Description
Starting fresh on Nostr can be weird.
You make a key. Open a client. Follow six people.
Then the feed just kind of sits there looking at you.
This is a curated starter list of 1,000 Nostr account public keys assembled to give a new or under-connected account a much larger starting point.
The goal wasn’t to collect every famous Bitcoin account or scrape a random relay until the counter hit 1,000. The list was built around accounts worth putting into an actual social graph: established Nostr users, active participants, technical people, Bitcoiners, developers, artists, weird internet people, community accounts and other accounts likely to lead somewhere useful.
What You Get
- 1,000 Nostr public keys
- Plain text format
- One 64-character hex pubkey per line
- No private keys
- No account credentials
- No dependency on a particular Nostr client
That’s it.
No 14-column spreadsheet explaining that a public key is, in fact, a public key.
What This Is For
The list is useful for:
- Bootstrapping a new Nostr account
- Expanding a nearly empty follow graph
- Finding more conversations to participate in
- Seeding Nostr research tools
- Testing follow-list utilities
- Building account-discovery software
- Exploring beyond the handful of accounts recommended by one client
CacheRat originally built the list because following people one at a time is a magnificent use of a finite human lifespan.
It is considerably less annoying to begin with a reasonably curated dataset and work backward: follow broadly, watch what appears, then remove whatever you don’t care about.
Curation
The list was assembled from existing Nostr account discovery, public follow relationships and known account sources, then reduced into a 1,000-account starter set.
The selection specifically tries to avoid obvious adult-content accounts and unnecessary bot garbage. Some useful or entertaining automated accounts may still appear where they make sense.
This is a curated list, not an identity-verification database.
A Nostr pubkey proves control of a key. It does not prove that the person behind it is famous, sane, currently active, human, interesting to you, or capable of making good decisions after midnight.
Plain Data
The download is deliberately boring.
0123456789abcdef... abcdef0123456789... ...
One pubkey per line.
That makes it easy to use with Python, shell scripts, databases, Nostr tools or whatever horrible little program you’ve written at 2:00 in the morning.
Important Limitation
Nostr changes constantly.
Accounts disappear. People stop posting. New accounts become important. Relay availability changes. A perfectly reasonable person may become completely unbearable next Tuesday.
This list is therefore a starter follow dataset, not a permanent ranking of the Nostr network.
You should expect to prune it.
Can I Build This Myself?
Absolutely.
Follow established Nostr accounts, inspect their follow lists, search community recommendations, remove junk, check questionable accounts and eventually assemble your own thousand-key file.
Nothing here depends on secret information.
CacheRat already did the digging and cleanup.
You get the file.
