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Why I’m betting on Nostr

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Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#11

Post by mrd3v0 »

nacs wrote: post #6

The number of users is almost irrelevant in the context of Nostr because many clients generate a new ID. These aren't email-verified/phone-verified users -- this is literally just a new key/ID being generated. Some web apps auto-create a new ID and join the network every time you use them. Also, the signal to noise ratio is really bad with a lot of spam and almost all discussions related in some way to crypto. Nostr…

That was my experience as well, just constant crypto spam and all the other kinds of posts or tags are very inactive.

Additionally, I tried a few clients, they were a bit buggy and far from anything anyone would take seriously for more than a minute. Key portability was broken on them as well for some reason I don't even want to invest my time investigating.

These decentralised solutions need to distance themselves from cryptocurrency (or at least make it in the background rather than the center of discussion and operations) to be taken seriously.

I see Radicle[1] did that by distancing the version control software from the cryptocurrency, and I think it was a good decision.

[1] https://radicle.xyz/

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#12

Post by intotheabyss »

unboxingelf wrote: post #5

as a dev and nostr user, here’s my elevator pitch: everything is an event. events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. they’re human readable json objects. events flow over websockets so it’s “real time”. you can build literally anything on this platform - listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. it can all interoperable. we started with basic twitter clones…

Why would you use Bitcoin lightning when you can use Ethereum L2s?

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#13

Post by imachine1980_ »

dekervin wrote: post #4

For all the talk about nostr, I recently discovered it's actually a tenth of the size of mastodon[0]. The hype-to-actual-activity is through the rough with this one. [0] https://datum.alwaysdata.net/?explorer_view=quest&quest_id=q...

i never hear of nostr before and i use mastodon for while, and twitter debacle was critical, 200000 active users is lots of people from this type of non comercial céntric products. edit: i check few nostr people and the public is quite different between the two platforms, that doesn't invalidate what i say but explain my lack of engagement in the platform

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#14

Post by JAlexoid »

azangru wrote: post #10
dekervin wrote: post #4

For all the talk about nostr, I recently discovered it's actually a tenth of the size of mastodon[0]. The hype-to-actual-activity is through the rough with this one. [0] https://datum.alwaysdata.net/?explorer_view=quest&quest_id=q...

That's actually quite impressive, considering that Mastodon is both talked about much wider, and is easier to use.

Getting an account setup is unfortunately a challenge.

Which leads to the same issue as Bitcoin, Git and other open services - costs of managing are so high, that there's going to be monopolization in the hands of the one that can attract the most resources... and even when the financial costs aren't high(hosting Git or a mailserver on your home router/server/NAS is not expensive), the time costs start to take a toll.

There's going to be a mental barrier to these things - paying $9 per month for a managed Mastodon instance is mentally way too much. I pay for Google One, to not think about storage and mail management... and get many perks with it.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#15

Post by evbogue »

I tried Nostr for awhile, and I appreciate that they're picking up where Scuttlebot left off. There are a few things that bug me about it that I wish they'd fix, or that some future protocol will solve.

First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time. This doesn't have to be an append-only log, but you need some idea of message order to avoid wasting bandwidth to get someone's timeline and detect when a message has been posted out of order.

Second, I don't like that many Nostr clients are using the same signing key for messages as they do for lightning transactions. We don't know how many of these web Nostr clients are secretly sending your private keys back to their servers, and everyone will run from Nostr as soon as some untrustworthy dev starts emptying lightning wallets.

Third, someone needs to delete some of these NIPS. The arms race to make Nostr as complex and difficult as possible to implement is not going to do much for the ecosystem in the long run. In the beginning Nostr was simple to implement from scratch, they should get back to that!

Fourth, it needs a dedicated blob store protocol. Yah, I know IPFS isn't great but someone should come up with something that is simple and works.

Anyway best of luck to the people who are working on the project. If anything we learned more about how these protocols can work, even if Nostr isn't going to be the winner in this space in the long term.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#16

Post by JAlexoid »

vorpalhex wrote: post #9
dekervin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even then most of the discussion are very shallow compared to crypto twitter. I can't understand why. I would've thought since it's early adopters, discussion inside a tightly knit group would be more meaningful... alas

Crypto scammers are the new discount viagra. Nostr and services like it have a place but they are not going to replace services that have meaningful anti-spam.

Meaningful ant-spam is resource heavy operation. Maybe if AI models are portable/accessible enough to run on a small system - we'd reduce the amount of manual work required...

Talk to anyone who tried running their own private mailserver. SMTP is a decentralized open and very simple protocol - yet that doesn't address the issues that keep people away from hosting their own mailservers.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#17

Post by JAlexoid »

unboxingelf wrote: post #5

as a dev and nostr user, here’s my elevator pitch: everything is an event. events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. they’re human readable json objects. events flow over websockets so it’s “real time”. you can build literally anything on this platform - listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. it can all interoperable. we started with basic twitter clones…

This isn't an elevator pitch, it's a standup line.

I understand your excitement, but your elevator pitch fails to tell me why I should even look at it.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#18

Post by Brighthurst »

I'd like to point out that the apparent "crypto dominance" is mostly due to that group's propensity to be early-adopters of new technology. The apparent crypto spam is actually a good opportunity to squash the bot issue early. Even people "in crypto" hate bots spamming the newest shitcoin.

So while that may put some people off, there is non-crypto related communication, and the "crypto dominance" will decrease over time.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#19

Post by StuntPope »

nacs wrote: post #6

The number of users is almost irrelevant in the context of Nostr because many clients generate a new ID. These aren't email-verified/phone-verified users -- this is literally just a new key/ID being generated. Some web apps auto-create a new ID and join the network every time you use them. Also, the signal to noise ratio is really bad with a lot of spam and almost all discussions related in some way to crypto. Nostr…

I would recommend ponying up a few sats and using paid relays.

If you're just using free relays you will get inundated with spam.

I was running an open relay for awhile and closed it up because of this.

(Lightning is the magic lubricant that makes Nostr so promising).

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#20

Post by unboxingelf »

intotheabyss wrote: post #12
unboxingelf wrote: post #5

as a dev and nostr user, here’s my elevator pitch: everything is an event. events are signed using pki so it’s easy to know who sent the event and it’s authentic. they’re human readable json objects. events flow over websockets so it’s “real time”. you can build literally anything on this platform - listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. it can all interoperable. we started with basic twitter clones…

Why would you use Bitcoin lightning when you can use Ethereum L2s?

Ethereum’s recent move to Proof of Stake undermines the their ability to be decentralized and permission-less. If a validator adds a blacklisted transaction, they will be slashed [0].

Ethereum had an unfair issuance. That means the founders kept a pool of coins for themselves and have unfair control of the network, furthered by PoS.

Ethereum is effectively a private tech company led by a CEO. They have a public roadmap.

Ultimately I think these fundamental properties of Ethereum make it inadequate as a permission-less money protocol. It works great for games and apps, but its foundations are susceptible to coercion and control - and you can’t build a permission-less protocol on that foundation.

[0] https://cointelegraph.com/news/51-of-ethereum-blocks-are-now...

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