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

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

#71

Post by drexlspivey »

kvathupo wrote: post #55
leesalminen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I understand it, the raison d'être of nostr is to use relays to store your data, which is presented on clients. So if a front-end bans you, then you can grab your data off any relay. If imgur shuts down, you're out of luck! Bluesky goes further with the AT protocol for more general data and algorithms iirc

Relays don't (have to) store your data, they relay in real time via websockets. Clients should store the data if they care about persistence

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

#72

Post by scsibug »

blueberrychpstx wrote: post #4
eykanal wrote: post #3

Saying "I don't want censorship" is equivalent to saying "I'm fine with people using my tool for coffee meetups, genocide planning, bridge club, and drug deals." It's an attempted handwashing of moral responsibility under the cover of software purity. At this point, it's pretty well documented that social media _as a tool_ has increased young female mental illness; the question is only "how much" [1]. To try to wave…

Social media as a tool strikes me as the same kind of argument as “REAL socialism hasn’t been tried yet” It doesn’t feel at all to me that there are any social media platforms that function at all like tools but rather data vampires attempting to addict at any cost” and so Haidt’s mention of increased suicide rate is unfortunately not at all a surprise. Sorry if this sounds harsh but calling platforms in the zeitgeis…

It is a tool for communication. We can build a twitter clone on it, a chess match server, IoT messaging, etc. Nostr-the-protocol is a proper tool. Agreed that the social aspects built on top of it should be built with human wellbeing in mind - not ad revenue.

Hopefully having the nostr protocol in place lets people iterate faster to build good social technology, and accelerates moving past the ad/engagement focused platforms we live with today.

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

#73

Post by klabb3 »

SnowProblem wrote: post #68

I wish Nostr were invented 30 years ago because it seems like a elegant protocol with room for extensions that could have served as the backend language for Twitter, IRC, FB, and more. But network effects are just so powerful and people post to be seen. Twitter isn't going to willingly open the door to competitors, and so I hope Nostr can find a few unique use cases and communities to let it blossom.

I.. agree, but I don’t think recreating existing platforms is a good idea either in FOSS or commercial projects. As you say, it’s already there.

> Network effects are just so powerful and people post to be seen.

Yeah, but those people aren’t moving the needle anyway, so they can be safely ignored, for now. They’ll come when it gets popular or trendy (see the recent mastodon influx).

Current gen social media is clearly not the end-all be-all. It’s riddled with problems, both because of the business model which incentivizes short-termism like clickbait, but also inherent problems in the social graph, feeds, etc. We’ve had at least a decade of experience to learn from the mistakes of the giants. Maybe this sounds elitist, but whenever I see a Twitter clone (say current gen Mastodon or Substack Notes) all I see is a lack of creativity and courage to face novel opportunities.

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

#74

Post by rektide »

dangoor wrote: post #25
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…

> The web and email got effectively centralized… Woah there. I don't agree with this. The web is certainly not centralized (this is on Hacker News and not Facebook, right?) It follows a power law distribution where you have some players getting lots of traffic and then there are lots and lots of small traffic sites. But it's definitely decentralized. _Google_ is something of a monopoly providing some of the features…

Here here!

As a web developer, I think we've figured out maybe 1% of what the web is good for & capable of. There's still so much possibility, so many options, that any given person can go off & explore & play around with & succeed on. The field has never been more open for, more ready for new exciting possibilities, better set to start changing if we can make a real authentic honest outreach to users, that is a fair shake from tech, & not leaving cloud-giants holding all the cards & us with a couple magic beans.

The doom & gloom look at the macro of what the web is is really sad. It's a constant pity party. The ability to control & shape our information spaces to our liking & pick our paths has never been higher, has only gotten better as more protocols & standards, focused at purer social networking levels than the web medium at large, have arisen.

As a developer, it's been a one way street with us crafting better and better means of web development and deployment every single year, and what we're excitingly starting to see is more genuine & personal involvement not just with creating sites, but with creating interconnection, creating interlink, creating intermedia, not just on one big property, but across many voices. Nostr highlighting the idea of a relay, that who we relay is a vote of amplification, is semi-covert social commentary on picking your traffic, on selecting what gets to get shared out. There's no headier better more promising time than today (and the web continues to be the premier delightful connectable blank slate from with which to experiment & iterate).

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

#75

Post by rektide »

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.

Is it a problem? Right now it doesn't seem to be a practical problem.

I agree that where we're headed, it seems like services like this will only continually degrade, that a huge amount of the corporate-run internet is undergoing radical #enshittification at an alarming rate, & the nation-states have strapped afterburners onto this hellbound-sled by starting to make the terms of use for these already imperfect the feudal- oops i mean corporate- data-keeps.

New age-verification identity-verification to post stuff has scaled up with shock & awe speeds, with Imgur just burning down huge swarths of the internet. So I guess yeah it has become a practical problem alraedy.

Oh and there's other signs of horror/intensification all about. Specs like Mobile Document Request opening up the Jevon's paradox of making it easier to request government id online are going to make a very shitty 203X's that greatly piss over the internet legacy we have. https://github.com/WICG/mobile-document-request-api/issues/6

But also... we have the saints of human history, https://archive.org, ticking along doing the good deeds. The more rag-tag ArchiveTeam folks. They keep saying it's not for archiving, but I really hope WebPackage / WebBundle specs take off, that we build a norm of take-away sites that we can retain. (Caveat: right now Chrome has zero interest in letting you use old snapshots, but I have zero faith this limited security totalitarianism will hold, given that Certificate Transparency lets us know that indeed this content did come from X site at Y time & had the right cert then.)

In general, it's all the web, so it only sort of matters that the thing goes away. We need to update the maxim, "Cool URIs Dont Change" (https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI). Sometimes the resources go away. But the URI remains. And we can spread backups, share the content, even when the hosts vanish, because the web is so cool like that.

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

#76

Post by redder23 »

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…

Email is not "controlled" by large companies. People choose to use large companies and let them read their emails because they are stupid. Email has not evolved in any way BECAUSE its NOT controlled by some company. If Google could, they would do even more evil with email that "just" reading all your mails.

To compare Twitter with email makes absolutely no sense. Yes Twitter is a totally controlled thing by a single company, email is not. You could say it for the web when it comes to net neutrality and where it does not exist anymore ...

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

#77

Post by mikae1 »

rektide wrote: post #75
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.

Is it a problem? Right now it doesn't seem to be a practical problem. I agree that where we're headed, it seems like services like this will only continually degrade, that a huge amount of the corporate-run internet is undergoing radical #enshittification at an alarming rate, & the nation-states have strapped afterburners onto this hellbound-sled by starting to make the terms of use for these already imperfect the fe…

> Is it a problem? Right now it doesn't seem to be a practical problem.

It will be the day these image hosting services die (and they do, all the time). This setup separates the post content 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.

Apparently there was a discussion just a few days ago about Imgur deleting images that are not associated with a user account[1]. Just imagine all the broken image embeds that will cause…

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636190

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

#78

Post by nine_k »

I have to repeat my most important concern about Nostr from ~3 months ago[1]: Nostr makes you forward data from strangers unencrypted. If anything unlawful which you forward for Nostr is ever found on your computer, or found transmitted from your computer, you'd have fun time to explain to the authorities how it even ended up on your machine, and why are you disseminating it.

Encryption is not trivially easy to introduce into this scheme, and it can't be too seamless. It's possible though, and I encourage the developers to work on that.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34529931

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

#79

Post by drexlspivey »

dangoor wrote: post #25
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…

> The web and email got effectively centralized… Woah there. I don't agree with this. The web is certainly not centralized (this is on Hacker News and not Facebook, right?) It follows a power law distribution where you have some players getting lots of traffic and then there are lots and lots of small traffic sites. But it's definitely decentralized. _Google_ is something of a monopoly providing some of the features…

Email is centralized in the sense that you might run your own server/domain but if Google decides you are bad and stops federating with you you might as well not exist. Who are you going to exchange mail with if most people are on Gmail?

That’s very different than Google banning your account where you can just switch to Bing for search.

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

#80

Post by rektide »

mikae1 wrote: post #77
rektide wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a problem? Right now it doesn't seem to be a practical problem. I agree that where we're headed, it seems like services like this will only continually degrade, that a huge amount of the corporate-run internet is undergoing radical #enshittification at an alarming rate, & the nation-states have strapped afterburners onto this hellbound-sled by starting to make the terms of use for these already imperfect the fe…

> Is it a problem? Right now it doesn't seem to be a practical problem. It will be the day these image hosting services die (and they do, all the time). This setup separates the post content 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. Apparently there was a discussion just a few days ago about Imgu…

this reply feels 1 step behind my post.

i already mentioned imgur. i already spent a while talking through how we adapt & deal with this. i tend to think the way forward isn't to change our user behavior or the pattern, but to layer user-sovereign resilience atop the web, which we already have wonderful examples of aplenty.

the Axioms of Web Architecture help us cope & iterate with emerging situations well, are a strong start for resilience layers. https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html

and reciprocally, i'm not saying it's a solved problem either.

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