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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

#161

Post by bflesch »

mhitza wrote: post #46
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 that moderation should be pushed to the individual user to avoid censorship, but not in the form it's currently implemented by all these platforms. To give an example on how I think moderation should work. If I follow you and you follow me on some nonexistent platform Y. You see the content I upvote, and I can see the content you upvote. So we'd start with block all by default, with transparency of why someth…

Yes, the trust and content moderation needs to be a central part for the social network to be successful. The P2P aspect is a technical detail but in order to invest into yet another thing, it needs to have certain attractiveness.

Why are HN people moving to lobste.rs? Because it is an exclusive community.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#162

Post by fc417fc802 »

bflesch wrote: post #160
fc417fc802 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

It's not a comparison but rather an analogy. Certainly it's quite a rough one. But it illustrates my key point well enough - that it is realistic to view infrastructure in a more or less neutral manner even when reputations are on the line.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#164

Post by fiatjaf »

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…

It's quite simple:

- You publish to, say, 3 relays.

- I follow you or want to browse your content for any reason.

- I connect to your 3 relays and fetch your content.

If I want to follow someone else and they publish to other relays I fetch their posts from those relays.

If some of your relays start censoring you you can move to other relays, or run your own, and I'll start fetching your content from those.

There's an interactive animation demo at https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/#/outbox that explains it.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#165

Post by strbean »

krapp wrote: post #137
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).

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 (look…

There's certainly a middle ground. I'd like to have A WAY to authenticate with the US government, other than an in-person ID check or a random private company.

It would be great if governments provided the option to authenticate with third party PKI. Having a public option would be nice as well. Identity management and verification is a core competency of government, after all.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#166

Post by verdverm »

_lvbh wrote: post #85
verdverm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My email has multiple recovery methods It's not the same problem

Send your key to your email. Then it's less secure but I take it you wouldn't mind.

This attitude (the snark) is why Nostr fails to attract any meaningful number of users outside of the crypto bro cult(ure)

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#167

Post by bawolff »

rglullis wrote: post #129
bawolff wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there are costs involved in the trade off, but the benefit is a system that actually works for the average user.

My point is that is this is not a trade-off but a complete violation of the principles that are used to justify the existence of nostr. Nostr's whole shtick is about "users owning their keys". If I can not change the keys used on WhatsApp or Signal, I do not own them. They are not in the same class , so the comparison is moot.

I dont see any reason why an app approach cant support that.

But honestly one of the reasons why these sorts of apps dont take off, is they rigidly adhere to security properties that dont make sense and nobody really cares about, at the expense of making an unusable app.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#168

Post by beeflet »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #57
beeflet wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the blockchain is useful in solving double-spending problems in purely p2p applications. Aside from cryptocurrency, take for example name systems like namecoin or ENS: these systems need a way of reconciling who owns what, which involves synchronizing some data across the whole network. It is inefficient, but the inefficiency seems to lie at some fundamental problem with p2p. Centralized systems need to do the same s…

blockchain isn't inefficient because it's p2p. it's inefficient because it assumes peers are untrustworthy and solves for that by imposing a proof of work, requiring cooperative peers to waste more electricity than bad actors.

assuming peers are trustworthy is assuming away the whole problem.

The problem isn't with p2p, but specifically with full-sync mutexes in p2p. There are petname systems that avoid the problem by avoiding the mutex itself, and there are centralized systems that avoid the p2p, but it comes down to zooko's trilemma.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#169

Post by rglullis »

bawolff wrote: post #167
rglullis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that is this is not a trade-off but a complete violation of the principles that are used to justify the existence of nostr. Nostr's whole shtick is about "users owning their keys". If I can not change the keys used on WhatsApp or Signal, I do not own them. They are not in the same class , so the comparison is moot.

I dont see any reason why an app approach cant support that. But honestly one of the reasons why these sorts of apps dont take off, is they rigidly adhere to security properties that dont make sense and nobody really cares about, at the expense of making an unusable app.

> I dont see any reason why an app approach cant support that.

Matrix clients have e2ee encryption like Signal or WhatsApp.

Every single one of my close contacts that I have on my server have ignored or misunderstood the instructions to download and store the recovery key when they first access the servers.

I have customers on my support channel who keep trying different clients (Element, ElementX, Fractal) and every time they fail to validate their sessions.

Then I have customers who got their phone stolen and then come asking me to either delete the data on their phone.

---

There is no magic about "putting it in a app to manage it". If any "app approach" you come up with creates a sandbox between user and device, then the user can not even see their private keys, then they effectively do not own it.

If you are doing "nostr, but with keys sandboxed on the device", then you are just recreating Signal - which is not decentralized - then what's the point?

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#170

Post by nout »

rglullis wrote: post #169
bawolff wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont see any reason why an app approach cant support that. But honestly one of the reasons why these sorts of apps dont take off, is they rigidly adhere to security properties that dont make sense and nobody really cares about, at the expense of making an unusable app.

> I dont see any reason why an app approach cant support that. Matrix clients have e2ee encryption like Signal or WhatsApp. Every single one of my close contacts that I have on my server have ignored or misunderstood the instructions to download and store the recovery key when they first access the servers. I have customers on my support channel who keep trying different clients (Element, ElementX, Fractal) and every…

Sandboxing keys on the device is indeed removing one point of nostr, but to clarify on your point: The difference between Signal and Nostr is that in nostr there are hundreds of independent servers (relays) that your app broadcasts events to, whereas on Signal it's just one centralized server.
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