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Nostr – Decentralized social network

nostr.com

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Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their website: >Nostr is a protocol, designed for simplicity, that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network. So they basically want to create twitter without Musk (or anyone in charge for that matter). Nothing wrong with that goal, it's just highly unlikely to succeed given the fundamental shortcomings of this approach.

"A global network" doesn't mean "the dominant global network", though. Mastodon is global, for example.

Just for the record: Mastodon is not a network, but a server app. The network is the Fediverse and the dominant protocol (currently) is W3C ActivityPub.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#152
post #146
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fun analogy, but I think a better match would be that Thunderbird immediately says that it is an email program.

From my first look I had no idea whether this is an app to connect to Nostr or a completely separate and iOS only network.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

Yes, but I think there are different sets of users.

Users like you probably are going to want to be where the largest and most diverse group of people is, which will be the largest service. That is currently, by far and away, Twitter. Moving those people away from Twitter, if they do not already have a strong motivation (either socio-political, or use policy, or because their friends and follows have all moved somewhere else), is unlikely, but in any case most of the users who are like you are going to be with the largest service. I doubt that we will have two equally sized services, at least not for quite some time, because many people who are not very disaffected with Twitter will not move.

The most disaffected groups are the ones who have the highest incentive to move to a new platform, and currently many of these fall into the "disgruntled" category, often for socio-political reasons. It makes sense to think that these will be over-represented in the group that makes a serious effort to move to the new platform (if you look at who comprised the surge of users of Mastodon, or something like Post, you can see that this is definitely the case). Bluesky will, at least initially, be like this, I think. In the long run, though, you're right -- most people will want to be with the larger, diverse platform.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Good points.

It will be interesting to see how things shake out, certainly, and where we are in the microblogging space in, say, 6 months.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#155
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how this is any different than an app with "gems" you can buy and re-sell back to the app. The difference is that the Bitcoin transaction will cause millions of computers to waste a serious amount of electricity calculating hashes over and over.

IIRC lightning network transactions only use as much electricity as 10 emails, although I guess at some point a real Bitcoin transaction will happen eventually.

Yeah pretty much. A lightning channel is a bit like putting money down as a retainer for a lawyer, or putting a deposit down in a hotel.

The real transaction happens at the beginning, and another transaction happens at the end when the channel closes and we settle out who gets the remainder.

Re: Nostr – Decentralized social network

#156
post #147
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does it rate-limit based on? If it's just IP address then I doubt that'll do much good as it won't stop any spammer worth their salt and yet could affect large groups stuck behind a NAT device.
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