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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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A web browser is a viewing portal to a specific page, accessed upon request 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

a specific page is also stream of stuff you then have to filter

if I bend over backwards far enough, sure, I can see how it can look like that

A relay is more like page updates across all of the internet being event streamed

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#72
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Boom. Same as Nostr, but with existing platforms" - Except without the ability to give and receive real value via zaps, and at the risk of being censored, and losing your entire audience at the whim of the network operators. Spam is basically a solved issue. There's both proof of work and paid relays, not to mention web or trust. It has been at absolute worst a minor annoyance. There's plenty of ways to discover con…

> It has been at absolute worst a minor annoyance. This is easy to say when there is little adoption and attackers don’t care about the network. It doesn’t mean it’ll remain true if that changes. Proof of work is much less effective when people are willing to use botnets and paid relays complicate life for regular users so there’s a cap on how aggressively that can be used.

Proof of Work secures Bitcoin, and people definitely care about that.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Boom. Same as Nostr, but with existing platforms" - Except without the ability to give and receive real value via zaps, and at the risk of being censored, and losing your entire audience at the whim of the network operators. Spam is basically a solved issue. There's both proof of work and paid relays, not to mention web or trust. It has been at absolute worst a minor annoyance. There's plenty of ways to discover con…

> Except without the ability to give and receive real value via zaps, and at the risk of being censored, and losing your entire audience at the whim of the network operators Every large relay has the same problem

Please take a look at my other replies to other posts.

Read about the outbox model, or Bitchat.

The large relays are not required. They are a public service but not essential. There are plenty of community relays charging for access too, and the outbox model means you're not even depending on them. Nostr can and does successfully operate via even Bluetooth Mesh Networks. Search up Bitchat and see how it has been used in Nepal, Indonesia, and elsewhere.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#74

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…

Check the outbox model: https://nostrify.dev/relay/outbox Why would "every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message"? Relays get one client pushing one message. That one message is pushed to multiple relays. To your own preferred relays, as well as to the preferred relays of others who are involved in the conversation, as well as to a couple of global relays for…

> Why would "every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message"?

Because that is the obvious thing that would happen without further implementation details. A few large relays taking the brunt of the vast majority of the network. It isn't an inherently scalable architecture.

Of course you can do other stuff in addition and thereby achieve scalability. At least arguably. But then a relevant explanation needs carefully walk through those additional non-obvious details.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#75

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…

>People losing their house keys is not generally an Earth shattering event.

yes because if you lose your house keys you don't lose your property, precisely because there is an entire legal and governmental apparatus securing it, the exact thing the crypto people first try get rid off and then reinvent (shoddily) when they inevitably discover that nobody wants to live in the jungle

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#76
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

Check out police bodycam footage on youtube for real world examples of exactly this.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check the outbox model: https://nostrify.dev/relay/outbox Why would "every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message"? Relays get one client pushing one message. That one message is pushed to multiple relays. To your own preferred relays, as well as to the preferred relays of others who are involved in the conversation, as well as to a couple of global relays for…

> Why would "every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message"? Because that is the obvious thing that would happen without further implementation details. A few large relays taking the brunt of the vast majority of the network. It isn't an inherently scalable architecture. Of course you can do other stuff in addition and thereby achieve scalability. At least argua…

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.

Your criticisms of the article are valid tho. And I don't think it is unique in its failing. Perhaps Nostr's fatal flaw is in the way it is being sold by its fans, myself included.

But that's OK. It will take off as Bitchat, or Primal, or whatever the next iteration is that figures out a way of selling Nostr's benefits, without confusing people with its implementation.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#78
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

This is not true. Read up on the outbox model. I have linked it elsewhere in replies in this thread. You post to your own preferred relays, as well as to the preferred relays of others who are involved in the conversation, as well as to a couple of global relays for easy discoverability. These global relays are useful, but are interchangeable and totally replaceable. As soon as you've connected with someone you can r…

That's exactly what I'm talking about with having pre-agreed relays. Those relays become preferred as a sticky default, especially with low-sophistication users that don't have organic onboarding paths away from the sticky defaults.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#79
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of nature's many attempts to evolve an atproto. (We are of course all evolving, and the destination is yet to be discovered)

I've been looking at that for quite some time, even met teams members developing the product. Sorry to say: both are fundamentally different technologies and philosophies. NOSTR "accounts" are meant to trivially generated and used outside the context of micro-blogging. That is the reason for being popular, the npub becomes a signature that validates texts and there is value in that. AT always feels like mastodon meet…

> US-centric political moderation on top.

This is something you opt-in to. Two concepts, labels and moderation policy.

You subscribe to "labelers" which will apply labels to posts. You can subscribe to many labelers. Some labelers will be generic or some will be focused on a certain idea/niche. You might have a labeler focusing on nsfw content or another for human vs ai content. Or one who just tags spiders. Labels can be anything, and are stand alone data objects in the atproto ecosystem.

Your moderation policy is up to you, on how to handle those above labels. You can decide to allow, warn, or block for each label applied by your labelers. Warn shows a content warning you must click through first to see.

Bsky does have a default labeler and moderation settings when you sign up, which you might be experiencing.

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