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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

#141

Post by attila-lendvai »

noman-land wrote: post #48
int32_64 wrote: post #15

With millions of daily users Mainline DHT is the most successful truly decentralized social network. Successful decentralization is about incentives, and Mainline DHT's incentive is downloading digital media for free.

I asked this in another comment, but why aren't we using DHTs for peer discovery for social apps? The ratio mechanic provides incentives in the file sharing realm, but you need different incentives for the threaded chat realm.

check out https://ethswarm.org

it's only the storage infra, though. but it stores content, nodes, and messages in the same DHT.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#142

Post by acdha »

shark_laser wrote: post #72
acdha wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has been at absolute worst a minor annoyance. This is easy to say when there is little adoption and attackers don’t care about the network. It doesn’t mean it’ll remain true if that changes. Proof of work is much less effective when people are willing to use botnets and paid relays complicate life for regular users so there’s a cap on how aggressively that can be used.

Proof of Work secures Bitcoin, and people definitely care about that.

How much money have people spent on Bitcoin because of PoW? All those billions were spent because as a speculative vehicle they thought they’d see even greater returns but that doesn’t mean that any other service will see a correspondingly high willingness to spend large amounts of real money.

This is especially challenging in the social space where people are accustomed to not paying and you have significant network effects from anyone being able to sign up for free. Bitcoin’s transaction fees are one of the major reasons why it failed as a currency and that has orders of magnitude fewer messages.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#143

Post by telephone3 »

treyd wrote: post #25
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.

Email is currently more decentralized than Nostr is in practice.

"I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web+email server at home, paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first-class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much.

Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to a VPS. No luck. I quickly understood that self-hosting email was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I have been fighting back out of pure spite, obstinacy, and activism. In other words, because it was the right thing to do.

But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.

(After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel, Carlos Fenollosa, 2022)"

From the article, quoting this other article

https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-...

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#144

Post by dahrkael »

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?)

in my case Spain with the DNI 3.0 but as others commented its a thing in many of them

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#145

Post by leephillips »

Diti wrote: post #111
leephillips wrote: post #51

“my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.” FUD. I and many others on HN run our own email servers with essentially no delivery problems.

Really? How did you manage to get past the Outlook blocks? Those were always the problematic ones for me.

After setting up dkim, dmarc, etc. I've had no problems in the past decade except for one person using aol. I told him that his email was broken and if he wanted to receive my email he needed to fix it. I don’t count such things as deliverabilty problems, but as receivability problems on the other end.

I’ve never sent any kind of bulk email and I suppose my host has a good IP. Everything I do depends critically on email deliverability, often to addresses I’ve never sent to before, so if I had a problem I would certainly know about it.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#146

Post by camgunz »

"Take some ordinary, off-the-shelf servers. Treat them as dumb, untrusted pipes. Their job is just to relay information. They don’t own the keys—you own your keys. You sign messages with your key, then post them to one or more relays. Other users follow one or more relays. When they get a message, they use your key to verify you sent it. That’s it!"

This is NNTP.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#147

Post by camgunz »

telephone3 wrote: post #143
treyd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is currently more decentralized than Nostr is in practice.

"I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web+email server at home, paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first-class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much. Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to…

If you do all the stuff (DKIM etc) AND you're not on a banned IP, you're fine. It seems like this person couldn't find a non-banned IP. I know plenty of people who self host email and successfully send to Gmail.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#148

Post by camgunz »

nunobrito wrote: post #100
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…

NOSTR is built to behave like existing platforms when desired. You are forgetting the fundamental difference that brought NOSTR to life: your identity and your texts being verifiable as yours. NOSTR was a response to the situation where virtually all other social media platforms could basically block your identity and delete all your posts. There is no such drastic possibility at this platform. Sure enough that relay…

No, they're verifiable as having been signed by a key. You can still call yourself "Michael Jackson's Ghost". This is the only identity verification people care about, the big bad "send us proof you are who you say you are" gate.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#149

Post by abc123abc123 »

camgunz wrote: post #147
telephone3 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web+email server at home, paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first-class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much. Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to…

If you do all the stuff (DKIM etc) AND you're not on a banned IP, you're fine. It seems like this person couldn't find a non-banned IP. I know plenty of people who self host email and successfully send to Gmail.

Yep. Know plenty of selfhosters who run email successfully. In fact, with all the email in a box packages out there, it's never been easier to self-host emails. One recommendation for those who are interested, is to choose a reputable VPS host with clean IP:s.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#150

Post by lxgr »

bawolff wrote: post #95
strbean wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> Hopefully some day we will get state-managed PKI, and citizens will get used to handling their keys appropriately. Passports have had keys in them for a while now (so-called "e-passports")

These keys are intentionally not usable for non-repudiable signatures.
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