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Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

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Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#111
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have one Mastodon server you can post to (for that account). You can post on as many NOSTR relays as you want. Get banned on one, you are still publishing on the others. You can also, along with your messages, suggest to "subscribers" your preferred relays, so people that really want to follow you as you get banned all over the net always know the best place to reach you. This process of course would be automated…

Run. Your. Own. Mastodon host. Problem solved. Linnode has one click rollouts.

Mastodon does not solve the problem stated above. In Nostr you don't have to be jumping from instance to instance and losing all your stuff every time in the process.

Mastodon is clearly inferior to Nostr when it comes to having a decentralized identity.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#112

Moderation is an essential part of community management, even in darknets. Trust in what is said and what is promised as part of a transaction is what attracts and retains members of the community. Just because you can create a censorship resistant network doesn't mean you should.

You only get the content you subscribe to in Nostr.

There's no algorithm that will curate your feed for you, it's up to you to choose who you follow.

Don't like what someone is posting? Unsubscribe.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand, a blockchain is only needed to achieve consensus on the network state. Why does social media require this?

Adding to the parent question, why do I need a wallet to join Nostr? I registered, and while the registration was delightfully painless, it autocreated a wallet for me at legend.lnbits.com.

That’s probably related to the client you used, it’s not necessary for you to have a wallet. That being said, it’s useful to have a lightning address because you can link that to your pubkey and people can send you sats if they like what you have to say

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#115

Moderation is an essential part of community management, even in darknets. Trust in what is said and what is promised as part of a transaction is what attracts and retains members of the community. Just because you can create a censorship resistant network doesn't mean you should.

Nostr relays can and should moderate content. You can craft your own set of relays that do not tolerate bad things and use just these.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#116
post #99
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine you're running a relay on your machine, and somebody posts some CSAM, or stolen CC data, or hate speech, etc through your relay. Relays can be authenticated. If you don't want your relay to accept data from anyone, don't leave it open. Same with any other Internet protocol. Also, per the spec or convention, relays SHALL NOT talk to each other. Each relay is a separate island, but the protocol permits and re…

The spec doesn't say relays SHALL NOT talk to each other. YOU made that up. It says they don't talk to each other but it is not prevented. You can mirror one relay to another easily: echo '["REQ", "mirror" ,{}]' | websocat wss://source | jq -del '.[1]' | websocat wss://dest

> It says they don't talk to each other but it is not prevented

No protocol can prevent a piece of software from doing whatever they want.

The "shall not" is not absolute: the spec assumes and expects relays not to talk to each other. Nothing prevents you from creating a relay that connects to another relay, of course, but that would not be in the spirit of what Nostr is trying to achieve.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#117

Does somebody know whether the same or something similar could be achieved by using the "Network News Transfer Protocol" (nntp), without designing a whole new protocol?

What would we gain by doing that?

Access to the existing NNTP infrastructure. It's not worth it IMO, the state of NNTP servers is quite bad.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#118
post #91
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them. This is an important point. Free speech is really as much about the rights of the listener as the rights of the speaker, if not more so. I think this is a good way of framing the censorship debate, because while it may be easy for some to dismiss the rights of a few dozen famous…

> it's way harder to argue that the millions of people who follow those celebrities shouldn't be allowed to hear what they have to say, even if they want to. Nobody is making that argument. The actual argument is that a private company should not be compelled to provide free hosting for them. They can and have used other hosting services but many of their followers apparently prefer not to use those alternatives.

> Nobody is making that argument.

This is untrue.

Not only are people making that argument explicitly, but there have been any number of orchestrated attacks on private companies in order to force them to remove content. And if they refuse, attacks on their vendors and distributors (such as app stores), including by the federal government and congresspeople openly demanding that they be banned, surrounded with completely unveiled threats of investigation and new legislation.

> They can and have used other hosting services but many of their followers apparently prefer not to use those alternatives.

Those alternatives are under constant attack by people making that argument that "nobody is making." The ones that have secured revenue or financing that is difficult to attack (i.e. Substack, Rumble) are thriving.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#119
post #104
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've just described 100 years of car evolution. On purpose. You can't build a car today that ignores these learnings, and safely deploy it on the open roads; just like you can't build what's effectively an open relay like it's 1997 and expect to stay safe against the threats outlined by nine_k.

You can build software on protocols like this. Your analogy fails at the mere fact that no physical harm can result from Nostr not solving this one thing you think is 100% necessary. The fact that Nostr is up and running and working is the undeniable fact that you don't NEED to solve every single problem known to humankind before you write some lines of code.

> You can build software on protocols like this.

I've never denied this. You can also DIY a go-kart and drive it on an open road.

> Your analogy fails at the mere fact that no physical harm can result from Nostr not solving this one thing you think is 100% necessary.

Notice how you've specifically used the term "physical harm" to differentiate from other forms of harm. Harm is harm.

> The fact that Nostr is up and running and working is the undeniable fact that you don't NEED to solve every single problem known to humankind before you write some lines of code.

...Where did I try to deny this? My analogy is very specific in that you can do all of these things, and with enough luck, nothing bad will happen.

The problem with luck is that it doesn't scale well, especially on the open road. I mean, Internet.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get kicked off a mastodon server, you lose your followers and posts unless you're able to move your account before you're kicked off - which requires the cooperation of the server that wants to kick you off. > If nobody wants to hear you spewing your stuff then you'll soon be screaming into the void but what you post will still be viewable on the web and to those that subscribe to you. People who are de-platfo…

> People who are de-platformed are almost always people who others WANT to hear. A tiny minority. The majority listens to public health (in the case of Covid) and doesn’t want to read conspiracy theories or research analysis by someone unqualified.

This is obviously false. Some people will eventually have to learn to cope with the fact that Trump won an election, which means that their received wisdom is not a consensual truth.

edit: Additionally, the reasoning is fallacious - all people are minorities in many ways, so a few dozen tiny minorities can add up to an entire population. You may not disagree with the government about covid (although the government has disagreed with itself about covid), but you might disagree with the government about something else.

You're making the case that all social media should simply agree with the government line (because the people who disagree are minorities.) That's a dangerous case to make if you ever want to replace a government democratically.

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