Nostr: Verify your name on your WordPress site

There is a lot of talk about decentralized networks these days. Twitter’s ongoing implosion probably contributes a lot to that.

I’ve talked about the Fediverse on this blog in the past few months, and like many others, I created a Bluesky account to give the AT protocol a try.

I wanted to give Nostr a try as well, and signed up for an account. I still have a lot of reading to do on the topic. I am not sure I’m fully onboard with “another decentralized protocol” (yes, another standard), especially one that seems to tie in closely with cryptocurrencies, but I wanted to take a closer look at it anyway to make up my own mind.

One of the first things I wanted to do was to verify my account. I am @[email protected] and @[email protected] on the Fediverse, I am @jeremy.hu on Bluesky, it made sense for me to be [email protected] on Nostr.

The verification process is detailed on this page. While ActivityPub (and thus everyone on the Fediverse) relies on Webfinger, Nostr decided to go with its own NIP-05. When I saw that, my first reaction was to wonder why they didn’t go with something that already existed, but again…

I consequently created a WordPress plugin (also available in the WordPress.org plugin directory) to add the necessary .well-known entry point to my own site:

https://herve.bzh/.well-known/nostr.json

Feel free to use the plugin if you need it too!

Props to @pfefferle for his work on the Webfinger plugin. It sped things up a lot to look at how Webfinger did things to create my own .well-known response. 🙂