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Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

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21–30 of 171 posts

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#21
post #7

> Take some ordinary, off-the-shelf servers. Treat them as dumb, untrusted pipes. Sounds like REST. The original REST, not the botched CRUD that companies pushed for. https://roy.gbiv.com/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dissertation... > The combination of layered system and uniform interface constraints induces architectural properties similar to those of the uniform pipe-and-filter style. See also Figure 5-8. The disser…

The key thing is that all messages are signed and have a few standard fields, making them easy to replicate across many relays while maintaining the ability to verify their origin. And the second thing being that it is based on websockets, allowing the client to maintain an open connection and have new data be pushed instantly rather than relying on polling.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#22
The presentation of blockchains as some kind of historical imperative would be downright Marx-like if it weren't for the primary difference that Marx put some thought into justifying his position. It's eminently possible to cryptographically secure software without lugging around an immutable distributed database because you're emotionally invested in the idea.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#23
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…

By the “sewage” analogy you are expressing the assumption that the vast majority of what people write is outright toxic and that being exposed to it is actively hurtful.

My experience on the internet does not reflect this, this is a very pessimistic view of people, bordering on perl-clutching.

Most raw user generated feeds are not great sure, but it’s mostly mediocre jokes and mildly provocative takes from bored trolls, and that’s usually a loud minority. Most people either lurk or make a modest effort now and then, particularly in niche communities like this where most people aware of it will already be fairly deeply immersed in tech. People have better things to do than to constantly be aggressively offensive, I imagine it gets old fast, and you really need to go out of your way to write something that legitimately hurts an adult.

Sure of course there are corners that are cesspits of hate, but they tend to band together and it is quite hard to bump into them accidentally. And when you do, you just feel slightly disgusted for a second, turn back and forget about it.

Some moderation is critical, but it usually needs to only be enforced for a few bad apples, most people act with decency and common sense, even when anonymous. And yes including people with lesser means and/or from shitty countries. People from different cultures are mostly the same when you peal away superficial customs, and I find much more in common with someone of my age with similar interests from the other side of the world, than with a grumpy old neighbor frankly. At least that’s my experience.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#24

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

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).

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#25
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.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#26

For who might be pulled in by the vague title, not knowing what a nostr is, thinking this article has anything to do with evolution - it has nothing to do with evolution or nature. Not one example of nature trying to evolve a nostr is descibed. Maybe like... the author thought a nostr is similar to, I dunno, a pack or tribe or something?

It's clearly a tongue in cheek joke about the progression of projects with similar goals that reach imperfect outcomes, with the implicit assumption that Nostr represents the ideal solution.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#27

It has been long predicted that federated models (like Nostr) just degrade into a few providers that monetize in the same way they would if the network was centralized. It's the worst of both worlds between centralization and real decentralization — which (unfortunately to the haters) almost certain requires Byzantine fault tolerant consensus (blockchains). Same thing over and over again.

Nostr doesn't even have the decoupling afforded by what we typically think of when we think of federated networks (email, activitypub, matrix). If you and another party aren't using the same relay, there is 0 way for you to interact. It assumes either you pre-agree on a relay (sticky defaults encouraging centralization) or shotgun messages to many relays (economies of scale encourgaing centralization). The protocol explicitly forbids relays from forwarding to each other.

Nostr is a very simple protocol that could have been invented in essence in 1995. There's a reason it wasn't invented until recently, because it's difficult to build robust protocols with good guarantees about discoverability and reliability with a foundation that is as limited as it is.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#28
post #23
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…

By the “sewage” analogy you are expressing the assumption that the vast majority of what people write is outright toxic and that being exposed to it is actively hurtful. My experience on the internet does not reflect this, this is a very pessimistic view of people, bordering on perl-clutching. Most raw user generated feeds are not great sure, but it’s mostly mediocre jokes and mildly provocative takes from bored trol…

My experience is that most forum style social media has been devoured into the reddit world, and furthermore that any attempt at making an offsite version of reddit or similar forum-like functionality is either locked down with rules that would make the Stasi blush or quickly converges on a new Stormfront forum.

The problem with reddit's panopticon moderation, with its ill defined, nebulously (and now AI) enforcement of sitewide policies, ends up repressing a negative behavior rather than refuting it, and, when people move to a similar off-reddit site, they are itching to start taking part in discourse they weren't allowed to before.

The end result is that people who are used to policing their own speech to avoid the panopticon rather than because it's the right thing to do eventually lose that moral code that was previously shaped by discourse and pushback from their peers rather than anonymous opaque moderation.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#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 relaying anything. It sounds like a single dumb, untrusted message store on a single server that doesn't relay anything anywhere. It even specifically says "Relays don’t talk to each other, and users only need to join a small number of relays to gain autonomy—at least two, and certainly less than a dozen".

Not sure where the less than a dozen relay bit comes from. Are they expecting clients to do all the relaying between the relays? If so, wouldn't you get every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message. It sounds like the complete opposite of what you actually want. The article seems to just stop short at exactly the point when it should say how what they're proposing actually works.

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