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Nostr

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Re: Nostr

#141

Post by digitalbase »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #36
littlecranky67 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nostr doesn't have an "algorithm" that tries to find posts that you engage with. You should follow your own list of people, and then you will see their content. There are some clients trying to be more smart, though. The "algorithm" in any social media is a blessing and a curse. Nostr shifts the responsibility of what to show to the clients.

Right, and I'm asking if there any interesting figures primarily using this platform to share interesting content because I don't know of any, and I didn't find any niches that were best served by this platform. In the past, the way that I would typically get to know people online was either through niche topic-specific forums or IRC channels. Then eventually if we got to know each other well enough, we would connect…

Discoverability is a huge challenge in any decentralized social protocol.

We've been talking a lot about this problem in nostr which can't be summarised in a quick HN comment but gathered some threads if you're really interested

https://asknostr.site/question/note1es989rjaccw82gpp705u462y... https://asknostr.site/question/note12dp9ewpngxejq8w9s6699k5z... https://asknostr.site/question/note1cp5cw366g7q9c2txvtrws0h7... https://asknostr.site/question/note1zqjk556quu6rvyetzvhdv7p3... https://asknostr.site/question/note1ss842g38wafwcfexd78gx0sc...

Re: Nostr

#142

Post by jeroenhd »

keiferski wrote: post #26

Something I don’t quite get about these new social networks that are clearly aimed at technical people: my model of a truly decentralized social network is more like a network of privately hosted personal websites, à la the original web. Not yet another platform I need to make an account to interact on separately. Have there been any attempts to make more of a “network” that incentivizes operating personal websites b…

"Accounts" in this case are just a public/private key pair. You can host your own relay (and nobody will hear what you have to say unless they subscribe to it), but you can use the same public key ("account") on any nostr relay. You can broadcast your posts to all relays, or just some, or just your own, depending on how you feel.

You can, in theory, generate a new key for every post if you want to. The relays don't care.

This is something Mastodon etc. lacks (accounts are tied to servers, so you can't move your self-hosted Mastodon to your self-hosted Akkomo without keeping Mastodon running, and you can't move from one instance to another if your instance admin doesn't let you).

On the other hand, the complete lack of account recovery, even for sysadmins, is something many people will have an issue with.

Re: Nostr

#143

Post by rollcat »

Arathorn wrote: post #69

> "An open protocol with a chance of working" One of the most depressing things about the decentralised protocol space is the adversarial attitude to other projects - whether that's Nostr v. ActivityPub v. ATproto v Nostr, XMPP v. Matrix v. IRCv3 v. Deltachat, etc. Imagine if the energy spent on positioning yourself relative to other open-source projects (who should be fellow travellers, if anything) was instead inve…

Doesn't help that all of the major decentralized protocols have been very effectively undermined and pushed aside.

GTalk first de-federated (weakening XMPP as a whole), then killed XMPP support completely. Reader effectively killed RSS for casual users. Email has been swallowed whole by the oligopoly of GMail+Yahoo+Outlook+iCloud+etc; spam is a real problem, so if you're self-hosting your email, you kinda expect to be blocked by default by the large networks.

Existing, corporate-backed efforts are "open-washing" their services.

Signal is supposed to be using an open protocol, but IIRC won't even let you join their network if you use an alt client.

Following Twitter's demise, Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet?

Actually open networks? Mastodon took off like crazy, but everyone tried to register on the "main", biggest instance - we got bamboozled so hard, we can't even comprehend what "decentralized" is actually supposed to mean.

ActivityPub as a protocol? Ted Unangst decided to build his own client from the spec, and was constantly running into Mastodonisms. https://flak.tedunangst.com/search?q=activitypub>

Matrix? It has effectively one client (Element) that isn't a security disaster. https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...>

Anything left, worth of anyone's attention?

Re: Nostr

#144

Post by littlecranky67 »

anon1395 wrote: post #122
t1E9mE7JTRjf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a world outside of USA, and there is even a world within it too - where you can just do things.

Why do you think i'm in the USA...? I am in the UK and it is impossible to buy bitcoin without regulations.

With "impossible" you mean you can't use Tor Browser and fire up Robosats to buy Bitcoin via Revolut or Wise?

Re: Nostr

#145

Post by woile »

numpad0 wrote: post #108

My back-burner idea: the equivalents of Nostr relays, Mastodon instances, Discord servers, etc. needs to be self-hostable in client apps for decentralized social media to work. Not only classical P2P software did exactly this, it worked/works beautifully. The only reason classical P2P software did not work and did not replace WWW as application was because of piracy prosecutions that makes users responsible for hosti…

I think this is how iroh works. They have "relays" which are servers that help establish a connection between 2 clients if necessary.

https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/relay

Re: Nostr

#146

Post by digitalbase »

Quindecillion wrote: post #37
camillomiller wrote: post #5

I find open protocols the most naive endeavour in tech nowadays. The reason why social media protocols work is because the incentive is to have them siloed, controlled, and artificially convincing people through algorithmic suggestions that posting what they had for lunch is somewhat interesting. These protocols seem to think that people actually want an alternative to what Instagram, Facebook, X etc. give them. They…

Do you have any suggestions for an effective way to bring them down? Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?

My approach for bringing them down is working on better systems/UX than what the closed-silos currently offer...And we have a long way to go.

But...Nostr (and other decentralised social media protocols) can offer things the existing platforms can not do: interoperability.

Imagine the people you follow to be the same from FB, to strava, to spotify... Imagine the content (signed notes) you make are available on different clients/platforms

That UX, perhaps for use-cases and projects we can't imagine today will be so much better than what we have today. I've tasted a little bit of just that switching between my Nostr twitter-like client (Primal/Yakihonne) and the Podcast app (foundtain.fm). It blew my mind.

This opens use cases the existing platforms can only dream about.

Re: Nostr

#147

Post by gwd »

Don't know much about Nostr, but wondered re the spam problem, if it would make sense to introduce the idea of proof-of-work for the identities? A quick search shows that the have optional PoW proposals for notes (i.e., individual posts), but I didn't see anything about PoW for identities.

People could spend $1, or $5, or $50 of compute for an identity, and others could use the cost of the identity as a filter. Having a $5 ID put on a blacklist would make poor behavior of any sort more costly.

Re: Nostr

#148

Post by dewey »

sak5sk wrote: post #139
dewey wrote: post #53

I've tried to use it many times, through Damos on iOS, but it's littered with dead and abandoned projects and an alternative UI that worked one day, will just be gone later. In the end the content I was seeing there was almost exclusively about Nostr and Crypto so it wasn't that interested to keep using it.

Yeah, it takes people to get good content worth paying attention to but if everyone says "it's dead" then it will remain dead. But if people voted with attention and said "yeah, it's kind of dead, but if I hang out here and my friends join, then it will be less dead and people will notice and also join..." You basically create the future you want.

That just describes any social network cold-start problem. If you want to solve that it needs to be really easy for regular users to join and contribute.

Example: Click "Join Nostr" on the nostr.com landing page and the first thing you see is "private" and "public" keys. Click next, you land on 4 example nostr clients. One is broken, the other one is filled with japanese content, the other one is a GitHub repository etc.

It's a cool project from a technical pov as the system is quite simple but you can not expect regular content to start popping up if the experience is only tailored towards motivated tech nerds.

I tried to improve that by making it easy to syndicate the content of Kirby (A blogging framework) to Nostr (https://github.com/dewey/kirby-posse/pull/9) but ran into many issues with how the various clients support and show images and lost interest along the way.

Re: Nostr

#149

Post by r721 »

I still don't understand how Nostr would behave in this hypothetical scenario - a bad actor creates 100k key pairs (via residential proxies) and posts 10 LLM-generated replies to each new post. Who would fight with that wave of spam exactly and how?

Re: Nostr

#150

Post by digitalbase »

r721 wrote: post #149

I still don't understand how Nostr would behave in this hypothetical scenario - a bad actor creates 100k key pairs (via residential proxies) and posts 10 LLM-generated replies to each new post. Who would fight with that wave of spam exactly and how?

This is happening today.

The answer is trusted relays and Web of Trust

Long-time nostr user. My feeds are all spam free. Not to say there aren't any other problems :-)

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