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Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

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Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#101

Post by dogma1138 »

beaconstudios wrote: post #49
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #4

> it does not rely on P2P techniques, therefore it works. followed by > To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. Sounds pretty much like P2P techniques to me.

Sounds like p2p with supernodes, like the GNUTELLA network (limewire) used.

It doesn’t seem like the relays on Nostr sync with each other and each relay operator can choose which content is hosted on it.

The link to the content isn’t global it’s still relay/post the client just searches for a given post within its list of relays.

The content is then served through a specific relay which hosts it so basically directly from a server.

So this isn’t a supernode topology or server P2P of any kind.

GNUTELLA supernodes were used to limit the number of peering connections that each client on the network had to maintain and organize the network into a manageable topology this is necessary from a technical perspective and any P2P network solves this problem in some manner that turns a fully meshed network into some sort of leaf and spine topology.

This is basically needed to ensure that any client on the network can reach any other client reliably and to ensure that the network can support large number of clients without needing to coordinate peering globally across the entire network.

If you build a P2P network where peering is just a randomized best effort mesh between all clients it would rather quickly break into a bunch of rather isolated networks as peninsulas and then islands would form.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#102

Post by fiatjaf »

shadowgovt wrote: post #47
ayende wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At which point you can setup your own relay, you don't have a block here

Unless nobody is willing to peer with you. These are all questions we've already seen from USENET; in fact, it's not entirely clear to me what the benefit to this protocol is over USENET, except it's new.

From what I know USENET is more like Mastodon. Nostr has similarities with Mastodon but it's much more flexible, scalable, not to mention the public key infrastructure.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#103

Post by fiatjaf »

webmaven wrote: post #36
vidarh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but you can disconnect those requirements on the server side. E.g. a "name/profile to key/value" service would be useful for more than this. If people want mastodon style handles, for example, it's easy enough to create a mapping that can leverage DNS for example to let you query for a matching pubkey in a cacheable and easily scalable way and without the need for that to be built into the messaging prot…

> That's true, but you can disconnect those requirements on the server side. > E.g. a "name/profile to key/value" service would be useful for more than this. At which point you've reintroduced a global namespace SPOF that is vulnerable to censorship, etc. You can push the complexity around like food on a plate, but getting rid of it is another matter entirely.

No, you don't. You can have DNS-based aliases to pubkeys, and then people will follow pubkeys and interact with pubkeys, not with the DNS aliases. So if these users are censored later from the DNS then they still keep their identity, their contacts, their followers etc.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#104

Post by fiatjaf »

LinuxBender wrote: post #5

I like the intent of these types of projects but a serious question I have is: How do you get the majority of people to switch to something like this? There are many examples but the most recent ones that come to mind are people trying to get their friends to use Murmur/Mumble instead of Discord with basically near-zero success. I've seen this in a few gaming forums. Anyone attempting this is basically laughed off th…

Well, Twitter has been going into a series of serious banning recently. They even banned the president of the United States. All these banned people had to find homes in suboptimal platforms from which they can be banned again and so on. If that trend increases and Nostr can position itself as a viable alternative it might catch some chunks of mainstream.

But yeah, it's kinda hard. We must keep building though.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#105

Post by fiatjaf »

uncomputation wrote: post #12

The protocol is nice and simple, but how does this prevent the issue that Aether has where running a relay just basically destroys your bandwidth and you have to store tons of stuff?

Relays don't have any requirements, you can run very lightweight relays that do very little or very big relays that do a lot of things -- and so on.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#106

Post by fiatjaf »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #4

> it does not rely on P2P techniques, therefore it works. followed by > To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. Sounds pretty much like P2P techniques to me.

To me it sounds pretty much like client-server architecture.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#107

Post by rpdillon »

endymi0n wrote: post #15

I used to be a huge fan of censorship resistance, freedom and privacy, but I didn‘t appreciate just how much self-selection there was in the kinds of people who went to great lengths to access IRC in the times of dial-up modems. These days, I have the feeling there are only two kinds of platforms left: The clean ones with strong moderation, where any form of edginess and possibly controversial topics including breast…

There may be a third category for those with technical know-how, that tend to be like the early internet, since they apply the same selection bias. I'm thinking of things like Gemini and SSB. If SSB could work out the challenges that make it hard to implement in non-JS, I think it could become something like email in its ubiquity.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#108

Post by elevader »

cuu508 wrote: post #73
shadowgovt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless nobody is willing to peer with you. These are all questions we've already seen from USENET; in fact, it's not entirely clear to me what the benefit to this protocol is over USENET, except it's new.

But IIUC, other relays don't need to peer with your relay. Your followers just need to know what relay you are using, so they can get your posts.

This sounds more and more like running a blog.

Re: Fiatjaf/nostr – a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter

#110

Post by itake »

riffic wrote: post #35
LinuxBender wrote: post #5

I like the intent of these types of projects but a serious question I have is: How do you get the majority of people to switch to something like this? There are many examples but the most recent ones that come to mind are people trying to get their friends to use Murmur/Mumble instead of Discord with basically near-zero success. I've seen this in a few gaming forums. Anyone attempting this is basically laughed off th…

> How do you get the majority of people to switch to something like this? This is really the wrong focus. Everyone should be focused on how to "mainstream" this in the minds of content creators, organizations, institutions, and media. The audience will find these subjects because they have a certain gravity to attract followers. This is why, in my mind, if the federated open web wants to "succeed" (spoilers, it hasn'…

chicken or the egg?

Why would a content creator, org, institution, and media use a new app with no users? All of the above publish to twitter because Twitter's "bizarre techniques to keep you addicted" and "doesn't show an actual historical feed from people you follow"

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