Building a nostr-powered comments, the multi-identities challenges

While working on building the new commenting widget, we are coming across quite a few interesting challenges.

For example, yesterday we were having a looong brainstorming session regarding how we will deal with the gap between a user's nostr identity & his website's identity (in our case, his bolt.fun account).

In our previous implementation, we didn't face this problem because we were generating the user's nostr keys ourselves & storing them beside his bolt.fun profile.

However, we now want to allow the non-custodial method going forward.

But this means that the user keys are with him, not with us, so we don't know which nostr profile is to which bolt.fun account (& he might even be commenting without having a bolt.fun account at all).

So in other words, each user will at any time likely have two totally separate identities:
- A Nostr identity(s)
- A bolt.fun account (optional)

While this differentiation might be confusing & strange to users the first time they see it,
but personally, I don't think it's a bad thing at all!!

& that's for several reasons:

- Interoperability.

For a feature to work across different nostr clients, the core parts has to be as platform-independent as possible. & obviously, bolt.fun's profile is something platform-specific.

Different clients like bolt.fun can (& will) add platform-specific features, but these features ideally should be extras & enhancements to the experience, not core parts that will break the feature on other clients.

- Privacy

In many cases, a user might want his commenting profile to remain private/anonymous & not linked to his social profile.

Maybe he wants to give some honest feedback, express a controversial opinion, (or maybe even say some bad stuff 😅).

So being able to keep his commenting identity private is crucial.

- Encourage users to learn more about Nostr

& I think this is an important point.
Cause previously, when we were the ones generating users' nostr keys & signing their messages for them, all of this would happen in the background without the users really noticing anything.

While this may be the easier UX, users didn't really learn, care, nor understand what this "nostr-thingy" is about or mean.

But now, by giving the users more control over their identities, & exposing some of the stuff to them, more users will be encouraged to learn & understand about this new technology, & how they should work with it.

Actually, as Nostr continue to gain more & more users & more websites integrate it in some part on another, users will become more used about it.

So why not be from the first ones who exposes & teach them about it?? 😁

Now saying all of that, I still think there's great value in providing users the option to CONNECT their bolt.fun account to one (or several) of their Nostr identities.

Why??
Because many people (including me) would like others to know that this useful/helpful/awesome content is written by them.

So somewhere in the website, if the user is logged in to his bolt.fun account AND he's connected to a nostr identity, we can show him a prompt/message saying that:

"If you would like your bolt.fun profile data to appear on your nostr comments in our website, you can link the 2 by clicking here"

When he clicks "here", we first verify his public key by asking him to sign something OR publish an event (for broader compatibility), & if everything's alright, then we link the 2 identities together.

Okaaays, I think that's everything for now!

The work on the new commenting feature is coming smoothly btw, so you could expect a first early version to drop out shortly.

Stay tuned for later updates.

Until then,
have a nice day 👋.