfaces disturbing content2025-09-19
Signup shows cryptographic keys first, then confusing example clients, one broken2025-09-19
Users must know and manage which relays to connect to; using multiple is slow and cumbersome2025-09-19
Can't delete messages reliably; clients lack support for deletion, and DMs only delete on your end2025-06-22
Clients get flooded with thousands of messages from relays when rendering a profile2024-03-28
Zap buttons look usable but silently fail without a separate wallet setup2023-09-01
Default feed is full of crypto spam, bad first impression2023-07-01
Users must save a private key or lose their account, a hard hurdle to join2023-05-04