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Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

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Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#151

Post by sph »

chr15m wrote: post #109
FreeTrade wrote: post #34

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 use a technology without agreeing with the views of other users of the technology. You don't have to follow those people.

No virtue signaling? In the social media age? How else would I get upvoted to the top of the comment section?

But then they don’t have no issue giving money to powerful people that likely don’t share their righteous worldview.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#152

Post by tkel »

mw888 wrote: post #6

Nostr breaks down along the longstanding ambiguity around what 'decentralization' means. In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite. People really want decentralization of power…

Accountability is not the same as decentralization of power, don't conflate them.

Decentralizing power means that many people are made powerful in their own respects.

Accountability means that one person or a small group of people are made powerful, but there are checks or mechanisms on that person's power.

These have vastly different impliciations for how organizations and groups of people develop and grow and interact.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#153

Post by teekert »

inigyou wrote: post #137
teekert wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have any other proposal for true micropayments (as in fractions of cents of value that flow freely) please, indulge me. I for one would prefer to give value via lightning over forcing my eyeballs on ads everywhere I look. Same goes for the agents I deploy, I'd like to have methods of returning value for whatever value they extract (in the form of information).

My proposal is that you don't.

Imo any fair future economy should embrace decentralized 9ie without a company taking a cut Apple style) frictionless sharing of value. Either that or we must have strive for a fair post-scarcity economy (Star Trek like). The way things are going I'm even more skeptical about achieving that.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#154

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

ttoinou wrote: post #40
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #24

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

I took a bioinformatics class, students were emailing large files around via the university's email portal. The files were frequently corrupted somewhere along the way. I had to show them how to check hashes and then they would just repeatedly download the file until they got one without errors. But then the sysadmin showed up and asked us to stop downloading multi-gig files repeatedly from his server.

I proposed bittorrent as the solution and the sysadmin lost his mind.

Without the piracy stigma, I think we'd just have integrtated it into email clients. The user doesn't need to know that the "attachment" is actually a torrent file, they should just "download" it and end up with a reliable copy of what was sent.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#155

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

inigyou wrote: post #147
grumbel wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of BitTorrent support in browsers is big thing that is missing. Brave and Opera have it, but all the mainstream browsers don't. Thus torrent downloads never got out of its specific niche. That said, I don't think piracy is to blame here, but more the murky nature of copyright in general, with BitTorrent you automatically become redistributor of everything you download and that's just a huge liability and privacy…

Why should they keep FTP or Gopher alive, or support Gemini, when they're just worse HTTP? I think they should make it possible to write a new protocol handler though.

Is FTP really worse HTTP? If you try to enumerate directories over HTTP alarms start going off because you look like an attacker.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#156

Post by duskwuff »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #155
inigyou wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they keep FTP or Gopher alive, or support Gemini, when they're just worse HTTP? I think they should make it possible to write a new protocol handler though.

Is FTP really worse HTTP? If you try to enumerate directories over HTTP alarms start going off because you look like an attacker.

> Is FTP really worse HTTP?

I don't think I'd even call it that. FTP had one purpose: it was an early protocol for remotely managing files. It never had any intent to support dynamically generated or otherwise "virtual" content (as supported by e.g. CGI scripts and mod_rewrite in Apache), and I don't think anyone has ever made a serious attempt to implement that. There's no practical use case for it.

Even as a file management protocol, though, FTP sucks. Its connection management is primitive in the extreme - one TCP connection per transfer - and that ruins performance for transfers involving many files, and is difficult to pass through firewalls and load balancers. FTPS encryption is an afterthought, and makes small-file performance even worse (as each connection requires separate TLS negotiation). There's no standard format for directory listings, just ad-hoc parsing of "ls -l" output. Support for modern filesystem features like extended attributes is largely nonexistent. Need I continue? :)

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#157

Post by lxgr »

inigyou wrote: post #148
lxgr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of that can be solved or worked around. The much bigger problem is that it's a bit "too anonymous" to ever be tolerated even in most democracies, for better or worse. I think the only thing that stands a chance is something that partially anonymizes one party to the transaction but not the other, or something that can deanonymize a given transaction only by very publicly and verifiably "breaking glass".

The government would just break glass on every transaction because what would you do about it?

Fortunately, not all governments have completely normalized warrantless wiretaps yet. I think requiring a court order and retroactive notification of suspects whose privacy has been invaded is a good model.

I'd rather have my money work in a way that allows that than in the current status quo, i.e. a complete lack of privacy for anything other than cash (which has different issues and doesn't work so well online).

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#159

Post by xigoi »

curtisblaine wrote: post #116
greekrich92 wrote: post #107

How does this impractical crypto nonsense keep making it to the front page?

What does nostr have to do with crypto?

The part where, instead of “liking” posts, you “zap” them, which involves paying Bitcoin to the poster.

Re: Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

#160

Post by inigyou »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #155
inigyou wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they keep FTP or Gopher alive, or support Gemini, when they're just worse HTTP? I think they should make it possible to write a new protocol handler though.

Is FTP really worse HTTP? If you try to enumerate directories over HTTP alarms start going off because you look like an attacker.

Yes, in every way except that servers and clients normally support upload while HTTP ones don't. This is the main reason to use it.

But you should use SFTP instead. This is SSH's replacement for FTP. It's not the same as FTPS which is useless.

We don't have to keep old protocols that offer nothing alive. Maybe a couple of clients and servers to demonstrate with, but it's a museum piece, not useful code. That's not an insult - museums are important. But we don't run Network Control Protocol (IPv1) on the internet, either.

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