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Nostr – Decentralized social network

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Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#141

Post by lern_too_spel »

thewataccount wrote: post #96
INTPenis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% of it is a scam, the only reason you said 99.99 is because blockchain as a technology is worth something. But crypto coins themselves have no value at all in the real world. One pizza place here, and one bitcoin ATM there does not make a difference. As long as you can't trade real goods and services for crypto coins it is absolutely worthless. And that is why any association with crypto makes intelligent people…

> As long as you can't trade real goods and services for crypto coins it is absolutely worthless. As long as you can sell it for USD it's not worthless - you don't other goods/services - although that said the list of those is still growing. The fact that I can send money (liquid fiat) to a friend without going through paypall/zello/etc. is valuable. The only thing that could make it a "scam" is the promise of money,…

> The fact that I can send money (liquid fiat) to a friend without going through paypall/zello/etc. is valuable.

You can do that only because Bitcoin is currently underregulated. Governments will eventually regulate it to enforce money laundering laws and starve DPRK, and then Bitcoin will become even more expensive relative to other options.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#142

Post by suddenclarity »

Grendalor wrote: post #134
Entinel wrote: 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, breat…

I see two flaws with that.

The first one is that there's no such thing as left and right. Two left wingers can have completely different opinions on nuclear and covid. So what political topic do you split the services based on? People seem to unite based on who they are against, but does that really work in the long run?

The second is that with newspapers, you're fluid and jump around. With your social circle, you build it to keep it. I'm following people from 13 years ago on Twitter. It works because social circles don't focus on politics. I can discuss fitness with my PT, programming with a university professor, and racing with a driver. Losing out on half of the population because you disagree on topic X seems crazy to me.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#144

Post by pornel »

wedesoft wrote: post #82
brethna wrote: post #67

So, I am surprised the Fediverse is not mentioned. Already bigger and better than anything Nostr is trying to do. Why reinvent the wheel? Or why not join the wheel?

distributed > federated

I don't think this is always true. Centralized services have practical benefits, and federation is a compromise between fully decentralized and centralized.

Federation frees individual users from key management (a trivial issue for HN users, but a big pain for less technical users).

Instance admins can handle spam and abuse for entire communities, and what is acceptable varies between communities.

Data can be aggregated per instance instead of independently fetched per user. For example, previews for external links can be cached per instance, since you trust your instance. In a fully distributed system it'd be either vulnerable to manipulation (since HTTPS doesn't offer a way for others to cryptographically verify data originates from a URL, without contacting the origin server) or every user would have to fetch a link preview themselves, which has DDoS potential and tracking risks.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#145

Post by jb55 »

infotogivenm wrote: post #108
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #43

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 am neutral on cryptocurrencies, but I agree that whenever I see people lumping cryptocurrency and cryptographically-secure messaging together it’s a huge red flag. The UX for key management should be monstrously different between shitposting and the instantaneous loss of money, for starters.

Damus does not manage your lightning wallet. All it does is open lightning invoice links in an external wallet when you want to zap someone.

All of this is optional and opt-in.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#146

Post by jb55 »

m4lvin wrote: post #113
jb55 wrote: post #5

Author of damus[1] here. We’ve seen a crazy growth in nostr in the past couple of months. Damus itself sees about 1000 to 10,000 download per week, and we’re up to about 500k to 1mil+ users (hard to get exact numbers on a decentralized network). Exciting times for social networking protocols! [1] https://damus.io

How does damus relate to nostr? Your landing page does not explain this at all. Is this because already the concepts of (distinguishing) client and network would be considered too technical for your target audience?

I don’t think it’s important to dive into tech details on the damus homepage. Gmail doesn’t attempt to explain the email RFCs when creating an account.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#147

Post by jb55 »

r721 wrote: post #119
rchaud wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a big part of the idea is that relays just dont carry spam/bad actors. How would the relay evaluate what is spam and what is not?

Yeah, I just don't understand what would relay operator actually do if someone would generate 10k key pairs and post 100k gpt-generated replies to some random posts.

The damus relay rate limits even if you have multiple keys

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#148

Post by syntheweave »

Grendalor wrote: post #134
Entinel wrote: 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, breat…

The political groups are simply rough mappings to "major demographics" of users and their preferences - clout-seekers, self-styled entrepreneurs, collectivists. The actual shifts taking place are all within the old bundling/unbundling saw: some features are now outside of the product, and some are integrated into it, and the features attract or repulse these demographics accordingly.

Mastodon always presented some dealbreakers for the "clout-seeking" demographic, since ActivityPub doesn't flatten the space into one high school class ranking(basic KPIs for this goal like numbers of likes don't synchronize across instances), and instances that behave badly are treated by the broader network as "nails to be hammered down", for better or for worse. And nostr likewise centers visible exchange-of-value which is too grubby and nakedly commercial for the upper crust. So I agree that Bluesky is "it" in the realm of attracting Twitter users, for the moment.

But any of these three could absorb features of the others in time. That tends to happen in tech.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#149

Post by fuyuasha »

stiltzkin wrote: post #87
jb55 wrote: post #5

Author of damus[1] here. We’ve seen a crazy growth in nostr in the past couple of months. Damus itself sees about 1000 to 10,000 download per week, and we’re up to about 500k to 1mil+ users (hard to get exact numbers on a decentralized network). Exciting times for social networking protocols! [1] https://damus.io

Any ETA for Damus on Android?

Damus is great but Amethyst is also great already on Android

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#150

Post by throwaway290 »

rchaud wrote: post #19
Barrin92 wrote: post #16

Calling Nostr a social network to me seems like a category error. It's a messaging protocol. People might build a social network on top of it, but it's not necessarily going to have any of the properties Nostr has, the same way Facebook is built on top of html. If you want to solve social issues at a protocol level, there need to be social mechanisms in the protocol. That would honestly be kind of interesting to see.…

Seems like it's more than that considering they have mobile apps coming that are definitely social networks.

I can build a social networking mobile app on top of HTTP but does that make HTTP a social network?
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