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.

FIPS is a mesh 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 Mac, or a spare phone you use as your home vault, 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 kiosk mode on a spare phone.
• Step by step: your Mac as your photo server, home vault and kiosk mode.

To turn it on, open Settings → Mesh → FIPS 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 page 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 → FIPS 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: Vault on Mac, Phone or Home 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 FIPS Mesh → Sync → Check sync on a phone.

An always-on vault

Kiosk mode

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

• It keeps the screen on, so the phone keeps serving. Leaving the app pauses kiosk mode, and it turns on again when you come back.
• 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, and 1 GB per session before they have to wait. They can't read your notes or change anything.

Set another phone to use it as its Home vault, and your new notes and photos go to the kiosk phone 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