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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

#151

Post by lxgr »

dahrkael wrote: post #105
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).

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

Neither do all EU member states (in case you mean that by "European") issue ID cards, nor do the ones that do universally enable them for digital signatures.

Many EU countries have existing e-signature rails completely independent from physical ID cards, which only have to conform to ICAO document verification standards (and these are intentionally not usable in an e-signature context).

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#152

Post by lxgr »

noman-land wrote: post #49
rglullis wrote: post #20

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

Normies manage their house keys just fine. Obviously crypto keys come with different challenges but that's a UX problem. People losing their house keys is not generally an Earth shattering event. Losing a crypto key doesn't have to be either. A wallet is easier to lose than a bank vault, but it also holds less money for the same reason. Crypto keys can be designed the same way, with high importance keys managed by sa…

> Normies manage their house keys just fine.

Your local locksmith would beg to differ.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#153

Post by nout »

immibis wrote: post #102
ralferoo wrote: post #30

Reading the comments below make me feel like I should maybe be expected to already know what nostr is. But anyway, I don't and reading this article, it felt like it just suddenly cut off at the end. It explained all the traditional approaches, which are all able to help discoverability and shareability of data between servers, and then says "the solution is relays" and then describes something that doesn't seem to be…

Nostr is one of those thought-terminating cults, you know, identical to "blockchain solves this" or "AGI solves this". And "Nostr can't be censored" is, of course, a statement identical to "Blockchain solves all consensus problems" and "AI can do anything better than a human."

Yeah, there are some stupid memes about nostr. I'd rephrase it as "nostr is harder to censor than other networks" like ActivityPub or AT Proto based.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#154

Post by lxgr »

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?)

German ID cards also support eID functionality on their citizen ID cards and even permanent resident ID cards, but ironically EU citizens are qualified for the issuance of neither, so they had to introduce another type of card for them to not run afoul of EU anti-discrimination laws.

All of this is currently pretty messy and there's only limited practical cross-country acceptance of eIDAS signatures, but is supposed to get unified under the banner of EUDI (EU Digital Identity) "wallets".

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#155

Post by lxgr »

bawolff wrote: post #94
rglullis wrote: post #20

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

People seem to manage their whatsapp (or signal, etc) keys just fine. Because its an app that just stores it as a file and doesn't tell you about it. So i think there are viable solutions here. It mostly just means having an app to manage the keys for you.

> People seem to manage their whatsapp (or signal, etc) keys just fine.

The opposite is the case: WhatsApp and Signal manage the keys for them, mostly in the background (unless you actively verify identities).

You can try it yourself: Turn off your phone, ask a friend to send you a message, throw your phone into a volcano, reactivate your account on a new phone without entering any secret keys. You'll still receive the message.

I personally think that most of Signal's and even WhatsApp's tradeoffs are reasonable for a product with an adaption of hundreds of millions, but it's decidedly not cryptographic self-custody.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#156

Post by curtisblaine »

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…

> If I want to get exposed to "different morals" I just open any of the other existing social networks. Until then I'm stuck here

I think the point is that "opening all other existing social networks" to get a rounded point of view has immense friction, especially in an enshittified world. Even with supposedly non-enshittified solutions like Mastodon, for example, you have to subscribe with different users to distinct instances that allow only a subset of the network and manage that for you. They can alter their banlist behind your back, for starters, so you have to manage that as well.

The proposal of Nostr is that you can follow as many relays as you want, in the same app, with the same user. Compare to having separate accounts for Facebook, X, Threads, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, and .

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#157

Post by nout »

ralferoo wrote: post #133
shark_laser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 receiv…

Well, you are right. This article sort of sucks in explaining anything and it is also already outdated. Understandably your summary of how it could work is wrong and the article is indeed to blame.

My suggestion would be to skip it and learn about nostr from other sources. I'm on Nostr since almost the beginning and it's been very exciting to watch. For reference my android client app (Amethyst) is currently directly connected to 390 relays (using the new "outbox model") and it works well, no slow down, no battery drain.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#158

Post by AuthAuth »

attila-lendvai wrote: post #139
AuthAuth wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean from multiple accounts. The idea is that they will get tired of constantly have to block content they don't want to see and they will understand why other people try to enforce stronger moderation defaults.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#159

Post by nout »

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.

It's not easy to spam someone on Nostr. The apps that users use have multiple options that make it into a non problem. There is a lot of spam and offensive content, but you just don't get to see it unless you look at "global" feed and that's now quite hidden in most apps. Essentially your app restricts to seeing content from people you follow and then you limit visibility on random replies to posts.

Now nostr is actually much bigger than "twitter-like" app, including powering app stores, chat apps, collaboration, podcasts, music player, etc.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#160

Post by bflesch »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #76
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…

It depends on if you frame it as a service versus as infrastructure that a service uses. The public roadways are similar streams of unfiltered sewage yet we see billboards along them and large businesses that care about appearances connect to them. Meanwhile gated communities also exist but are far from the norm. > showing up in another context with your name attached, directly next to some extremely degenerate trash…

Such a bad comparison. The correct picture would be 10.000 people from St. Petersburg whose main job it is to drive through my street with a local number plate a million times per day, just to demonstrate to me that there is so much traffic on my road.

The economies of scale for creating sewage in social media are basically unbounded. Tens of thousands of people have a 9 to 5 job which consists of creating sewage content just to steer people towards a certain narrative.

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