Narchives

An Android app for browsing web page archives published via the Nostr protocol and stored on Blossom media servers.

Think of it like an RSS reader, but for WACZ web archives. Anyone with the Nostr Web Archiver Chrome extension can archive a web page — the archive gets uploaded to a Blossom server and announced on Nostr. Narchives is the reading client for those archives.

Check out github.com/fiatjaf/nostr-web-archiver for creating web archives and uploading them to blossom/nostr! The more archives on nostr, the better this app is (and the less we have to rely on centralized internet archives)

Features

• Global feed — browse all recently archived web pages across your relays
• Relay browsing — see archives published to a specific relay
• Profile browsing — see all archives by a specific Nostr user (npub)
• URL filtering — filter archives by domain (e.g. show only nytimes.com)
• Archive replay — view the original web page as it was captured, rendered via ReplayWeb.page
• Reader mode — clean article view stripped down to just the text
• Offline reading — save archives locally for reading without internet
• Bookmarking — save archives to a local library

How It Works

1. The app connects to Nostr relays and subscribes to kind 30041 events (web archive announcements)
2. Each event contains metadata about an archived page: the original URL, title, and a SHA-256 hash pointing to a WACZ file on a Blossom server
3. When you tap an archive, the app resolves the WACZ file location, starts a local HTTP server, and renders the archived page in a WebView using ReplayWeb.page
4. Reader mode extracts the article text from the WACZ using Readability4J

Tech Stack

• Kotlin + Jetpack Compose (Material 3)
• Quartz (Amethyst's Nostr protocol library) — relay connections, event parsing, bech32, signature verification
• Room — local database for caching events, profiles, relays
• NanoHTTPD — embedded HTTP server for WACZ replay (proxies range requests to Blossom servers)
• ReplayWeb.page — renders WACZ archives in WebView
• Readability4J — article extraction for reader mode
• OkHttp — HTTP client for Blossom blob retrieval
• WorkManager — background WACZ downloads

Development

Prerequisites

This project uses Nix with direnv for a reproducible dev environment. No global installs needed.

Setup

git clone <repo-url> nostr-archive-reader
cd nostr-archive-reader
direnv allow    # Activates the Nix dev shell

This gives you:

• JDK 17
• Android SDK (API 35, build-tools 35.0.0)
• Gradle 8.11.1
• nak (Nostr Army Knife) for testing

Build

./gradlew assembleDebug

Test keys (via nak)

# Generate a keypair
nak key generate                    # hex private key
nak key public <hex-privkey>        # hex public key
nak encode nsec <hex-privkey>       # bech32 nsec
nak encode npub <hex-pubkey>        # bech32 npub

# Query relays for kind 30041 events
nak req -k 30041 -l 5 wss://relay.nostr.band

Project Structure

app/src/main/java/com/narchives/reader/
├── NarchivesApp.kt              # Application class
├── MainActivity.kt              # Single activity, hosts Compose
├── di/AppContainer.kt           # Manual dependency injection
├── data/
│   ├── local/                   # Room database, entities, DAOs
│   ├── remote/nostr/            # Quartz wrapper, event mapping
│   ├── remote/blossom/          # Blossom HTTP client
│   ├── repository/              # ArchiveRepository, ProfileRepository, RelayRepository
│   └── preferences/             # DataStore preferences
├── replay/                      # NanoHTTPD replay server, reader mode
└── ui/                          # Compose screens, navigation, theme

Protocol References

• NIP-01 — Nostr basic protocol
• Kind 30041 — Web archive announcement events
• Blossom — Blob storage protocol (BUD-01, BUD-02)
• WACZ — Web Archive Collection Zipped format
• ReplayWeb.page — Client-side WACZ replay engine

License

TBD