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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

#121

Post by Karrot_Kream »

heyitsguay wrote: post #118
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because forums generally have topics and rules. If we're in a forum about sports cars and you're constantly starting adversarial threads about city planning and parking, then mods would probably censor you to keep the forum on topic. Places like Facebook advertise themselves as the "town square of the web". Traditionally nobody was censored in the town square. There's a difference between purpose built communi…

> Traditionally nobody was censored in the town square. This isn't true, it's just that the spatial constraints IRL mean there's never been a need to scale moderation of town squares beyond intuitive methods. Go to your physical town square and start screaming slurs and threats of violence at passers-by, and see how long it takes before the community "censors" you.

> screaming slurs and threats of violence at passers-by, and see how long it takes before the community "censors" you.

In developing and developed countries I've had (ostensibly) mentally ill people shouting epithets at passerbys and they're just ignored. So I think this is more about cultural norms.

Moreover, the case you mention is simple. If a spammer joins a forum and starts spamming, there's usually broad support to kick them out. Once the argument becomes ideological, that's when sentiment is a lot more mixed

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

#122

Post by warning26 »

darthrupert wrote: post #84
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…

I'm like you except I've reached a clarity: the Internet and anonymity destroyed free speech and it's now dead as an ideal.

The internet has shown that free speech simply doesn't work if literally anyone has the power to broadcast whatever they want to thousands of algorithmically selected users.

Comparing "speech" pre and post social media is like comparing "weaponry" between knives and nuclear weapons.

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

#124

Post by Ambolia »

noptd wrote: post #113
JulianMorrison wrote: post #48

Banning people is an upside. Setting boundaries of acceptable behaviour is necessary for having a space where people won't be troll-brigaded and hate-swarmed, and where the worst people on the internet don't drive out everyone else.

Seems like an acceptable position to take until you find yourself outside of the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Personally, I don't mind having to manually filter/ignore non-conformant behavior in order to prevent that possibility for myself and any other minority group online.

Customized chains of trusts can be created too. Where you could choose either directly who you want to read, or who you trust to "whitelist" people, so you can have censorship but you can choose your own censors.

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

#125

Post by pseudozach »

fiatjaf wrote: post #103
webmaven wrote: post #36

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. 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.

You could even deterministically map pubkeys to handles with something like bip39. it won't be pretty but it will be unique, human-readable and uncensorable.

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

#126

Post by pseudozach »

jlelse wrote: post #13

Why so complicated? Just setup your personal website with RSS feeds.

barrier to entry. You can start broadcasting your thoughts within seconds with no infrastructure. No need to worry about hosting content until you're big enough to be censored.

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

#127

Post by pseudozach »

supertestnet wrote: post #24
vlunkr wrote: post #11

For me the fact that it's censorship-resistant is not the interesting point here, it's that it's decentralized.

It's not decentralized yet but only potentially decentralized if a lot of people run relays. Currently there are only about seven relays powering the whole network: https://nostr-registry.netlify.app/ Luckily, relays are very lightweight and easy to run so maybe it will eventually get decentralized.

And remember relays can be incentivized to host content by micropayments via Lightning network if needed.

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

#128

Post by Shish2k »

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…

> So in practical terms how would one make such a platform widely adopted?

I’m not sure if can be…

- Developers working for free generally build things that they themselves want to use. If you look at HN’s opinions on eg Discord vs IRC (or Dropbox vs rsync+cronjob), you can see how the venn diagram of “nerd goals” (e2ee, distributed, federated) and “everybody else goals” (I want to communicate with my friends) is almost two separate circles.

- If you get paid by the users, nobody will use it (Remember app.net? Me neither)

- If you get paid by advertisers, you have the same economic incentives that created Facebook

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

#129

Post by webmaven »

vidarh wrote: post #46
webmaven wrote: post #36

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. 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.

That's only true if you choose to introduce a global namespace. There's nothing requiring you to have just a single such catalog of users as long as the canonical reference is the pubkey any more than the contact list on my phone requires you to name people the same on your phone. (and in fact on reading the protocol specs, they do have a way for relays to publish mappings [1] . EDIT: and that would seem to make it p…

Sure, you can have multiple namespaces, and each would have to be censored, but that's about as difficult as playing whack-a-mole with multiple domains pointed at an IP address.

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

#130

Post by webmaven »

fiatjaf wrote: post #103
webmaven wrote: post #36

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. 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.

That's kind of like saying that people don't interact with domain names, but with IP addresses.

The point of having the mapping of a name to a key is for users to use it in place of the underlying key in their interactions with the system.

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