Nostr Firehose Screensaver
The Nostr Firehose screensaver streams the live public firehose of Nostr text notes past you in real time from a key-less relay WebSocket, with a built-in content filter. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
Live preview
Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the Nostr Firehose screensaver works
The saver opens a live connection to a public Nostr relay over WebSocket, subscribing to new text notes with no key or account.
Each new note flows up the screen with its author's shortened public key and a relative timestamp.
A built-in content filter drops notes that match a word blocklist, and you can narrow it to a keyword.
If the connection drops it reconnects automatically, so the feed keeps flowing.
Notes carried by relays, signed by keys
Nostr stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. It is an open protocol, not a company or an app. Each user holds a key pair, and the public key serves as their identity. The only object in the protocol is the event, which carries the author’s public key, a timestamp, a kind number, tags, content and a signature (Schnorr on the secp256k1 curve). Anyone can check a signature without trusting the server that delivered it.
Clients are what people use to read and write, and relays are servers that expose a WebSocket endpoint, store events and send them to subscribed clients. A client opens a subscription with a REQ message containing filters, and the relay returns matching events and then keeps sending new ones. A plain text note is kind 1, which is what a firehose of notes consists of.
Reading from a single relay gives you only the events that relay holds, not the whole network. The timestamp is set by the author’s client and covered by the signature, so it can be wrong, and a valid signature proves who signed a note, not that its content is true.
A worked example
Notes rise from the bottom the instant they're written somewhere on the Nostr network — a thought, a link, a reply — a real-time window onto a decentralized social protocol with no single owner. Type a filter word and only notes mentioning it stream through.
Settings & tips
- Filter by word shows only notes containing your word (leave blank for everything).
- Accent recolours the highlights.
- The shortened string before each timestamp is the author's public key, not a username — Nostr accounts don't require one.
Frequently asked questions
- Are these real live notes?
- Yes. They stream from a public Nostr relay the moment they're published, so it's genuinely real-time.
- Is the content filtered?
- Yes, on a best-effort basis. A built-in blocklist drops notes with slurs or explicit terms, but live public notes can still be unpredictable.
- Does it need an account or key?
- No. Reading a public Nostr relay is key-less; the saver only needs an internet connection.
- Can I focus it on a topic?
- Yes. Enter a filter word and only notes containing it will stream through.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.
- What is a public key on Nostr?
- It is the user's identity: a 32-byte key, usually shown as hex or in a shortened form. Posts are signed with the matching private key, so anyone can verify who wrote them.
- Why might a note be missing from this stream?
- A single relay only holds the events it has been sent, so you see a slice of the network, not everything posted anywhere.
- Can notes be deleted?
- A user can publish a deletion request for their own events, but the protocol says relays should honour it rather than must, and clients should not treat relays as authoritative, so deletion is a request, not a guarantee.