About Pinstr
Pinstr is a cork board for short-lived public digital notes. Each board is a geohash: a short code for a patch of the map, from three letters (a country-sized cell) to nine (a doorway). You open a board, sign a note with your Nostr key, and pin it there.
Notes expiration
Every note carries an expiry (1d, 1w, 1m, 6m, 1y). The board shows what is left of it, and the paper creases as it ages: clean paper when new, worn and marked as it gets closer to expiry. When it expires, the note is gone from every board, not archived, not moved to a second page. Nothing here is built to last, which is the point.
Boards nest
Boards nest by precision, so a note can reach a neighbourhood from a town. Open a board and the brass plates on the rails tell you what you are seeing: a light for each level below you, green where your chosen depth includes those notes, red where it hides them. Setting the depth to exact shows only this cell; each step further widens it.
No account
There are no signups. You either bring a Nostr key, pair a remote signer like Amber, or come in through Telegram, which gives you a real Nostr identity that you can then export to other Nostr clients if you plan to explore Nostr more, which I definitely encourage. Anonymous posting is allowed, but it comes with a price to prevent spam.
What it costs
Pinning is paid for in sats over the Lightning network, and nothing else. One price covers a whole note: a note that straddles several cells costs the same as one that fits inside a single cell, and the expiry you choose — a day or a year — does not change it.
| Who is pinning | Price |
|---|---|
| A subscribed key | 10 sats a week or 411 sats a year — a year is 52 weeks with 21% off |
| With a 5+ character satoshi.si name | 7 sats a week, 308 a year — 25% off the list price |
| With a 4-character satoshi.si name | 5 sats a week, 205 a year — half the list price |
| With a 3-character satoshi.si name | free — the subscription costs nothing at all |
| An anonymous note | 69 sats per note, from a throwaway key that may pin one |
| A key with a NIP-05 name on any domain | free, paid in work instead: 29 bits of proof of work on the note's own id |
The name is what decides a member's price, and the names are priced the same way round: on satoshi.si a 3-character name costs 50,000 sats, a 4-character one 21,000, and anything from 5 to 30 characters 5,000. The shorter the name, the less you pay every week — so a short name is worth the sats if you intend to keep pinning. Names of one or two characters are not sold.
Proof of work is the free way in for anyone with a Nostr identity: instead of sats, the note's id must start with enough zero bits, which costs electricity rather than money. It needs a NIP-05 name to claim, and the board checks the work itself — a note that claims work it does not have is refused like any other bad order.
Public by nature
A pinned note is public. Notes can be seen on other Nostr clients, and relays outside wss://nostr.satoshi.si could store them too, so it's very important not to post anything you would not say out loud in the streets.
A hobby project
Pinstr is a hobby project, supported by the users who subscribe to it, probably the cheapest subscription on the internet thanks to micropayments, which are possible with Bitcoin. That's why this website will always support only Bitcoin, so please do not request other payment rails because they are not worth my time. But if you need help with getting started with Bitcoin, feel free to reach out. I'll be happy to guide you to the right resources.
Open the board and pin something while you are here. Notes are signed by you, not by this site.