Are a lot of people using Nostr now? I frequently get recommendations from people to look at stuff on Bluesky, Twitter, or Mastodon, but I think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559138 is the first time I've seen anything posted on Nostr.
Nostr and ATProto (2024)
61–70 of 74 posts
Re: Nostr and ATProto (2024)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
true, however >You can read and leave comments on this post here on Bluesky, or here on Nostr, or even here on Mastodon. the only link that doesn't work is the Nostr one, the content doesn't load for me
That's not an issue with Nostr, it's an issue with the client that they decided to link to. Here's the content loading just fine in Primal: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsqfeuezj38syyppscdpu0c0zwermxl...
Okay, so I think this is the first time I've seen something posted on Nostr. Unless maybe I saw it on another client where it looked very different?
Re: Nostr and ATProto (2024)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reason you don't see more of these is because an isolated experience is... well, isolated. I don't understand why you become isolated once you've built your own app, it it because the bluesky firehouse has to decide to index posts I make on my server? I guess I'm asking how does an application decide which sources to index from, just anyone advertising that they are serving that lexicon? Why then would I become…
Hmm, no, that’s not what I meant. Let me try to break it down a bit. There’s really two main kinds of nodes in the system. Hosting servers and app servers. They’re completely unrelated and completely decoupled. It’s like Dropbox vs apps that put data in your Dropbox. A hosting server stores your personal data. This is similar to having a Git repository with data from all social apps. Or like a Dropbox folder. That’s…
Thanks for the patient explanation. It surprises me that an aggregator would simply start distributing from any server that announces it has content for that application. Moderation without false positives must be a beast.
Re: Nostr and ATProto (2024)
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it practical for an individual with a $4 VPS to spin up a mastadon server + front end client for their own use and have it interact with existing servers? Curious how much friction there is that users end up in on someone else's machine
He's talking about Nostr here, not mastodon.
Ah makes more sense thanks. iirc mastadon doesn't have much of an identity migration story, except for using domain control as proof of identity which is kinda neat. I still like DNS and TLDs as a pay-to-play distributed namespace if you're going to have a persistent identity that can travel from server to server, and change hands as property from one owner to another. (I think there is case law on domain names being property, somewhat unique in cyberspace)
Re: Nostr and ATProto (2024)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The magic moment is importing your secret key into an alternate client and all your contacts, posts, and feed populate from the data stored in the relays.
Is it practical for an individual with a $4 VPS to spin up a mastadon server + front end client for their own use and have it interact with existing servers? Curious how much friction there is that users end up in on someone else's machine
Mastodon is a fairly finicky beast, has a few dependencies that you also have to manage (redis, sidekiq, Postgres), and is surprisingly resource intensive.
So you can do it, but it’s not really designed for that use case.
I would be great if there were a full-featured single user ActivityPub server, but last time I looked, there wasn’t really.
Re: Nostr and ATProto (2024)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
just a theory, but as atproto matures, there are now other example projects using the protocol for other things besides "distributed twitter clone". for example, tangled was talked about yesterday. [1] and that probably came up because more people are wondering about the future of github as it becomes more integrated into microsoft. as things become more centralized, interest in decentralization goes up. [1]: https:/…
I think partially it's because momentum is picking up in the AT ecosystem. Since all data lives in a single conceptual space, you start seeing community services like https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ (backlinks without running your own index), https://slices.network/ (indexes data you want and gives you a GraphQL/REST endpoint), independent relays ( https://atproto.africa/ ), and so on. To give you an example, h…
I wonder if one could perhaps create an RSS reader app by piggybacking on ATProto purely for broadcasting change events, with the feed themselves still located at their traditional address? Basically reviving Google Reader on ATProto infra.
Re: Nostr and ATProto (2024)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
just a theory, but as atproto matures, there are now other example projects using the protocol for other things besides "distributed twitter clone". for example, tangled was talked about yesterday. [1] and that probably came up because more people are wondering about the future of github as it becomes more integrated into microsoft. as things become more centralized, interest in decentralization goes up. [1]: https:/…
I think partially it's because momentum is picking up in the AT ecosystem. Since all data lives in a single conceptual space, you start seeing community services like https://constellation.microcosm.blue/ (backlinks without running your own index), https://slices.network/ (indexes data you want and gives you a GraphQL/REST endpoint), independent relays ( https://atproto.africa/ ), and so on. To give you an example, h…
thank you for sharing these links, if it isn't too much to ask, could you or someone reading this compile a list of useful / interesting ATproto endpoints for HN?
Re: Nostr and ATProto (2024)
#68Are a lot of people using Nostr now? I frequently get recommendations from people to look at stuff on Bluesky, Twitter, or Mastodon, but I think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559138 is the first time I've seen anything posted on Nostr.
Every time I've seen a nostr trending feed it's been 100% cryptocurrency chat, so I assume it's only popular within those circles
Re: Nostr and ATProto (2024)
#69whats with the sudden upsurge in interest in ATProto related stuff on HN? Not that I am complaining. I am glad to see something else take AI's spot but just curious. Last month or so has been very busy with something or the other ATProto related
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Re: Nostr and ATProto (2024)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, no, that’s not what I meant. Let me try to break it down a bit. There’s really two main kinds of nodes in the system. Hosting servers and app servers. They’re completely unrelated and completely decoupled. It’s like Dropbox vs apps that put data in your Dropbox. A hosting server stores your personal data. This is similar to having a Git repository with data from all social apps. Or like a Dropbox folder. That’s…
Thanks for the patient explanation. It surprises me that an aggregator would simply start distributing from any server that announces it has content for that application. Moderation without false positives must be a beast.
The way I think about it, ingesting a stream of records from an arbitrary server is not any different to ingesting a series of POST requests from someone’s computer. It doesn’t make moderation different.
Moderation in AT is layered. Hosting servers do their own moderation but it’s very minimal (just trying to catch illegal content early). Relay operators also have levers to stop broadcasting from specific nodes if they’re problematic (but again, this is reserved for either extreme illegal content or for network abuse). Most of what you’d think as moderation happens at the app server level, which is the same as in non-AT apps. The app server can easily choose to not serve a certain user’s posts even if they exist upstream at their hosting.
One wrinkle is that AT goes a step further and extracts moderation primitives (“labelers”) as a separate thing — for example, you can ingest Bluesky’s moderation decisions from a separate service (and the Bluesky app server listens to the same service). This makes moderation composable, and also lets someone make a fork of Bluesky that “listens” to a different moderation authority.