Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

wiki.wellorder.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 148 posts

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#41

Post by oh_sigh »

leesalminen wrote: post #32
neilk wrote: post #12

> Resilience is provided by the protocol being simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice. Platform lock-in is impossible, since any client can republish any note to a different relay if one misbehaves or enacts a disagreeable policy. That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email and both are effectively controlled by large companies. Twitter is centralized d…

A big topic of conversation at nostrica (nostr's first conference) last month was how to maintain decentralization. One of the biggest concerns was having a client or relay provider build features outside of the protocol to gain market share and enable them to lock-in users. You are correct that there is no easy solution to these problems. There are draft NIPs that attempt to solve many of the problems you've describ…

Maybe nostr needs a Law of Jante/tall poppy lopper - any client or relay that gets too special gets blacklisted/punished by all the other clients/relays (to the extent possible through the protocol). Sorry if that is in a NIPS, there are 84 in that link and I can't read through them all.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#42

Post by cube2222 »

In a similar vain, I'm curious how Bluesky[0] will pan out. The protocol looks very cool with how much it separates and distributes the different concerns[1] (storage, recommendations, clients, etc.) as opposed to something "federated but fairly monolithic" like Mastodon.

[0]: https://blueskyweb.xyz/

[1]: https://atproto.com/docs

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#43

Post by mikae1 »

leesalminen wrote: post #40
mikae1 wrote: post #39

I see a problem. I'd say a majority of the posts on Nostr are media posts (mostly images) and the network relies on Imgur and other image hosting services for all content. Not very decentralized in practice.

It's weird how "decentralized" means something different to every individual. Having the ability to choose where to host my images is what I'd call decentralized.

Perhaps the greatest problem with this setup is that the post content is separate from the post itself. I hope that most of us remember what a giant mess hosting images for forums on free image hosting services (that were later shut down) caused.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#44

Post by tough »

cube2222 wrote: post #42

In a similar vain, I'm curious how Bluesky[0] will pan out. The protocol looks very cool with how much it separates and distributes the different concerns[1] (storage, recommendations, clients, etc.) as opposed to something "federated but fairly monolithic" like Mastodon. [0]: https://blueskyweb.xyz/ [1]: https://atproto.com/docs

I've been curious about BlueSky too, popping a lot on Twitter lately, but it's hard to secure an invite

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#45

Post by jrm4 »

neilk wrote: post #12

> Resilience is provided by the protocol being simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice. Platform lock-in is impossible, since any client can republish any note to a different relay if one misbehaves or enacts a disagreeable policy. That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email and both are effectively controlled by large companies. Twitter is centralized d…

I think your "effectively controlled" is mostly meaningless.

There's orders of magnitude of difference between "started off as scattered and big companies now do a majority of the maintenance" vs actually CENTRALIZED, like Twitter.

My website and my email, from my domain, both exist generally as equals without any meaningfully strong influence from google or whatnot, e.g. censoring my website would be a practically completely different thing from the ridiculous mess that Twitter is becoming (if it isn't already.)

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#46

Post by anarchogeek »

mikae1 wrote: post #39

I see a problem. I'd say a majority of the posts on Nostr are media posts (mostly images) and the network relies on Imgur and other image hosting services for all content. Not very decentralized in practice.

There's a new nip to cover the metadata for images and media including being able to use torrents for file hosting.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/94.md

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#47

Post by anarchogeek »

EGreg wrote: post #9

How is this different than Secure Scuttlebutt? I remember following that for a while. Dominic Tarr invented that. Also Dat / Hypercore from Matthias Mullie, powering Beaker Browser

Here's a good write-up comparing SSB and Nostr.

https://mattlorentz.com/weblog/2023/01/18/nostr-v-ssb.html

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#48

Post by cube2222 »

tough wrote: post #44
cube2222 wrote: post #42

In a similar vain, I'm curious how Bluesky[0] will pan out. The protocol looks very cool with how much it separates and distributes the different concerns[1] (storage, recommendations, clients, etc.) as opposed to something "federated but fairly monolithic" like Mastodon. [0]: https://blueskyweb.xyz/ [1]: https://atproto.com/docs

I've been curious about BlueSky too, popping a lot on Twitter lately, but it's hard to secure an invite

Iirc the waitlist is packed (million or so) and they've only let in 20k so far while they're working on scaling moderation (which is pluggable as well, I think).

Some info in the interview by TheVerge[0].

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/23686778/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-int...

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#49

Post by gonehome »

packetlost wrote: post #10

As a crypto-skeptic (lol), I really like Nostr. Unfortunately, I don't think it will catch on until someone takes the time to shave off the sharp technical edges and figure out spam + identity verification. The current Nostr network is full of cult-like bitcoin cryptobros, racist Twitter/Fediverse refugees, and spam. Lots, and lots of spam. But the technology is cool af and could be made into something more.

Yeah, partly why I think you need something like Urbit’s ID system to counter spam.

Though I’m biased and just generally like the urbit approach more.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#50

Post by evbogue »

EGreg wrote: post #9

How is this different than Secure Scuttlebutt? I remember following that for a while. Dominic Tarr invented that. Also Dat / Hypercore from Matthias Mullie, powering Beaker Browser

After using Nostr a bit, I don't think there's a huge difference between SSB and it except that Nostr has no blob sync and they abandoned append-only logs and use different signing key cryptography.

Scuttlebutt just suffers from an inaccessible implementation at the moment, but there is a team coming together to make a working implementation again.

Post reply on HN