FOLLOW US:
[This seems to be an emerging tool that "Fiatjaf" (the father of Nostr) is working on. It will make it far easier to find specific things on Nostr. That said, it doesn't help you find categories of things.]
When you tell people to "look you up on Nostr" there are several ways of going about that.
If you're a regular user your NIP-05 identifier will look like an email address - for example "s3x_jay@s3x.social". That's relatively easy for people to remember and type in. When they type that in their client will query s3x.social and get your public key and their client would then query the relays it uses to find you.
If your NIP-05 provider takes the extra step to specify what relays you use (like we do), then their client can query those relays to find you even if they don't usually use those relays.
One caveat though - if you your NIP-05 is simply a domain name - for example ours is simply "s3x.social" - some clients aren't smart enough to recognize that as a NIP-05 address. But if you give out "_@s3x.social" then they'll figure out it's a NIP-05 and they'll find you. (Hopefully most clients will fix that problem in the near future).
You could always give out your 'npub' - ours is npub1k27tyhsg9hqqy2zm7lgxk9n3kafsy8e7x6du6hnes8q65mr2aslqn3vmmj - but that isn't exactly something you tell someone over drinks or something you want on a business card. But if the context is a link on a website, it works pretty well.
The problem with that is that, unlike properly configured NIP-05 which tells people what relays to find you on, there's no guarantee they'll find you since your profile information may not be on one of the relays they use.
Pretty much every Nostr user knows they have an npub, but many don't know they also have an 'nprofile - ours is nprofile1qqst909jtcyzmsqz9pdl05rtzecmw5czrulrdx7dteucrsd2d34wc0srp0hpa. On it's own it's kinda redundant with your npub. But it's capable of doing things the npub can't (in the context of helping people find you)…
What's interesting about nprofiles is they can be generated with other data in them - namely relay hints. So they can work just like a properly configured NIP-05 identifier and tell the other person what relays to use to look you up.
It's a really basic demo site, but if you go to nak.nostr.com you can enter your npub, put in some relay hints, and it will generate a nprofile with relay hints in it. So our nprofile goes from:
nprofile1qqst909jtcyzmsqz9pdl05rtzecmw5czrulrdx7dteucrsd2d34wc0srp0hpa
to
nprofile1qqst909jtcyzmsqz9pdl05rtzecmw5czrulrdx7dteucrsd2d34wc0spzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuuen0qh8xmmrd9skch3wx30
when we add wss://relay.s3x.social as a relay hint, and then to
nprofile1qqst909jtcyzmsqz9pdl05rtzecmw5czrulrdx7dteucrsd2d34wc0spzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuuen0qh8xmmrd9skcqgnwaehxw309ac82unsd3jhqct8v5hx2uckd5r9h
when we add a second relay hint of wss://purplepage.es.
While you as a person have an 'npub' every one of your posts has a 'note' ID. They look like note10p99cqmfljucu30yfj0ldwfwvcv5wk6psg639hcsm0hx7mkf74ussc4c29
And just like npubs have nprofiles which seem redundant at first look, but can be extended with relay information, note IDs have 'nevent' equivalents that can be extended. The nevent for that note is
nevent1qqs8sjjuqd5lewvwghjye8lkhyhxvx28tdqcydgjmugdhmn0dmyl27gdfnt0x
And if I extend it embedding that it can be found on relay.s3x.social it will look like this:
nevent1qqs8sjjuqd5lewvwghjye8lkhyhxvx28tdqcydgjmugdhmn0dmyl27gpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuuen0qh8xmmrd9skcnuwt6s
So cool things are coming that will make Nostr a lot better!