A reader’s guide to Decent Newsroom
- What is Decent Newsroom?
- How accounts work on Decent Newsroom
- Getting around: where to find things
- Reading lists: your personal “curation building blocks”
- Why things sometimes look “delayed” on Nostr
- Troubleshooting FAQ
- Need help?
Welcome to a quick guide for readers who run into “wait, why isn’t this working?” moments on Decent Newsroom. Below you’ll find the most common issues and the fastest fixes.
What is Decent Newsroom?
Decent Newsroom is a Nostr-based platform for discovering, curating, and publishing long-form content—built around magazines and search.
Unlike traditional platforms, Decent Newsroom doesn’t “own” the content. Articles are Nostr events that can be published and mirrored across relays, while Decent Newsroom focuses on making them readable, searchable, and easy to curate into magazines.
How accounts work on Decent Newsroom
You don’t make an account with email
Decent Newsroom does not store emails/passwords. Authentication is done via your Nostr keys (your npub identity).
How to sign in
On the site, you’ll see login options like:
- Extension (a Nostr browser extension)
- Signer (a remote signer flow)
If you choose the remote signer option, you’ll see a QR-based pairing flow. The option to copy/paste the connection into the signer isn’t yet available, but it’s in the works.
Getting around: where to find things
Newsstand (magazines)
Newsstand is the magazine rack: curated publications you can browse like sections of a newspaper.
Explore (search)
Explore is the long-form discovery feed + search entry point, with category filters (Lifestyle, Tech, etc.). You can use tags or keywords in the search bar, as well as Nostr identifiers. If you search a npub, for example, you’ll be redirected to their profile page.
Topics (tags you can browse)
Topics is a structured way to explore tags by theme (e.g., “Bitcoin & Sound Money,” “Artificial Intelligence,” etc.).
If you log in, Decent Newsroom looks for your interests event (kind 10015) and lists those at the top.
Multimedia
Multimedia is a serendipity-driven feed for media posts (images, video links, etc.). Each card is clickable and leads to the single post page.
Highlights
Highlights surfaces noteworthy passages highlighted by the community. Decent Newsroom preferentially shows highlights of passages from Nostr-native articles.
Reading lists: your personal “curation building blocks”
Decent Newsroom lets you create and share reading lists (curated lists). You can browse them when logged in, and create new ones from the Reading Lists page. Reading lists also plug into magazine creation: in the magazine setup wizard, you can attach an existing reading list as a category using its coordinate.
Why things sometimes look “delayed” on Nostr
Nostr content is relay-based and decentralized. That means discovery is partly an indexing problem: content may exist on relays Decent Newsroom isn’t currently crawling by default, or it may take time to be fetched and indexed. Decent Newsroom also aims to be fast to read. Practically, that means you may see a page load instantly using a recently cached version, while the server refreshes content behind the scenes and the next view is updated. (This avoids “waiting on relays” during page load—critical on decentralized networks.) Nostr is the source of truth; DN is the ‘print edition’ web page that anyone can open and preview. Decent Newsroom deliberately turns Nostr articles into fast, stable web pages that work everywhere. When you share a DN link, it includes the preview information—headline, cover image, and summary—so the link “unfurls” properly in group chats, social feeds, and messaging apps. If you’re a creator and want Decent Newsroom to reliably fetch from your declared relays, Active Indexing exists specifically for that.
Troubleshooting FAQ
I can’t sign in / the signer pairing is stuck
- If using remote signer: close and reopen the pairing dialog.
- If using an extension: check that the extension is installed and allowed on this site.
I can’t sign an event I created
We have a known issue when a browser has multiple Nostr signers available. It might feel like a slotmachine, but try a couple of times anyway.
I can’t find an article I know exists on Nostr
Most often: it’s on relays outside the default crawl set.
The shortest path to importing an article or looking up any other event is to paste the naddr or nevent address into the search field on the Explore page.
We also offer Active Indexing. If you’re an author and would like to see your content show up regularly, that is the “make sure DN fetches my declared relays” solution for publishers.
As a reader, try:
- searching in Explore
- browsing via Topics
- checking the author’s profile page and their Articles tab
I’m seeing an older version of a page
This is usually the “fast load first, refresh after” behavior. Refresh the page once, or come back shortly—DN prioritizes speed, then revalidates.
Media links don’t load
Some media is hosted externally and may depend on the original host being reachable. If a specific item is broken, send feedback with the link.
Need help?
Use the Send Feedback page on Decent Newsroom for bug reports and feature requests.