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…
> listen for a type of event, do something, emit another. If everything is an event, and you can send any types of events, then you can trivially saturate the network, the clients, and the relays with bogus events. > but are rapidly moving into uncharted territory - people are building music distribution apps, ai agents, and so on. None of this is uncharted territory. Uncharted for Nostr, maybe. But time and again an…
I agree this is a problem. However, there is at least one protocol addition (that doesn't involve cryptocurrency per se, although it shares some ideas) that tries to address this: proof-of-work requirements.
The idea is basically this: message IDs are SHA256 hashes of message contents. If you add a nonce to the message metadata, then each time you change the nonce, you'll get a different SHA256. Relays can then choose to ignore messages without a particular number of leading zeroes in the event ID. This means a client will have to do a non-trivial amount of computation to generate an event ID that a particular relay will accept.
> None of this is uncharted territory. Uncharted for Nostr, maybe. But time and again anything that comes out of crypto shows that people building this stuff have literally zero knowledge of what has been there in the real world before them.
I mean, I think it's a direction for social media that hasn't been tried yet on a wide scale. Personally, I look at it as a cool idea- I don't know if it'll actually pan out in the long run, but I think it addresses a bunch of problems with both centralized and federated social media, so it's worth seeing what can be done.