Non-technical Onboarding guide to Rostra - What is Rostra, and how to use Rostra?

[vishalxl]

What is Rostra?

Rostra is another attempt at a p2p social network.

So there are social networks like Twitter, Facebook, even Instagram, which are centralized. You create an account, and you get locked into it.

In a p2p/decentralized social network, you do not get locked in. You keep some amount of freedom, which allows you to not be beholden to anyone or some corporation regarding the content you create or consume. Rostra is one such network. Other such networks are Mastodon/Fediverse, Blue Sky, Nostr, etc.

Where do I access Rostra?

There are two ways: first, use a public instance like Rostra.me ,

and second is you do the following

git clone https://github.com/dpc/rostra.git
cd rostra 
cargo run --bin rostra --release -- web-ui 

Third step will take 20-40 minutes to build the application, and then it will start your own local instance of Rostra ( server and client both). This will not be accessible by anyone else ( since its a local application), but you can read and post it like any other (public) rostra instance.

How do I log in to Rostra? What is a Rostra Account?

On running the web-ui client of Rostra, you are given option to 'create account' or 'login'. You can do either.

A Rostra Account is a public/private key combination; of which the private key should always be kept private, and the public key is your identifier that you may share with anyone. That public key identifies you on the network. These keys are ed25519 keys, which may mean something to you if you follow cryptography.

what to do after logging in?

Follow some people, whose id's are mentioned here. Create a post, say hello world. You can like posts, you can go explore settings section. Check its code. Do whatever. Rostra is your Oystra ( cheap joke).

What more does Rostra offer?

Right now Rostra is basically a twitter like social network. There is no chat, nor group chats or communities. However, all these can be built over time, if there is demand.

But why Rostra, what so special about it?

Todo

What's Pkarr/Iroh and how Rostra uses it?

Rostra is built over Iroh/Pkarr, which means that it bypasses the DNS ( domain name system). Pkarr library is used to access the DHT ( which is also used in Bittorrent) data, which gives you the current IP address of your desired rostra friend.

Note that the site pkarr.org is not directly used. Even if the pkarr site goes down, rostra will keep working.

For example, my rostra public id is: rsut5j319xfrsr8ud3rgua8nmxm6kegcjjggijc6te5ein4tyjw8my

You can look up my contact address here on pkarr.
(The site is used only to show you the current value. Actually rostra does not use the pkarr.org site, it uses the pkarr library to directly access the data from DHT)

What are the privacy and security features I should know about?

1. If you log in to a rostra site like 'rostra.me', and if you use your private key, then you are in a way sharing your private key with that site/server. That has obvious implications, as in the server could misuse it to post in your behalf. To avoid this, the solution is simple: you run your own instance on localhost, and the steps to do that are mentioned in point above in this guide.

2. A site like rostra.me will obviously know your IP address too. So you will be leaking that too. Again, solution to avoid this is simple: run your own instance on your own computer on your localhost. In that case, the default setting is that all communication between your peers will happen over Iroh servers, so the peers themselves will now know your IP address. But then, the intermediate Iroh/Pkarr servers, will know your ip address. To avoid that, you could run your own Iroh/Pkarr servers, but how to do that, is too complicated for me, let alone this guide...