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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

#131

Post by revelio »

0xpgm wrote: post #107
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…

> That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email Really? Web browsers, web servers and mail servers are beasts. I don't see them being 'simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice'

Not now but in the beginning they were. The first version of HTML was basically just a hack that glued an SGML parser to the NeXTStep text view control. The web didn't support inline images because the NeXTStep control TBL used didn't support it. Then companies like Netscape came along and started adding features. The rest is history.

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

#132

Post by derefr »

jeroenhd wrote: post #127
nunobrito wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If these are the kinds of people who are attracted to nostr

I think it's more that these people are around on every platform; but most platforms create (simple, vote-based; or complex, engagement-based) algorithmic filter-bubbles, so that you can live in blissful ignorance of these people's very persistent attempts to get your attention.

(A good example of an already-established platform that doesn't have this kind of filter, is Discord. If you join Discord servers at random, you'll often get flooded by DMs from bots trying to shove this same kind of content in your face.)

As much as the engagement-based recommender algorithms of sites like Twitter encourage "hate-following" and "doom-scrolling", they do have the nice property of inherently filtering out this kind of spam: these "human spambots" post things that can be predicted by their content to receive literally no engagement at all (since everything similar anyone's posted recently received no engagement at all); and so these spam posts get dropped out of any feed they'd otherwise appear in.

Nostr inherently cannot have any kind of online self-tuning algorithmic filter-bubble like this; such algorithms are powered by a global corpus of "everything everyone is currently posting, and every way that everyone else is reacting to it." Nostr relays only see the "notes" that are passing through them; and they have no idea what downstream Nostr clients think of those posts. So even if someone wanted to build a "smart relay" that does algorithmic filtering, there's no signal to power it.

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

#133

Post by yellowapple »

thisgoesnowhere wrote: post #97
redder23 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What percentage of your reach do you lose if google blacklists your domain?

Not everyone needs "reach"¹. In my case, if Google blacklisted my domain, worst-case scenario would be a handful of people who wouldn't get my emails, and I'd have to reach them by other means. I'm actually dealing with this right now², except with AT&T instead of Google, and all that's lost is my ability to email my grandpa.

More realistically, even when Google "blacklists" a domain, it typically just means emails from it end up in spam. "Check your spam folder" is sufficiently disseminated advice-wise that it ain't really all that big of a deal in practice whether Google arbitrarily decides my mailserver doesn't look sufficiently legitimate. If Google's taking measures more extreme than sending emails to Spam, then it's almost certainly because the server operator is doing something horribly, horribly wrong - like "running an open relay" levels of wrong.

----

¹: I'd go further and argue that any emails from domains operated by people who actually do care about "reach" probably should be rejected and/or sent to Spam/Junk - namely, because they largely are spam/junk. Hell, I'd go further than that and say that I know of precisely zero domains which both care about "reach" and refrain from sending junk mail. I do know of plenty of domains that think they're special snowflakes whose unsolicited marketing fluff emails are totally legitimate and not at all spam and therefore it's totally unfair that their "reach" metrics are below 100% because of those big meanies and their spam filters. Needless to say, I take their complaints about their "reach" with a Dell PowerEdge R750 sized grain of salt.

²: Actually more severe than the usual case with Google, since AT&T does outright refuse to deliver mail from servers it doesn't like - and despite mine appearing on no blacklists of any sort, and despite AT&T repeatedly denying in various support fora that it maintains any blacklist of its own, I get hard bounces from their servers, and complete silence when following the very support processes said bounce emails describe. Oh well.

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

#134

Post by yellowapple »

rvz wrote: post #102
thisgoesnowhere wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of your reach do you lose if google blacklists your domain?

*silence*

FYI: comments like yours are more effective when posted at least a day later, lest they end up looking silly when the "silence" is eventually broken - as it is now.

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

#135

Post by yellowapple »

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.

IPFS seems promising as a solution here.

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

#136

Post by INTPenis »

kevinak wrote: post #124
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?

There are many perspectives on what is user friendly. What helps the docker case along is its accessibility and availability to people. A lot of people know about it, so a lot of people have played around with it enough to use it.

PKI is not on the same level of accessibility and availability as docker, not even close.

The proof is to simply look at what took off and what didn't. Yes this is a tech forum but it's also a startup forum, and startups take off because they're accessible to people. Same goes for nostr, it will take off when it becomes accessible to regular people.

And even that has many different aspects. If self-hosting is an important aspect, as fediverse nodes for example, then it must also be accessible to self-hosters. That is where docker-compose comes in for the fediverse.

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

#137

Post by rvz »

yellowapple wrote: post #134
rvz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*silence*

FYI: comments like yours are more effective when posted at least a day later, lest they end up looking silly when the "silence" is eventually broken - as it is now.

It is still very effective, it took you a day later to respond to the parent.

OP Comment: 25 April 2023, 00:41:52 AM

Yours: 26 April 2023, 03:18:06 AM

I was expecting a response much earlier than that since the answer is very obvious. Instead you decided to come up with a typical anecdote which can easily be dismissed.

The main fact is, almost everyone knows that you lose LOTS of users emailing you once a provider like GMail blocks you as it is the most used email provider. [0]

[0] https://mailchimp.com/resources/most-used-email-service-prov...

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

#138

Post by yellowapple »

rvz wrote: post #137
yellowapple wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI: comments like yours are more effective when posted at least a day later, lest they end up looking silly when the "silence" is eventually broken - as it is now.

It is still very effective, it took you a day later to respond to the parent. OP Comment: 25 April 2023, 00:41:52 AM Yours: 26 April 2023, 03:18:06 AM I was expecting a response much earlier than that since the answer is very obvious. Instead you decided to come up with a typical anecdote which can easily be dismissed. The main fact is, almost everyone knows that you lose LOTS of users emailing you once a provider li…

> It is still very effective, it took you a day later to respond to the parent.

My apologies for not being terminally online.

> Instead you decided to come up with a typical anecdote which can easily be dismissed.

Which is fair, but

1. It still makes your "silence" comment look premature, and

2. If even I can still get mails delivered to GMail inboxen as an ordinary person running a personal mail server, an actual (legitimate) business should have no trouble with that whatsoever, and

3. There was more in that comment besides the anecdote, and your decision to dismiss it out-of-hand - much like your decision to prematurely declare the existence of "silence" on a topic - does not reflect charitably on you.

> The main fact is, almost everyone knows that you lose LOTS of users emailing you once a provider like GMail blocks you

Do you have any examples of GMail blocking its own users from sending an email to a domain it doesn't like? Like I mentioned in the other comment: it's more typical for it to be the other way around, and more typical than that for it to be a soft block (mail going to Spam) than a hard block (hard bouncing of mail).

Unless you've got such an example, calling that a "fact" (let alone the main one) would make Elastigirl pull a muscle; like sure, that'd indeed be pretty thoroughly inconvenient, much like it'd be inconvenient if Behemecoatyl took over my mind and compelled me to shut down my mail server, but I'm unaware for much (non-fictional) precedent for either. Even in my anecdotal case where AT&T does indeed hard-bounce emails from me to my grandpa, my grandpa can still send me emails just fine.

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

#139

Post by evbogue »

mkl wrote: post #103
evbogue wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is where Secure Scuttlebot is superior. Why would you connect to people out of your friend of a friend zone? An algorithm should decide who you are relaying.

You are talking to strangers on the internet right now and seem to find it worthwhile. Do you mean Secure Scuttlebutt? "Scuttlebot" seems to be the old name for the primary Secure Scuttlebutt server implementation ( https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/glossary ), though its website is still https://scuttlebot.io/ .

Yes, you've got it. Not many people were around back then, but once upon a time there was a working version of Scuttlebot (by Dominic Tarr) that was documented at https://scuttlebot.io/ with a client called Patchwork (by Paul Frazee).

The idea behind the project was that you would gossip between scuttlebot 'pub' servers and then replicate messages from the people you follow and the people that those people follow. All of the messages were signed with ed25519 keypairs, and to send private messages you'd use ed2curve to box private messages.

These days we're putting together a team that is going to salvage what is left of the working code from back before the project was scuttled and hopefully restore the network to functionality again. Please be in touch if you are interested in this future.

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

#140

Post by nunobrito »

phkx wrote: post #119
nunobrito wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal development came from an ex-Twitter director that was initially sponsored by the CIA (through Radio Free Europe) and then developed with experts on the backyard of the NSA (Hawaii). Eventually this relatively unknown messenger algorithm got adopted by a messenger company own by Facebook (a privacy loving group) for over a billion users. It ain't no surprise that just about everyone relevant in the crypto world…

I have to ask: crypto as in crypto currency or as in actual cryptography? I‘m left with the impression that both our descriptions of these protocols and services are in need of some more substantial backing.

Crypto has nowadays three meanings.

The first was cryptography, the second in currency as you describe, but the third meaning and most important one is related to the latin root of that word in the sense of "secret", "hidden": https://www.etymonline.com/word/crypto-

When talking about something crypto, one must measure these two "secret" and "hidden" attributes. Signal was never really adopted because of its suspicious origin and strange adoption by whatsapp. Similar case for a few other messengers like Matrix if you get around to see that in more detail.

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