is nostr some bitcoin thing?
It seems it's mostly used by bitcoin people. I have no interest in bitcoin.
Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must realize that the moment you say “just switch to another” you’ve lost 99% of your potential user base. It took me signing up for Lemmy to realize why Lemmy is still a completely dead network.
Decentralization/federation is not about "potential user base". It's about diffusion of control. People need to learn to fish because the SaaS model is a precarious foundation to build a culture on. We are having this conversation in a more mainstream way now because more people found out how precarious their online cultural foundations are. Your Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters will get ruined by changes of owners…
> The point is to either host your own instance, or use the instance of someone you trust and/or whose moderation policy you align with.
This should be the goal but will never happen with an activity-pub-based fediverse. It just doesn't scale to everyone or even every small group having their own instances because. Current fediverse software is also too complicated and too resource hungry for even most technically inclined people to self host.
You really need a better foundation that is designed for efficient communication between millions of hosts from the start.
Re: Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.nostrapps.com/ has quite a few non-twitter clones to offer.
all of these seem to be Twitter-like social apps. what am I missing?
Not sure why but they focus on tab "social" by default. You can click "All Apps" in the top (or any other category)
Re: Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
#54Can anyone compare this to https://radicle.xyz/? (Or am I wrong thinking they're similar? I've used neither.)
I suppose gitstr would have the benefit that you'd already have the public key of whatever person you'd want to send the patches to? Because you learned of the existence of their repos via nostr, or so?
Re: Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
By definition, an instance will only block instances it doesn't trust, so yes, only untrustworthy instances are blocked by an instance that doesn't trust them The mistake is believing that all instances behave the same and block the same. The whole point of federation is that every instance chooses who it wants to block.
That's not how it works at all. Admins pressure other admins in apply the same blocks, or risk getting defederated. The entire thing is ran by power hungry bullies.
That's not how it works at all (see, I can do exactly the same).
1) I, as an admin, have never been pressured by anyone to do anything and can federate with whoever I want. Thousands of instances are the same. The only ones who are pressured are the biggest ones, who also happen to host the worst content (xenophobic, racist, gore, pedo content).
2) You are not owed an audience. Not everyone wants to ear what you have to say. Moderation at scale needs to happen if we want marginalized communities to thrive, and unfortunately since the internet is mostly hostile to those the most efficient way to do this is to block. But if you're not ok with the blocking policy of your instance, change it. That's the whole point of federation. You'd do the same with Nostr: you disconnect from a relay if you don't like what comes from them, connect to another one, except with Nostr you can't totally be sure the bad content will be filtered out.
Re: Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried nostr and I was impressed by how fast it is compared to the alternatives and by how seamless it is to connect to everyone. Unfortunately I'm not interested by the current content and I'm not sure a social media without censorship is viable on large scale
> I'm not sure a social media without censorship is viable on large scale Right, it absolutely isn't. Some form of censorship is vital. This claim becomes more agreeable when substituting "censorship" with the almost-synonymous word "moderation".
This take is terrifying to me. Obviously we all have things that we don’t want to be exposed to, and probably many things that we don’t feel anyone should be exposed to, but who gets to make the decision of what is acceptable and what isn’t?
Bias and financial interests in speech and content are more rampant, now, than they have ever been. I don’t trust anyone but myself to “save” me from seeing what I can only describe as “wrongthink”.
Re: Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
#57I don't really understand Nostr. Without having your own personal relay or website, how can you publish your public key? (or without a trusted centralized authority) And if you do have a website where you publish your private key, why wouldn't you just publish your content there? How do you manage public keys you trust? Is this something a client implementation should do? What happens when all relays you write to go…
You sign messages with your key and then publish it to any relays you want. Once your message is signed, it is good to go on any relay. You manage pubkeys you trust by signing a message with a list of pubkeys you trust, simple as that. People can learn about what relays you are on by (again) signing a message that states which relays you are publishing to. If all relays go down you just send your messages to any othe…
So: You sign your message and then attach the public key and push that to a relay?
How would anyone reading that message know that this was actually signed by you and is your public key? There has to be a trusted exchange of the public key before or the relay could just spoof your message. Some messaging apps do a thing where you meet in person and scan the other persons QR code for example. Otherwise, you have to trust the relay. But as I understand it that is not the idea of it.
Again, if you sign a message with a list of pub keys, what if the relay disappears? How do you get around that problem at all without hosting your own relay?
About the relays disappearing, how will people find you on a new set of relays you choose unless they are reading from those already? Relays don't communicate with each other.
Other protocols like ActivityPub ultimately have the same problem. You have to host your own mastodon server to address these things.
I understand the signed message. But this is not P2P, the relay is the (untrusted) middleman. So how is that in any way different than just sending someone an email and signing it? Or publishing signed messages in any other place online? Is it about the convenience of very quickly being able to switch to another relay without a hassle?
Re: Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
#58I don't really understand Nostr. Without having your own personal relay or website, how can you publish your public key? (or without a trusted centralized authority) And if you do have a website where you publish your private key, why wouldn't you just publish your content there? How do you manage public keys you trust? Is this something a client implementation should do? What happens when all relays you write to go…
Who doesn't have a homepage, that wants one? It can be a Twitter bio, a (gulp) keybase page, or a personally hosted page.
Okay. Well, then you have to trust Twitter or Keybase, centralized authorities. And your profiles there can be taken down also.
And if you have a homepage, why do you need Nostr at all? You can just sign content and publish it on your website then, no?
I'm starting to think that the main thing with Nostr is convenience. Should you run into an issue with any relay(s) you simply change to different relays without much work involved, i.e. without "your operations" having to pause. But that doesn't solve the discoverability issue with relays.
It's actually not much different than if you signed your tweets and then if you got banned just moved to facebook. Just more convenient.
Re: Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
#59Re: Gitstr: Send and receive Git patches over Nostr
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nostr really feels to me like the blockchain That’s not strange, given that it’s architecturally similar. However, blockchains are solving global consensus problems. Nostr doesn’t give a shit. To me, that’s good. One piece at a time. Also, what’s so important about consensus? It’s extremely slow and expensive and mostly matters for financial applications. The less financial speculation the better, imo. Time will te…
In what ways is the architecture similar? As far as I can tell, the only similarity to Bitcoin is that it is a "permissionless" protocol. Any relay can participate in Nostr, just like any node can participate in Bitcoin.
They’re both decentralized. Actors are identified by public keys. Messages are signed and processed by other nodes.
The only high level differences are (1) Nostr does not have a persistence layer (much less one with global consensus) and (2) applications live “outside” the system whereas in the crypto world they’re either hard coded (say bitcoin) or through smart contracts that live “on-chain”, ie as part of the system.
Maybe I’m missing something though. It’s just my observation.