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Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

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Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#131

Post by attila-lendvai »

nunobrito wrote: post #5
wmf wrote: post #3

P2P with end-to-end encryption over relays existed in 2001 (e.g. Groove, Mojo Nation) and wasn't invented by Nostr. Nostr is so simple because it handwaves away the fact that everybody seems to use the same small set of relays and there's nothing stopping them from censoring the network. I'm also not aware of any incentives for the relay operators either.

You are correct that it existed well before, the difference is that it was always complicated to use. Heck, we have been able to send PGP emails since almost 30 years ago. The innovative concept is that npub/nsec along with sending notes is trivially simple. The content does not need to encrypted, there is a huge value on publishing clear text messages that are crypto-verifiable. You also didn't had this feature on g…

PGP can also sign clear text messages.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#132

Post by attila-lendvai »

vintermann wrote: post #99
pyrolistical wrote: post #53

Every social media platform needs to a solution to: 1. Content discovery 2. Spam 3. Content moderation I can see relays offering unique solutions to each one. But now they are more than just dumb servers. You get to the point where you might as well just write posts locally then submit them to X, Facebook, etc. You get the same result. And if you include a cryptographic signature with each post, you can prove you are…

Spam and content moderation are basically the same thing. In both cases it's hiding things from the user that the user didn't ask for or want to see. Unless by spam you mean denial of service attacks. Which should probably be a point of its own anyway. It's the main killer of the decentralized internet currently.

the extra curve with spam is that it must be made economically expensive for the spammer. spam is more of a DoS attack than just content i'm not interested in.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#133

Post by ralferoo »

shark_laser wrote: post #77
fc417fc802 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would "every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message"? Because that is the obvious thing that would happen without further implementation details. A few large relays taking the brunt of the vast majority of the network. It isn't an inherently scalable architecture. Of course you can do other stuff in addition and thereby achieve scalability. At least argua…

I'm still confused about why multiple clients would be pushing the same message, especially given that Nostr events are signed, but that's by the by. I think "without further implementation details" is the key point here. Client developers usually have these. Sure, Nostr is still small, but there's several clever ways of dealing with scalability issues. Not least of which is the outbox model, linked in my first post.…

> I'm still confused about why multiple clients would be pushing the same message

From the information given in the article, it states categorically that the relays do not ever connect to other relays (which makes you wonder why they even choose to misname them if they're not actually relaying anything).

It then continues saying that clients need to connect to multiple (but not more than a dozen) to be able to receive all content from anywhere. The only inference I can make from that is that a client is responsible to receiving a message from one "relay" and transmitting it to another.

The obvious question then is how does the client know if the other relays already have the message? There are two obvious options:

* The client informs the relay about every new message it receives from every other relay. That means each relay will be informed about each new message from the vast majority of the clients that connect to it, which is obviously going to be expensive. It would also put the burden on clients to remember which relays they've informed, and if they add a new relay, the client would presumably have to replay every message it knows just in case the relay is missing it.

* The other option is that the client has to query the relay for a list of every single message on the relay and only forward on new messages to the relay if the relay says it doesn't have it. This could potentially be even more expensive, and even if the client/relay maintain some kind of shared state, if the client tries another relay, it'd have to re-download the entire list of messages. Even if we're only talking about message IDs, that's a huge amount of data to download.

In any case, if relays will just accept any old message and rely on the clients to check they were signed correctly, then it stands to reason that any relay can be trivially DDoS by bombarding it with junk. The impression the article gives is that relays would never verify the authenticity of a message itself, because that would break their distributed model.

The article doesn't provide any detail about how its new "relay" solution works. It just stops abruptly after asserting that relays fix everything, with no explanation. This is exactly the reason why I said the article feels like it's cut short.

So, without any hints to its possible implementation, one can only speculate and I personally can't see any way in which this solution would be better than a peer-based solution where "relays" actually relay messages between themselves. It's possible that whatever the author has created is truly innovative and groundbreaking, but they haven't chosen to tell us why in the article.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#134

Post by attila-lendvai »

pjc50 wrote: post #121
dahrkael wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

european IDs already have a chip with your personal keys and you can use that to log into any state operated service

There is no European ID. Please specify individual countries (I think this is just Estonia at the moment?)

has been the case for Hungarian ID cards for a decade now, but it was never really used, except maybe by burorats in gov offices to access their systems.

but no one understands it, including the people who need to issue new signing keys.

it didn't get anywhere really. it was just a good opportunity for a lot of taxpayer money to... "lose its taxpayer money nature" (actual phrase by an actual politician when cornered by questions).

and now they are "moving on" to an app that must be installed on your phone to access more and more services.

ID2030 is roaring on worldwide... soon mandatory iris scans, vaccine implants, and who knows when they will try to roll out mandatory brain implants against thought crimes.

the more i think about the sign of the beast (as an atheist), the more sense it makes.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#135

Post by rglullis »

pjc50 wrote: post #121
dahrkael wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

european IDs already have a chip with your personal keys and you can use that to log into any state operated service

There is no European ID. Please specify individual countries (I think this is just Estonia at the moment?)

Portuguese IDs also have a sim card, but I never used it for anything other than accessing government services.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#136

Post by immibis »

WastedCucumber wrote: post #19

For who might be pulled in by the vague title, not knowing what a nostr is, thinking this article has anything to do with evolution - it has nothing to do with evolution or nature. Not one example of nature trying to evolve a nostr is descibed. Maybe like... the author thought a nostr is similar to, I dunno, a pack or tribe or something?

Nature has successfully evolved an Israeli Nostr: almost every mammal has at least one nostr.il

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#137

Post by krapp »

strbean wrote: post #24
rglullis wrote: post #20

Nostr will always be a fringe network. The normies do not want to manage their own keys.

Hopefully some day we will get state-managed PKI, and citizens will get used to handling their keys appropriately. It's crazy that some functionality on e.g. the IRS website requires me to verify my identity using a private company (ID.me).

No thank you. That last thing anyone should want is governments holding ownership over their private keys.

Private companies are bad enough, but at least they won't declare you an undesirable for your political beliefs or religion or ethnicity or gender identity or sexual preference or whatever and shoot you in the head over it.

Except where governments and private companies collaborate, which of course happens (looking at you literally every American social media platform.)

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#138

Post by attila-lendvai »

bflesch wrote: post #10

I feel projects like nostr ignore inherent human requirements for social networks. This is a striking quote from their landing page: "Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" — it simply recognizes that different people have different morals and preferences and each server, being privately owned, can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please and users are free to choose what t…

i'm booted from facebook. does that really mean that i have no "real-life social rank" anymore?

in fact, the further mainstream social networks evolve, the more social rank it started to bring not to be there, and/or having been booted. it's early on this path, but i started to notice the signs.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#139

Post by attila-lendvai »

AuthAuth wrote: post #14
bflesch wrote: post #10

I feel projects like nostr ignore inherent human requirements for social networks. This is a striking quote from their landing page: "Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" — it simply recognizes that different people have different morals and preferences and each server, being privately owned, can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please and users are free to choose what t…

One could easily test the author's conviction on "rejecting content as they please" by spamming them with horrible stuff for a few months and the author would learn why 100% of content moderation should not be pushed on the individual user.

i think you cannot spam someone's screen in nostr. they just unsubscribe from your key, if they ever were subscribed.

DoS on the infra is a different question, though.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#140

Post by EgregiousCube »

digitalbase wrote: post #112
EgregiousCube wrote: post #2

We already see "paid relays" and relays that filter certain content, even as small as nostr is today. I think the end state, if it manages to really catch on, is going to be as "oligarchical" as mastodon or other federated networks today - just via relays instead of via homeservers. A step in the right direction for sure! But I don't feel like Nostr is the final target that nature is shooting for here.

Key difference is that is one relay author becomes "oligarchical" the notes just route around that (through different relays).

+1, user owning the ID is a step in the right direction compared to "homeserver" owning the right key and makes this possible.

That said - maybe (total hypothetical) the reason one relay becomes really big is because a lot of people think it provides really good service, and maybe it's difficult to convince the majority of the network to route around it. This would create a similar problem to what we see in more well established federated chat networks.

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