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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

#91

Post by bawolff »

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.

Bitcoin uses proof of work in a very different way then pretty much anyone else.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#92

Post by nunobrito »

pests wrote: post #79
nunobrito wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Thank you for explaining how it works. I'm building a decentralized platform and NOSTR was the first choice as base for signing messages and identities. There is the will to include other protocols (even IRC is supported as entry method) but whenever approaching AT there are always obstacles.

Will put on the list for a deeper review.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#93

Post by bawolff »

FabHK wrote: post #61

Pet peeve: > N^2 scaling: if every fed has to talk to every other fed to exchange messages, the number of connections will scale exponentially No. That's quadratic growth, which is a fairly mild form of polynomial growth, which is much much much slower than exponential growth. k k^2 2^k 1 1 1 10 100 1024 100 1e4 1e30

In fairness here, when it comes to large distributed networks, this type of scaling is generally unacceptable.

But yes i agree its really sloppy for them to say exponential. I'd actually call it linear since what matters (mostly) is how many connections each node has to do, not the total number of connections in the system.

Nonetheless imagine if email worked by making a connection to every computer in the world to check if they had mail for you. It would obviously not work.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#94

Post by bawolff »

rglullis wrote: post #20

Nostr will always be a fringe network. The normies do not want to manage their own keys.

People seem to manage their whatsapp (or signal, etc) keys just fine. Because its an app that just stores it as a file and doesn't tell you about it.

So i think there are viable solutions here. It mostly just means having an app to manage the keys for you.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#95

Post by bawolff »

strbean wrote: post #24
rglullis wrote: post #20

Nostr will always be a fringe network. The normies do not want to manage their own keys.

Hopefully some day we will get state-managed PKI, and citizens will get used to handling their keys appropriately. It's crazy that some functionality on e.g. the IRS website requires me to verify my identity using a private company (ID.me).

> Hopefully some day we will get state-managed PKI, and citizens will get used to handling their keys appropriately.

Passports have had keys in them for a while now (so-called "e-passports")

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#96

Post by nunobrito »

shakna wrote: post #87
shark_laser wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

NOSTR is a protocol that doesn't detail all implementation details so it wouldn't be fair to point HTML as culprit for flaws of web browsers.

That is a good paper, the leaks are mentioned the app Damus (notes browser) which wasn't really much worried about verifying the authenticity of the notes. The details: https://crypto-sec-n.github.io/

These are apps developed on free time and made available for free so these issues are bound to exist and be repaired.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#97

Post by nunobrito »

MangoToupe wrote: post #64
eykanal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. Worth mentioning that "censoring" can occur in any of a number of ways; blocking select traffic, slowing select traffic, "forgetting" specific nodes, redirecting other nodes at will, performing MITM attacks (if the protocol isn't secure), etc etc. 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…

Could this be run by, say, a public library or are there concerns about liability? It also seems like this is sort of reinventing email.

The concept of public library are the "super-relays", which are always available and basically accept any note you send their way.

It is "kind of" like reinventing email with PGP. Main difference is that you can choose to send the message in plain text with a cryptographic signature that proves it was sent from you or full encrypted like PGP.

There is still (in my opinion) a disadvantage when compared to PGP: key rotation. Once you create a key pair in NOSTR it is your identity forever, whereas in PGP you have mechanisms to declare a key obsolete and generate a new one.

In overall PGP failed over the last 30 years, sharing public keys with other people was always the biggest difficulty for real adoption. With NOSTR this process is kind of solved but we are yet to see about adoption.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#98

Post by dahrkael »

treyd wrote: post #25
wmf wrote: post #3

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.

Email is currently more decentralized than Nostr is in practice.

considering most people today only use 3 or 4 big email providers i can see the exact same happening for nostr, the p2p part seems more like a gimmick than a protocol requirement

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#99

Post by vintermann »

pyrolistical wrote: post #53

Every social media platform needs to a solution to: 1. Content discovery 2. Spam 3. Content moderation I can see relays offering unique solutions to each one. But now they are more than just dumb servers. You get to the point where you might as well just write posts locally then submit them to X, Facebook, etc. You get the same result. And if you include a cryptographic signature with each post, you can prove you are…

Spam and content moderation are basically the same thing. In both cases it's hiding things from the user that the user didn't ask for or want to see.

Unless by spam you mean denial of service attacks. Which should probably be a point of its own anyway. It's the main killer of the decentralized internet currently.

Re: Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr

#100

Post by nunobrito »

pyrolistical wrote: post #53

Every social media platform needs to a solution to: 1. Content discovery 2. Spam 3. Content moderation I can see relays offering unique solutions to each one. But now they are more than just dumb servers. You get to the point where you might as well just write posts locally then submit them to X, Facebook, etc. You get the same result. And if you include a cryptographic signature with each post, you can prove you are…

NOSTR is built to behave like existing platforms when desired. You are forgetting the fundamental difference that brought NOSTR to life: your identity and your texts being verifiable as yours.

NOSTR was a response to the situation where virtually all other social media platforms could basically block your identity and delete all your posts. There is no such drastic possibility at this platform. Sure enough that relays might refuse to receive messages from a user and delete notes from their servers but they will never be capable of silencing that user and he can continue sending his (verifiable) messages to any other relays out there in the internet. Followers of that person will continue to read his texts without disturbance, which is quite relevant when not long ago you'd see large groups of people de-platformed when refusing to inject toxic substances on their bodies.

It is a world of difference between centralized/federated platforms to NOSTR where your freedom to write messages as yourself can never be taken away.

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