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Why I’m betting on Nostr

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Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#111
post #15

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 re…

In other words, Nostr can't do almost anything that matters.

> First, I want a replication strategy.

xx Network has message replication built in.

> Third, someone needs to delete some of these NIPS.

xx Network lets you delete messages.

> Fourth, it needs a dedicated blob store protocol.

For blobs, clients should be able to plug in to any 3rd party blob storage (e.g. Crust Network). This secondary storage is needed only for large attachments and isn't strictly required in messaging. If you think about it, you could upload large attachments anywhere and send links in messages. Look how Teams or Outlook work with One Drive.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#112
I like the concept of Nostr. The technology is not too bad (there's that small issue that you can't change your key so if it ever gets exposed you're done).

In practice though, the only two topics covered on Nostr are a) nostr, b) bitcoin and how stupid non bitcoin believers are.

Good demo that technology is only a portion of success.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#113
post #15

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 re…

So I've been building of one of the nostr web clients ( https://satellite.earth ) full time since December last year - I agree partially with all these points and will try to add something from my perspective of being perhaps a bit too close to this. 1) With regard to message replication/ordering, the relays are supposed to reject messages that are received with a timestamp that deviates from the server clock beyond…

I checked out a community that on the tin is about learning coding and found Trumpers, bigots and antivaxxers. It reminded me of pro free speech fork of Reddit. It wasn't a bad idea AT ALL on the face of it but in practice its front page was never without a racial slur and no decent people stayed long.

If everyone cares about privacy then privacy focused places ought to be full of on average smart people having intelligent conversations. If few people feel the need to bother you end of serving largely the paranoid and the odious and this can easily be a self re-enforcing trend as bad drives out the good.

I feel like the space could use some innovation if its produce communities worth attending to without strong centralized moderation. Instead of bubbling up the top 100 things the community as a whole thinks are worth reading or the top 100 things that someone thinks I might be willing to engage with including 60 things selected because they are liable to make me angry or succeed in wasting my time why not have a personalized analysis done on MY side or on a computer I rent to pull in 10,000 things and figure out which 100 I actually want to engage with based on my own aims not advertisers.

I would probably pay for that especially if it could be plugged into a lot of common platforms to filter out the crap.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#114
post #15

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 re…

IPFS is so heavy and unperformant, just not a lot of bang for your buck when paying for a host. As far as I can tell it owes its success to VC funded blockchain startups subsidizing hosts with 8:1 payouts for hosting other peoples' stuff I'm betting on webtorrent paired with seedboxes - your peer just has to serve whatever mp3/mp4 you're hosting to the first few clients, and as long as their browser windows are open…

Would tweaking PeerTube not work for that?

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I've been building of one of the nostr web clients ( https://satellite.earth ) full time since December last year - I agree partially with all these points and will try to add something from my perspective of being perhaps a bit too close to this. 1) With regard to message replication/ordering, the relays are supposed to reject messages that are received with a timestamp that deviates from the server clock beyond…

I checked out a community that on the tin is about learning coding and found Trumpers, bigots and antivaxxers. It reminded me of pro free speech fork of Reddit. It wasn't a bad idea AT ALL on the face of it but in practice its front page was never without a racial slur and no decent people stayed long. If everyone cares about privacy then privacy focused places ought to be full of on average smart people having intel…

Social media is crawling with the bigoted anti-reality Trumper crowd. There are plenty here as well.

Maybe running a local spam filter on one of these decentralized platforms is the way to go. I wouldn't mind running LLMs and removing all the content from Trump crime family fans. Would be nice to detect and reject LLM-generated adtech bullshit while we are at it.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#116
Hey everyone, author of the original essay here. Glad to see so much interest in Nostr!

I originally published this article in Jan '23. Since then, we've seen a lot of development around both the protocol and applications (much of which has been well documented here by jb55 and others). Twitter-like clients such as Damus and Amethyst have gotten much better and new clients like primal (primal.net) have emerged with their own takes on features like caching and algorithms. Nostr Wallet Connect made it substantially easier to connect a Lightning wallet with a Nostr client for one tap zapping, radically simplifying the payment experience for end users.

I'm personally most excited to see several early examples of applications that move beyond social media and show Nostr for what it is - a generalized data protocol. Almost any app would benefit from a persistent identity and portable data shared with other apps. Here are a few live examples:

- Long tail of edge AI services - pablof7z and several others are piloting a new construct called "data vending machines (DVMs)" which allow users to publish job requests to the nostr network and other users (or bots) to compete to fulfill those requests. We're already seeing early markets for fine tuned open source models completing services like voice-to-text transcription or image generation. Even cooler, each of these DVMs is chainable, so the output of one DVM can be the input of another. See https://vendata.io for example. This recent hackathon had a few cool dvm projects as well: https://bolt.fun/tournaments/ai4all/overview

- Music - Stemstr (stemstr.app) is a Nostr native app for creating and remixing music. Wavlake (wavlake.com) is a music streaming service with Lightning zaps, which recently integrated Nostr login.

- Text annotation - https://highlighter.com allows users to collaboratively highlight text (think rapgenius on Nostr). You can even collaboratively highlight this very thread if you like!

- Marketplaces - bids and asks are messages which can be published over Nostr, allowing multiple marketplace front ends to share a common order book or liquidity. We've already seen a few pocs for building Nostr based marketplaces such as: github.com/lnbits/nostrmarket github.com/supertestnet/superstore

- Nostr browser - an early version of Spring, a nostr browser, recently launched to experiment with hosting various microapps in one interface: github.com/nostrband/nostr-universe/

This list is just the tip of the iceberg, but hopefully it gives a good overview of Nostr's potential. I've invested in a number of these projects already and remain committed to funding many more hackers exploring Nostr in the coming months!

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#117
two things. first, the more you try to convince me about the best thing after sliced bread, the more I doubt it's even a bread. second, anything related to crypto currency should be held in doubt (in the highest order) until proven otherwise.

even if I ignore two things above, I don't want to use any new comm. protocols. to me, what we have now is good enough™.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#118
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be nice to see a well secure alternative to torrent and IPFS so we can just settle and use it. Ideally encrypted and anonymous optionally too.

I like the idea of anonymity, and have done implementations of anonymous services - ones that are public and live now. I wouldn't do it for money unless i was somehow indemnified against fault and damages. In my measured opinion, it is too risky to allow unfettered anonymous uploads, even strictly financially.

If you use bitcoin you can make services that provide value and get paid for those online without any identity involved. That's the main value. That said it's a bit complicated to use bitcoin in a truly anonymous way without connecting identity to it at any point.

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#119
post #102
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any signed message, there is only ONE public key that could have generated that signature. You either know that key, or you don't. The network can either deliver or help you discover the key, or not. That's way different from trusting a third party to not lie to you about authenticity or the source of the message.

How does that work in the context of the whole system where I need to link a key pair to a person? If I know you in real life we can check key fingerprints or something (GPG suggests statistically nobody will) but otherwise I have to trust a third-party who says that the Bob I want to talk to has keys X, Y, and Z. If you don’t do that, as soon as it becomes popular enough to attract scammers you’re going to have Mall…

Nostr is quite open for what options people use to become more trustable. People can pay couple thousand sats to get a verification, or as you say Nostr can also do the same with shifting to web of existing sources of identity. E.g. it is well known that this Jack is CEO of Strike (strike.me) and so any nostr client can verify that https://snort.social/p/jack@strike.me is trustable, because it serves his public key here: https://strike.me/.well-known/nostr.json

Re: Why I’m betting on Nostr

#120
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

Yeah, Nostr is quite new compared to Mastodon. The clients became usable just this year. I posted my first note on Nostr in Dec 2021 and that was literally just days after the first web client allowed posting. Mastodon has been there at least since 2016.
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