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Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

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Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#91

Post by evbogue »

meibo wrote: post #11

Anything Jack is involved in is tainted for me until further notice. I wouldn't even dare to touch any of his new platforms, seeing his connections with Elon and how his judgement failed so spectacularly with the Twitter deal - it's not worth it, just to be sold out again when he gets bored of it or it doesn't end up being a business. At least he admitted to it. I'm not saying Mastodon is the solution, but at least n…

Jack is great. He has a big heart. He should fund retro secure scuttlebot (rss). We're putting together a team right now.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#92

Post by evbogue »

nine_k wrote: post #78

I have to repeat my most important concern about Nostr from ~3 months ago[1]: Nostr makes you forward data from strangers unencrypted. If anything unlawful which you forward for Nostr is ever found on your computer, or found transmitted from your computer, you'd have fun time to explain to the authorities how it even ended up on your machine, and why are you disseminating it. Encryption is not trivially easy to intro…

Yes, this is where Secure Scuttlebot is superior.

Why would you connect to people out of your friend of a friend zone?

An algorithm should decide who you are relaying.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#93

Post by scsibug »

drexlspivey wrote: post #71
kvathupo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, the raison d'être of nostr is to use relays to store your data, which is presented on clients. So if a front-end bans you, then you can grab your data off any relay. If imgur shuts down, you're out of luck! Bluesky goes further with the AT protocol for more general data and algorithms iirc

Relays don't (have to) store your data, they relay in real time via websockets. Clients should store the data if they care about persistence

Practically all relays will store your data if they are going to act as a relay for you at all. Very few things on Nostr work with ephemeral events alone.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#94

Post by evbogue »

nine_k wrote: post #78

I have to repeat my most important concern about Nostr from ~3 months ago[1]: Nostr makes you forward data from strangers unencrypted. If anything unlawful which you forward for Nostr is ever found on your computer, or found transmitted from your computer, you'd have fun time to explain to the authorities how it even ended up on your machine, and why are you disseminating it. Encryption is not trivially easy to intro…

I guess what I meant to say, for those who missed out on the good old scuttlebot days, is that encryption is trivial and also you should not be syncing strangers.

People have solved these problems before, and we will solve them again.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#95

Post by dangoor »

drexlspivey wrote: post #79
dangoor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The web and email got effectively centralized… Woah there. I don't agree with this. The web is certainly not centralized (this is on Hacker News and not Facebook, right?) It follows a power law distribution where you have some players getting lots of traffic and then there are lots and lots of small traffic sites. But it's definitely decentralized. _Google_ is something of a monopoly providing some of the features…

Email is centralized in the sense that you might run your own server/domain but if Google decides you are bad and stops federating with you you might as well not exist. Who are you going to exchange mail with if most people are on Gmail? That’s very different than Google banning your account where you can just switch to Bing for search.

Fair point, though I suspect that Google not accepting mail from a particular provider without good reason would cause a bit of an uproar.

I definitely wouldn't recommend that folks try to run their own mail servers, so it's true that email is more consolidated than the web.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#97

Post by thisgoesnowhere »

redder23 wrote: post #76
neilk wrote: post #12

> Resilience is provided by the protocol being simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice. Platform lock-in is impossible, since any client can republish any note to a different relay if one misbehaves or enacts a disagreeable policy. That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email and both are effectively controlled by large companies. Twitter is centralized d…

Email is not "controlled" by large companies. People choose to use large companies and let them read their emails because they are stupid. Email has not evolved in any way BECAUSE its NOT controlled by some company. If Google could, they would do even more evil with email that "just" reading all your mails. To compare Twitter with email makes absolutely no sense. Yes Twitter is a totally controlled thing by a single…

What percentage of your reach do you lose if google blacklists your domain?

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#98

Post by nine_k »

evbogue wrote: post #94
nine_k wrote: post #78

I have to repeat my most important concern about Nostr from ~3 months ago[1]: Nostr makes you forward data from strangers unencrypted. If anything unlawful which you forward for Nostr is ever found on your computer, or found transmitted from your computer, you'd have fun time to explain to the authorities how it even ended up on your machine, and why are you disseminating it. Encryption is not trivially easy to intro…

I guess what I meant to say, for those who missed out on the good old scuttlebot days, is that encryption is trivial and also you should not be syncing strangers. People have solved these problems before, and we will solve them again.

Certainly! But they need to be solved first, and key distribution / trust is a bit more involved than just message propagation.

Not synching strangers may sort of miss the point of "censorship resistance". A group of people that know each other can use e.g. Signal to share data, with very good guarantees of protection from outside snooping or pressure. I thought that one of the key parts of Nostr's idea is the ability to find forwarding nodes without being personally friends with node operators, much like Bittorrent or IPFS.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#99

Post by evbogue »

nine_k wrote: post #98
evbogue wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what I meant to say, for those who missed out on the good old scuttlebot days, is that encryption is trivial and also you should not be syncing strangers. People have solved these problems before, and we will solve them again.

Certainly! But they need to be solved first, and key distribution / trust is a bit more involved than just message propagation. Not synching strangers may sort of miss the point of "censorship resistance". A group of people that know each other can use e.g. Signal to share data, with very good guarantees of protection from outside snooping or pressure. I thought that one of the key parts of Nostr's idea is the abilit…

Yah, you've got it. Nostr is heading in this direction that scuttlebot already achieved (at one moment in time) by eventually developing encryption over a wire and having a sync strategy.

Right now Nostr (mostly) parks everyone's data on the relays without a strategy. On ssb there was a strategy, which was that relays are also friends and they decide what they keep for you. FOAF gossip and replication. I'm sure there's a repo with some old node.js code in it somewhere around here that describes it.

We'll get beyond this, and we're putting together the team to redevelop scuttlebot right now.

If you're interested, hollar. We have no funding.

Re: Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction

#100

Post by im3w1l »

Zamicol wrote: post #53
anarchogeek wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a good write-up comparing SSB and Nostr. https://mattlorentz.com/weblog/2023/01/18/nostr-v-ssb.html

In my mind, key rotation is foundational, and neither system appears to support that.

My counterpoint would be that key rotation, while nice isn't essential, and it comes with a lot of complexity and trade offs. In particular, it really steers the design towards integrating with a blockchain which many people have understandable reservations against.
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