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Nostr – Decentralized social network

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131–140 of 170 posts

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason they have to "fiddle" with it. Generating a new keypair could be a button. Normies use keypairs every time they connect to an https site. They just don't know it, nor is there any reason why they should.

This is not a function of "could." They're already asking users to do it. If they "could," why didn't they? To make something easy, you first have to actually make it easy. Not let forum users argue about how easy it "could" be.

> If they "could," why didn't they?

Because this is early days?

Surely you don't imagine that every product emerges in its final form?

Maybe instead you could explain why they couldn't. As I noted, people seem to be able to use TLS to make secure connections to websites without generating keypairs from the command line, or whatever.

Edit: and in fact this has been done.

https://nostr.how/en/guides/iris

Type in your name. Hit "Go". Done.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on how relays differ (mostly conceptually) from something like Mastodon instances? Adding because Nostr seems to be marketed as something more decentralized than that, and I'd like to get a deeper understanding.

This is gossip protocol not a federated thing. assuming it's the same as Scuttlebutt (also gossip protocol) a relay is literally just a relay. There's no "home server". You don't have an account on anyone's machine. You just shove data out to "people" who are listening to you. In scuttlebutt the relays are configured so that anyone can ask it to "follow" them and then they send their data to it. Anyone who listens to…

Nostr is way simpler than ssb, there isn't even a gossip or replication strategy. You just publish your signed messages on servers. There isn't even a blob strategy!

This makes it way easier for people to write clients or bots or whatever, but it also tosses out many of the guarantees people who used the original scuttlebot took for granted.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like alternatives to big sites but this sentence makes me nervous: "Bitcoin & , the native currency of the internet." Is there a need for this?

I'm with you on every crypto except Bitcoin, but nothing about bitcoin should make you nervous. Its nice you live in a country with a stable currency that doesnt hyperinflate. Not everyone has this luxury. Zimbabwe and Venezuela come to mind.

> but nothing about bitcoin should make you nervous.

The energy consumption of bitcoin does in fact make me very nervous.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#134
post #65

Nostr doesn't need to become the new Twitter and I think it fills a fun niche but I think bluesky will eventually be that new Twitter because your average Joe just wants to go to twitter.com/whatever and not have to mess around with other people's domains, private keys, and whatever. Again, I think Nostr is great and eventually I imagine you can just push to both platforms but the people I follow on Twitter are not t…

Yes, this is right.

Nostr will be more like Mastodon was before Elon ... a smallish place for enthusiasts of decentralization, albeit following a different protocol than Mastodon, of course.

Bluesky is already the new Twitter, you can tell. The cool kids all want to be on Bluesky. In effect, the very low rate drip of invites approach they are following, coupled with a virtual megaton of almost entirely gushing, breathless positive stories from the tech press are generating a high pent-up demand and a sense of virality even while it has a tiny userbase. The people running it are very clever, and are clearly doing everything they can to become the alternative for disgruntled Twitter users that Mastodon, Nostr and others are not (and arguably never were trying to be ... Bluesky is, by contrast, trying like heck to be exactly that).

Does this mean Twitter dies? No, I don't think so. What I think it means, though, is that, like the MSM, we will have likely two microblogging platforms that are broken into socio-ideological camps, like we have with most of the other media. It's new for social media, of course (not that there haven't been wing platforms before, but they have been small), but not new for media in general or the internet in general. And one could say that it's actually somewhat surprising that it took so long for this kind of split to happen in social media as well, but it kind of "feels right" that it's happening, given the very divergent ways that people have reacted to Twitter over the past year. It seems "right" that there should be separate services for people based on the kind of ideology and views they prefer, since this is how pretty much everyone rolls in every other aspect of the media already anyway.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#135
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are already paying for paid relays ? What is the reasoning? Congrats on your first comment by the way.

I used paid relays. The reasons are higher quality content. It works alright for spam prevention. Also, I use the nostr.wine filter relay, which is pretty neat. You can connect to it and it will pull notes from your web of contacts (your follows, plus their follows). Additionally, it will rebroadcast your notes to public relays. It's a pretty nice way to keep your feed quiet (not spammy), but also allow your notes to…

I will have to look into this more. It sounds like it's not as simple as the project website makes it sound.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at all that virtue. Bitcoin started a literal tsunami of financial crimes, I feel bad for hyperinflated countries and if they find some use in bitcoin that's great for them, but I for one will stay the fuck away from anything blockchain related if I can help it.

On a similar note, cellphones/internet allow all sorts of crime. Cars, make it easy to commit crimes. Food, allows people to use energy to fuel themselves to commit crimes. Water/boats/international trade: huge for crime. Cash, great for crime. Government, could be complicit in crime. ChatGPT says you used "hasty generalization" fallacy, but I'm not sure that is the correct fallacy. You have a fallacy here.

Nah, that’s not the hasty generalization fallacy. They didn’t say “bitcoin allows for crime to happen”, they said bitcoin has been the center of a huge amount of actual financial crime.

I think that’s the observation fallacy, where you look at what’s happening and then state it out loud.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#137
post #78
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network effects. Every new app that joins grows the network without the content creator having to do anything new.

If I joined today for example, how would I come across something you posted? The user increment is +1, but that's just the potential number of people you could reach. Somebody would have to the equivalent of re-tweeting, for your content to be visible on their profile, and discoverable by others. Is that different from say, Mastodon?

There are a few ways to find my content. 1. Follow me 2. Find my note in a hashtag / interest-based relay or in global chat (global will probably not remain for long as the network grows and it gets too noisy / spammy). You'll have interest based relays / tags, however that gets structured. Right now there are no interest-based relays that I know of (yet). 3. Via a boost (equiv. to retweet). 4. Via some sort of ranker. Some clients rank posts by activity.

In general, you have to follow people to discover content you want to see, but it's not a requirement (as outlined above). I definitely think the Nostr experience for people improves dramatically as they follow a few folks.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#138
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network effects. Every new app that joins grows the network without the content creator having to do anything new.

like mastodon? from my mastodon account I can interact with pixelfed (like Instagram), peertube (like YouTube) and Lemmy (like reddit).

Sorry I am not familiar with Mastadon.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#139
post #62
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the beautiful part about Nostr, anyone can create a website and "sell" it any way they like.

That's not how that works though. It would be like me calling XMPP a cryptocurrency.

I couldn't stop you from calling anything anything you want

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#140
post #93
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the beautiful part about Nostr, anyone can create a website and "sell" it any way they like.

any way they like...as long as it's in Bitcoin.

who is they and what are we talking about? like what? The payments are optional.
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