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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

#81

Post by Nevermark »

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.

> because it [acknowledges the plain fact that unknown] peers are untrustworthy

FTFY

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#82

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

bflesch wrote: 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…

> You'd need to put immense trust into the "filtering" process

I think their audience for that page is people who want to implement those filters. It's not like you can log into nostr and start browsing any more than you can log into https and start browsing.

I don't appreciate the content either but a protocol that doesn't create high value targets for corruption (e.g. certificate authorities) is useful independent of the regrettable vibes that its fan club has. You're not going to catch their cooties if your public key is database-adjacent to someone else's.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#83

Post by therein »

shark_laser wrote: post #72
acdha wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You missed the point of what he is saying. The point is, proof of work used to post stuff to relays etc. is not solving the spam issue that Nostr is yet to face due to network effects. Your quip about people care about PoW because bitcoin uses it is just a very unrelated statement that is super off base.

Nostr relays are like Discord "servers" if they were actually servers you could deploy yourself and each client had a cryptographic identity and was used in DMs. You can have the same UI to interact with them all. But they are disjoint. You can interact with people in the channels as long as you subscribe to the same "relay" etc.

Also you keep bringing up Lightning as if it is successful but it is not. It failed in every way. Its model simply does not make sense unless you are a node that receives as much as it sends or sends as much as it receives. You know this yourself if you are a Lightning user. Bitcoin is cool, crypto is cool, even Nostr is cool but some of your statements are conflicting with each other and they aren't making great points.

I tried Nostr but like a lot of people here have been saying, it falls short in many ways due to the way it is structured. Relays are not really relays, they are more but also less. They are like community servers. Sure you can connect to many, have the same UI, but they are still disjoint and feels lonely.

You keep saying you can sign your messages and there is value there to people who are saying it is censorable in the ways they described.

This is not a personal thing, I want to like Nostr and I tried using it. I can and would probably get some use out of using it as a pubsub or message delivery infrastructure for two things I want to connect but what if the relay goes down? It is like a centralized pubsub messagebox thing. But can't even do that fully.

That other guy that said it is just like writing a message, signing it, posting it on X, Facebook, YouTube and BlueSky. People who follow those places can see it. There needs to be some sort of relay to relay communication (actual relaying) that needs to go on. And that wouldn't scale, even if it would work for now.

Protocol itself is simple and nice to have. Could be cool as a transport. The concept is uniquely situated too but using it the way it initially came out as feels like trying to shove a square into a circular hole.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#84

Post by viccis »

mothballed wrote: post #32
viccis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Repressing rather than refuting pretty closely models real life though. Usually if you violate social norms people just push you out of the group and not bother explaining it to you. Not always, but usually. Yes if it is so bad it gets violent or something you will find out for sure why, but if you just show up to a friend function and start spouting off about gassing the jews or something most likely people just won…

Socialization usually involves corrective action and nuance. A platform that will give you an AI issued permaban for saying "Say that again and I'll knock ur block off pal" about some silly topic makes people too aware of the repression and then it's sublimated in communities that approve of actually heinous stuff.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#85

Post by _lvbh »

verdverm wrote: post #69
beeflet wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what happens if you lose your password? You click a link to reset it, and it gets sent to your email. What happens if you lose access to your email password? It is the same problem.

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.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#87

Post by shakna »

shark_laser wrote: post #70
acdha wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you summarize how those prevent the listed problems? Tossing around absolutes like “you cannot censor Nostr” sounds like a religious assertion rather than technical analysis.

I have posted very similar replies to other messages in this thread and don't want to repeat myself too much at the risk of being considered spam. But... Outbox model prevents censorship because you push your (cryptographically signed and so impossible to impersonate) messages 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 a…

Encrypted but not always leak proof. [0] There have been viable attacks for relays to perform.

[0] https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1459

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#88

Post by throwawaysoxjje »

noman-land wrote: post #49
rglullis wrote: post #20

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…

Not really sure this analogy works since the usability of my house and everything in it is unrelated to having them. The house keys only make getting into my house easier.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#90

Post by Bolwin »

Retr0id wrote: post #6
nunobrito wrote: post #4

Nowadays a NOSTR "relay" isn't exactly a relay any longer, is it? Should likely be called a "database server" since it's main purpose is to host user data and perform queries over it. A relay is something connecting two devices and makes a best effort to get out of their way. Nevertheless: NOSTR is the most exciting social network that I've seen in the past 20 years. The concept of owning the keys without a blockchai…

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

atproto is literally one server
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