41–50 of 171 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
how is it any more difficult than taking care of a password?
People also take care of their house keys and their wallets, but If I lose the keys to my house, it isn't automatically taken over by squatters and if I lose my ID card I can issue a new one quickly.
What happens if you lose the cryptographic key to your nostr account? Who do you call for help?
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.
Also, beyond just no positive incentives, there are nontrivial negatives... they're hubs for an entire network, which can be a lot of traffic and bandwidth if peers are sharing anything other than text. That's a potentially significant cost for literally just being a dumb router. The idea of charging for this doesn't make sense... you don't choose a router, it's automatic based on location, so there's no incentive for quality. That ends up being a race to the bottom, which there's no room for arbitrage; prices are driven down to near-zero profit.
Abuse-wise, the model is fundamentally flawed. Economically, the idea kinda works so long as hub traffic is low enough to be swallowed in background noise for whoever manages the hub. Beyond that the model breaks pretty quickly.
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 think the blogosphere is the most succesful distributed social network. People just dont like viewing it that way.
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…
"Each server, being privately owned, can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please and users are free to choose what to read and from where." Doesn't this same line of thinking apply to the Internet as a whole? Couldn't your question of "Why would anyone use Nostr?" equally be asked for "Why would anyone use a web browser?"
A relay is a stream of stuff you then have to filter
It's really like apples and oranges, web pages or blog sites is probably a better thing to ask about than web browsers
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
how is it any more difficult than taking care of a password?
What happens when the key is lost, and the consequences like "lose all your money" or "lose your account access" are non-starters, as someone who owns a hardware key for my email account
Multi-sig wallets are even more complicated and not for normies
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.
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 something is in one's list.
I pitched a P2P platform like this years ago to NLNet (taking heavy inspiration from I2P's Syndie app, minus the funky UX), though I didn't manage to get any funding due to missing clout as a public developer; to lead such an effort.
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.
Nostr will always be a fringe network. The normies do not want to manage their own keys.
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 safer means like m of n schemes mixed with traditional "hard" storage in geographically distributed safe deposit boxes or whatever, while less important keys can be treated in a more relaxed fashion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
how is it any more difficult than taking care of a password?
Can I click a link to reset my keys? What happens when the key is lost, and the consequences like "lose all your money" or "lose your account access" are non-starters, as someone who owns a hardware key for my email account Multi-sig wallets are even more complicated and not for normies
It is the same problem.