Why I spent a year building Vega — a Tauri-based Nostr client with an embedded relay, Lightning zaps, and first-class long-form writing.
Most Nostr clients live in the browser or on your phone. That's fine for scrolling, but I kept hitting the same walls: I wanted a fast native app on my desktop, I wanted my notes to survive even if every relay I used disappeared, and I wanted to write — actual long-form articles, not just 280-character hot takes.
So I built Vega, a free and open-source (MIT) desktop Nostr client for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It's now at version 0.14, with 70+ features and 20 NIPs implemented. This post is about why it exists and the technical decisions that shaped it.
Wait, what's Nostr?
Quick primer if you haven't crossed paths with it yet: Nostr is a simple, open protocol for censorship-resistant social networking. Your identity is a keypair, not an account on someone's server. Your posts ("notes") are signed events published to relays — dumb, interchangeable servers anyone can run. No company owns the network, and clients are interchangeable too: log into any of them with the same key, and your identity, follows, and posts come with you.
