Your phone is your photo server now.

The basics

What the mesh is

Most phones and home computers can't be reached from the internet. They sit behind a home router, move between Wi-Fi and cell, and have no fixed address. That's why your photos normally live on someone else's server.

The mesh (built on FIPS) is a network where you reach a device by its Nostr key (an npub) instead of an IP address. It works across home routers and mobile networks, and the connection between two devices is encrypted end to end. Nostr Vault uses it to let your devices reach each other, and to let other people fetch your photos from you.

Photos stay trustworthy no matter who hands them over. On Nostr, a photo is named by its fingerprint (a hash). Whoever sends it, the app checks the fingerprint, and if it matches, it's the photo. If it doesn't, the photo is thrown away and loaded the normal way.

Your own server

Your phone or Mac as your photo server

Your Nostr profile already keeps a list of where your media lives. Nostr Vault adds one more entry to that list: your home vault (your Mac or a spare phone), written as its mesh address. Your everyday phone isn't listed. It goes after your normal media servers, so apps that don't know about the mesh carry on as before.

An app that does know about it can ask your device for a photo directly, by its fingerprint, the same way it would ask any media server. Your photos still go to your normal servers too. Your device is one more place they can come from, and the one you own.

• On a Mac, the Nostr Vault app serves while it's open. Leave it running and your Mac is an always-on photo server.
• On a phone, it serves while the app is open, or full-time in Home vault mode on a spare phone.
• Step by step: your Mac as your photo server, home vault.

To turn it on, open Settings → Mesh and switch on Mesh. Serving is off until you turn it on.

Your devices, together

My Devices

My Devices is the list of your own phones, Macs, home vault and browser vault that reach each other over the mesh. Devices on this list sync with each other in full: your notes, your photos and your history.

1. On each device, open Settings → Mesh, turn on Mesh, and in This Device tap Copy. That's the device's mesh address.
2. On your other devices, go to My Devices → Add a device by address, paste it, and pick what it is: Home vault · full history, Home vault · new posts, Phone or Browser vault.
3. Do it in both directions: add each phone on the Mac, and the Mac on each phone.

A device on the list shows a dot when it's in reach. To check that everything arrived, use Mesh → Sync → Check sync on a phone.

An always-on vault

Home vault mode

Home vault mode turns a phone into a small always-on vault. Put an old phone on a charger at home, turn Home vault mode on under Share With Others, and it keeps serving.

• On iPhone it keeps the screen on, pauses when you leave the app and turns on again when you come back. On Android it keeps serving in the background while the vault runs.
• Your own devices in My Devices reach it in full.
• Everyone else can only read the photos in your posts, and only slowly: 1 MB/s shared between all of them, at most 256 MB each. On iPhone they get 1 GB a day in total, then wait until the next day. On Android, Pause after sets the total for one session (1 GB to start). They can't read your notes or change anything.

Add it on your other phones as Home vault · new posts, and your new notes and photos go to the home vault over the mesh, which sends your notes on to your relays.

Works in any browser

Share pages

When you share a post from Nostr Vault, the link opens that post in the Nostr Vault web app, in any normal browser. Anyone can read it as a guest, with no account and nothing to install, and sign in from there to reply or like.

If a photo in that post or its replies can't be loaded from its usual server, the browser fetches it from that author's own device over the mesh. It joins the mesh for that one visit with a throwaway key, asks the device for the photo by its fingerprint, checks the fingerprint, and shows it.

• The photo is fetched by the visitor's own browser. nostrvault.app keeps no copy of it, and a guest's browser keeps nothing once the tab is closed.
• You may see blob:https://nostrvault.app/… as the image address. That's just the browser's name for a photo it already has, and it only works in that tab.
• The first load is slow for now: around 15 seconds for a full photo.

What others can see

Privacy

• Your home IP isn't published. Your profile lists your device by its mesh key, not its address. The mesh finds it by key.
• The door only serves photos. To anyone outside My Devices, your device only hands out the photos in your public posts. It doesn't expose your relay, your messages, your keys or anything private.
• A separate key. The device's mesh key is its own key, made once and kept on that device. Your Nostr key never goes to the mesh.
• Follows only is about what your app loads. Your app asks the mesh for photos only from people you follow, so strangers' devices aren't contacted. It doesn't limit who can see your photos: there's no setting for that. See who can see what.

Where it works

What works today