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Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

nostr.org

51–60 of 198 posts

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#51
The homepage could be a description of ATProto. Except lots of people around me already use ATproto, and a successful European instance has just been launched, Eurosky, focusing on expanding the protocol with apps doing other things than micro-messages (Bluesky).

Why should I care ? Honest question.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#52
post #48

I tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.

NOSTR is a protocol so there's no entity for you to be bitter with... You can be annoyed at the people who were on there, but that's a different subject. There's probably a better analogy than this, but what you're describing would be like playing soccer and being annoyed that your teammates are furries. Go find another team to play with.

This in HN, everybody in here has been bitter with a protocol at some point in their career.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#54
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "awkward" coordination? Clients fetch updates from whatever servers they follow. Same thing with email that you've been using for decades, doesn't get simpler than that.

Email requires a message to reach a specific, limited set of participants. Nostr is a public forum, which means an unbounded number of participants who can engage. Ordering a conversation between an unbounded set across independent nodes leads to misordered interactions not possible if you just centralize. It seems like a small issue, but at scale quality really suffers when some universal, fine-resolution ordering c…

There are things like mailing lists since decades and they do fine.

You are assuming that everyone can spam your messages whereas in reality with NOSTR you choose from which relays to get updates. These relays are sovereign in the sense that they can (and will) define the rules and who can use them.

I've never experienced misordered interactions since years of using NOSTR. This might be something of a theoretical issue because in practice that isn't observed.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#55
I really like nostr because it gives you freedom of association. You can unfollow other users and, if you run a relay, you can refuse to accept content from users you don't like, but you can't ban other relays (like mastodon does) and you can't refuse content based on relays other users use, because you don't know. In other words, you only can ignore people you don't like but you can't meaningfully deplatform them or prevent them from looking at or following your content. That's how it should be and, incidentally, that's what makes people in favour of deplatforming furious, which can only be a good thing :)

Unfortunately nostr has little network effect because the current ecosystem was stood up by bitcoin enthusiasts, and there's no much generalist discourse on it. Luckily, it's a simple protocol and it's really hard to kill protocols in the first place. Maybe the next censorship debacle on the current alternative social media platforms will give it a boost, or maybe it will remain a small niche group of ecosystems for specialized users? Who knows, but I'm glad it exists.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#56

Nah it’s DOA because it was adopted by the alt right.

Same problem as with telegram messenger or tor browser: once you promote censorship resistance and inability to be deplatformed, it attracts people who previously got censored and deplatformed. Then on the other hand, when the hong kong protesters and the ukraine soldiers used it for their purposes, it is a welcome freedom tech (unless you are china or russia). Decentralization and true censorship resistance will always be a double-edged sword.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#57

I tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.

I honestly think it would be completely legit to build a completely separate ecosystem on top of the same protocol. A separate set of relays, separate apps which connect to those relays by default, no lighting payments, different defaults, marketed to a different audience. Ultimately it is not just a single network. If users need interoperability eventually they can easily add other relays. But it's true that many pe…

> no lighting payments

Nah, you didn't understand it. Lightning is a layer-2 protocol on top of bitcoin. Nostr is the so-called layer-3. Good luck trying to build Nostr without Lightning.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#58

I tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.

You can't blame the protocol for the user it attracts. It is in early development. Just imagine the year is 1996 and you are complaining that WWW, IRC and the USENET is full of male tech nerds with a STEM background and a taste in SciFi/Fantasy culture. It will take some a while for the evolution to happen until you can get your beauty and makeup styling content.

>full of male tech nerds with a STEM background and a taste in SciFi/Fantasy culture.

Anything like this in 2026?

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#59
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adoption by too narrow an audience can totally poison a protocol for the rest of us. Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.

I doubt widespread adoption was slowed down with mainstream news about BitTorrent, or what are you talking about more specifically ? Others peer to peer sharing platforms got much more popular despite mainstream news about them like LimeWire and eMule

Maybe they want to torrent Linux ISOs but can't because their ISP/VPN blocks the torrent protocol. Http for server->client downloading is inferior but we are stuck with it.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#60
post #4

The thing with Nostr is that the protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other. What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers. There's lots of centraliz…

> spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.

And how do you exactly envision enforcement? Ohhhh, you copied some bits, you going to jail!!

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