Nostr is truly censorship-resistant protocol for social network and messenger app, combine with Bitcoin, they are powerful tools bring you to freedom. Lume is one of many great clients to help you interact with them, built with Tauri and Web-tech aiming for speed and efficiency

Lume is simple as it is, no more buzzwords

App screenshot

How Nostr works?

Everybody runs a client. It can be a native client, a web client, etc. To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side. Learn more

Motivation

When Nostr became popular, many clients exist but none of them satisfy me, so I built my own. I don't many experence in develop desktop app before, my background is just strongly in Ruby on Rails, this is also a good opportunity for me to improve my skills.

Development

Prerequisites:

Nodejs >= 18.0.0
Install pnpm: docs
Setup Tauri: docs

Clone repo:

Note: always use canary branch for development

git clone -b canary https://github.com/luminous-devs/lume.git

Move to clone folder in previous step

cd lume/

Install dependencies

pnpm install

Run development build

pnpm tauri dev

First time launch app, Lume automatically create local database (sqlite) and run migrations, place at src-tauri/migrations

Database folder: tauri::api::path::BaseDirectory::App
MacOS: /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/com.lume.nu/lume.db

In splashscreen page, Lume will check accounts table has any account or not. If not redirect to /onboarding. If present, run subscribe to fetch events from DEFAULT_RELAYS

In /onboarding page, user can import old private key or create new .If import old key, fetch kind 0, 3 then insert to accounts table in database .If create new, show to user npub/nsec as well as random profile, then move to pre-follows page. Then redirect back to splashscreen

About Lume event processing

Lume is using nostr-relaypool-ts to interact with relays
When user open app, if total notes in db == 0, splashscreen src/app/page.tsx will fetch all events from 24 hours ago, if above zero, it will fetch all events since last time logged
When user using app, event collector component have role fetch all events since current time and save to database
event collector also have role update last time logged to local storage when user close the app
Newsfeed page following or circle will fetch event from database then render in virtuaso component
Lume don't render event directly after get it from relays, event will be saved in database first, and fetch via sql query