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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

#121

Post by derefr »

nunobrito wrote: post #108
derefr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not just IRC then? The thing that makes Twitter/Mastadon/etc not just IRC, is that in these, you can scroll back as far as you like—specifically, past where your client joined the network.

Because IRC still needs a lot of things to keep running (be usable) and works mostly for chat messages. NOSTR isn't twitter nor IRC, you can take your posts which can contain just about any type of data inside and build an art gallery, a forum or dump for meteorological information. You can scroll back in the past. It is up to the relay if they have interest in keeping your data or not. If nobody cares about your dat…

I’m not a publisher/journalist; I don’t have any posts. I’m a historian and archivist. And in those roles, I care about being able to retroactively access data that neither publishers nor relays considered to have value / be worth preserving at time of publication, but which instead was preserved due only to the “accident of history” of them publishing in a durable medium. Compare and contrast: digitized newspapers available on microfiche.

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

#122

Post by sph »

nine_k wrote: post #78

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 intro…

Then I guess I'll have to repeat my top reply to you then.

"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."

If you don't want people to host illegal stuff on your server, do not run an open relay, an open FTP server, a social network, or an image host.

If you do, be prepared to have to work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

It's not strictly a NOSTR fault, and there is no reason why YOU need to run a relay.

Your comment is misleading and a little disingenuous: Nostr doesn't make you forward stuff. A client doesn't have to forward anything. It just connects to relays and subscribes to topics. Relay != client.

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

#123

Post by kevinak »

kinakomochidayo wrote: post #116

Other than the tech, one big thing that’s kept me away from Nostr is the people on it. I’d rather not have my feed spammed and have Bitcoin maxis endlessly talking about how stacking Bitcoin is great. What makes social network work is the diverse range of people and it currently doesn’t have that at all.

Can’t you just follow people that don’t talk about it? There’s no algorithmic feed that feeds you stuff you don’t want

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

#124

Post by kevinak »

INTPenis wrote: post #109

I'm all for the best solution winning but here's the perspective of a regular end user. When I read about nostr I see code examples and cryptography charts. When I read about Mastodon (fediverse) I just run docker-compose up and I'm in business. That is what made the fediverse breakthrough and nostr not. It needs to be user friendly for both end users and sysadmins for it to catch on. Also unrelated to all that, I'm…

Regular end user…. docker-compose? We have very different concepts of what a regular user is. Surely, generating a key pair must be infinitely more easy than setting up docker?

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

#125

Post by sph »

INTPenis wrote: post #109

I'm all for the best solution winning but here's the perspective of a regular end user. When I read about nostr I see code examples and cryptography charts. When I read about Mastodon (fediverse) I just run docker-compose up and I'm in business. That is what made the fediverse breakthrough and nostr not. It needs to be user friendly for both end users and sysadmins for it to catch on. Also unrelated to all that, I'm…

This is a tech forum. We tend to enjoy discovering and exploring new technology that's alpha quality and not yet ready to hit the shelves, and maybe we'll help them get there.

Nostr is a couple years old. How old is Mastodon? Of course it's not grandma friendly yet. No one is trying to sell it to them just yet.

I don't get this common and frustrating criticism often posted on here for any new project and idea. Every major breakthrough has started as a buggy, half-arsed project with many shortcomings. Pointing that out is not very constructive.

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

#126

Post by dgellow »

kinakomochidayo wrote: post #116

Other than the tech, one big thing that’s kept me away from Nostr is the people on it. I’d rather not have my feed spammed and have Bitcoin maxis endlessly talking about how stacking Bitcoin is great. What makes social network work is the diverse range of people and it currently doesn’t have that at all.

Bluesky has a cool vibe so far, no bitcoin maxis endlessly bragging about the end of fiat. Send me an email if you want an invite: sam at elborai me

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

#127

Post by jeroenhd »

nunobrito wrote: post #108
derefr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not just IRC then? The thing that makes Twitter/Mastadon/etc not just IRC, is that in these, you can scroll back as far as you like—specifically, past where your client joined the network.

Because IRC still needs a lot of things to keep running (be usable) and works mostly for chat messages. NOSTR isn't twitter nor IRC, you can take your posts which can contain just about any type of data inside and build an art gallery, a forum or dump for meteorological information. You can scroll back in the past. It is up to the relay if they have interest in keeping your data or not. If nobody cares about your dat…

Does this mean that if I want a normal social media feed I need to program my own relay server? Or is there a relay server somewhere that I can tell to store the accounts I'm interested in? That seems like a major flaw.

I've downloaded an app for nostr and I'm not very impressed with the posts on the main timeline. They mostly seem to spam cryptocurrency ads and bad memes, most of them carrying some kind of American right wing propaganda angle. If these are the kinds of people who are attracted to nostr, I can't say I'm sad to see the nostr project decide not to federate with ActivityPub.

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

#128

Post by ashwagary »

beardog wrote: post #101
nine_k wrote: post #78

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 intro…

Not that it is 1:1 equivalent (due to expense and difference in encoding), but blockchains such as bitcoin can be used to store arbitrary data (and have been). Thus far I believe no one has gone to jail for running a cryptocurrency node because of non-financial reasons.

>blockchains such as bitcoin can be used to store arbitrary data

You are right, 50k or so Bitcoin nodes around the world host blocks with cp which was placed there roughly a decade ago. It cannot be removed from the chain.

AFAIK nobody has been arrested for running a node.

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

#129

Post by dekervin »

jonstaab wrote: post #61
dekervin wrote: post #28

I've tried using snort.social , dog testing it with the intent of recommanding it, but it's basically unusable. Would someone have a good web interface to recommand?

https://coracle.social is the client I work on. It's less well-known, but is pretty feature-complete.

It's way better than snort. Do you have an email somewhere? I would like to send you issues that will be shared with me.

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

#130

Post by effisfor »

themagician wrote: post #83

I have played with this a bit lately and my conclusion thus far is: The idea of trying to bind everything to a single private key is such a bad idea for the average person. In order to truly secure a private key you have to go to pretty extraordinary lengths. It is not easy. It is not, "common sense." Like most of crypto, the basic immutable nature of things is simply bad for humans. Here, your private key is eventua…

I've tinkered with nostr and there's plenty to agree with here, but it's not specific to nostr. Nostr is in its very early days where people who tinker now are also pretty good at protecting that private key (dorks like us). For mass adoption we're probably going to see WebAuthn develop and solve the problems you're mentioning for most non-technical people. The early dorks will flinch at Apple/Google syncing people's e2ee keys, but techies will always be able to just dial in their private key to the client of their choosing. So it will be a bit messy, but hopefully the best of both worlds. And a giant improvement from current paradigm.

I don't use it, but Minds is an example of an app that is using delegated keys to sign people's messages using nostr protocol, allowing a user's data a route out of Minds' infrastructure in the future. Again, seems a healthy improvement.

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