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FreeTrade 53 minutes ago [-]
I tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.
treyd 3 hours ago [-]
The thing with Nostr is that the protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.
What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers.
There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.
nunobrito 1 hours ago [-]
> protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.
That statement is false and if you disagree: please provide a source.
There is no such restriction on the NIP (protocol guidelines). I have been writing NOSTR software since years and there was NEVER such restriction in place. In fact, wouldn't even make sense because some relays (e.g. Primal) are super-aggregators for smaller relays.
> users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays
This is a false statement. NIP 65 provides a list of which servers the users declares to be using. This way readers for that user know at which door (server) to knock and ask for updates.
notarobot123 3 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
t1E9mE7JTRjf 2 hours ago [-]
there are relays built exactly for this, for rebroadcasting. You can do whatever you want in nostr btw.
this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with.
there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.
davotoula 2 hours ago [-]
But part of the protocol is that user profiles also list the relays where to find their content (where their posts go to) and a second user connects to those relays to fetch their content directly?
abhayraizada 2 hours ago [-]
it doesn't explicitly forbdit it. It just doesn't spec it out, because it doesn't need it for the protocol to work. There are already many relays and clients that do just this.
dannyw 1 hours ago [-]
I think GP's point (which I agree with) is that the functionality is almost essential. When it's not part of the spec, then you end up with differing off-spec implementations, and again, centralization risk.
This would be like the HTTP protocol not defining `POST`, and leaving it up to servers and clients to implement it based on however it feels like.
I really like the ideals behind Nostr, but I think its implementation and execution could be better.
grumbel 4 minutes ago [-]
It would be more analog to HTTP not specing out how CDNs should work, or Usenet not specing out how DejaNews is going to work. It's infrastructure stuff neither the client nor the simple server has to care about.
The Nostr spec covers what matters, cryptographic identities and unique message ids, that make dumb relays that duplicating messages from elsewhere possible (an area where HTTP or Activity Pub fail at).
therein 3 hours ago [-]
Well put, that's exactly what I think of Nostr as well.
mw888 3 hours ago [-]
Nostr breaks down along the longstanding ambiguity around what 'decentralization' means.
In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite.
People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced.
Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.
nunobrito 2 hours ago [-]
What "awkward" coordination? Clients fetch updates from whatever servers they follow.
Same thing with email that you've been using for decades, doesn't get simpler than that.
mw888 4 minutes ago [-]
Email requires a message to reach a specific, limited set of participants. Nostr is a public forum, which means an unbounded number of participants who can engage.
Ordering a conversation between an unbounded set, where multiple participants have different views is a bad degradation of quality—the simple fix is what occurs: centralize. It seems like a small issue, but at scale quality really suffers when some universal, fine-resolution ordering can't be agreed upon.
You can devise many clever schemes to try to avoid centralization and achieve coherency, but if one service is more up to date with more info, it is preferable and offers a more coherent public conversation. Network effects still dominate despite the protocol.
All that said, if I wasn't very aligned with the spirit, I wouldn't care so much to think about it. I'm also aligned with the spirit of Bitcoin but the culture present in both doesn't help it. The fact that Nostr is Bitcoin aligned, meaning it rejects the technical options of protocols taking more risks, hurts it.
john_owl 1 hours ago [-]
Just like a RSS feed client or a podcast client that connects to multiple feeds to update your timeline.
synctext 59 minutes ago [-]
> decentralization of power
Insightful! We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin.
Email, RSS, and also Nostr are too simple. The core protocol does not contain any measures against spam, abuse and fraud. No accountability. Just launch a million fake identities and spam these network. Your Internet address got blocked? Try the a16z-funded startup that uses a USA-based phone farm. Decentralised accountability is unsolved.
My university lab has focused on decentralisation for decades, its hard. We need a decentralised trust framework (e.g. our TrustChain protocol), decentralised spam prevention (StarveSpam) and decentralised democracy (our TwoStepDemocracy protocol). Getting this deployed and do iterative improvements needs more resources then universities have. Another coordination problem for The Common Good.
colordrops 26 minutes ago [-]
What's wrong with RSS?
donpdonp 41 minutes ago [-]
for those simply looking to try nostr for the first time, https://iris.to is a great way to get started.
monkeywork 3 hours ago [-]
Funny timing on this - I just came across my backed up keys recently and signed back into it. Poking around over the last 24 hours has left me underwhelmed in terms of actual interesting content (I'm not a cryptobro) nor overly innovative things built on top of the protocol.
Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...
davotoula 2 hours ago [-]
It's a very rich protocol with many advanced features but here are the basics:
1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM)
2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos
3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff
4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read
5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues
6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group
7. Like twitch with live video streams
8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)
abhayraizada 2 hours ago [-]
Social media is one of its most underwhelming usecases, there's loads of productivity apps building on it like if you look that formstr ecosystem (about.formstr.app) and gaming ecosystem as well, it's really just a new communication medium
monkeywork 2 hours ago [-]
can you expand on the gaming ecosystem around it?
SheilferZepeda 2 hours ago [-]
I build edtechs apps with it. Lets me develop tech like the ability to create scholarships with learning, cross-platform badges/achievements and cool stuff like that.
Tepix 2 hours ago [-]
Nostr is very useful when using it as underlying network for trystero
KetoManx64 2 hours ago [-]
Seems to be surviving just fine bases on the comment feeds I see utilizing it in Podcast 2.0 apps. Sorry, nobody cares about your police, we're just here for the tech
For me, the great idea behind Nostr is that identity is a self-generated key pair, which can then be used wherever you want (and the economic model, with much potentials). In terms of decentralisation, however, I'm not convinced; I find the model of the late ZeroNet, the KAD network and others, essentially DHT, far superior, because it allows content to stay alive as long as there's interest in it, and every member of the network donates a certain amount of storage and bandwidth (adjustable at will) without being able to choose which specific scrap of content to host.
In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.
The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:
- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)
- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)
- short posts like Twitter/X
- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit
- very long, blog-style posts
- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar
We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.
tolerance 3 days ago [-]
Nostr is in need of benevolent shills.
doublepg23 3 hours ago [-]
Nostr is cute but I feel it runs into xkcd 191.
To paraphrase:
> If you Used Nostr your communication would be completely uncensored and decentralized.
> Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who use Nostr.
As of now it’s filled with BTC-maxis / crypto bros that mainly talk about how great Nostr and Bitcoin are … and not much else.
I suppose there’s plenty of tasteless AI slop and gross adult scams if that suits your palate.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
The website mentions the network is pro-censorship:
> Pro-censorship: The protocol is ownerless, relays are not
> 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 to read and from where.
monkeywork 2 hours ago [-]
From what I've gathered it's pro-censorship however since the user is entirely mobile and can change relays at will without friction that the power still remains with the user... the relay doesn't have much power in anything they can't keep their users from finding you, and they can't keep you from publishing elsewhere they can only choose to not accept your posts.
When I setup my account I list 3-4 relays that will host my content, if any one relay decides they dislike me and bans me no big deal everyone who follows me already knows to check 3-4 different servers for me and will find my content on the others, and I can update that list at any point in time just as quickly as I'm banned... so unless you can get every relay (which ideally are all individual groups with likely different rules / regulations) I publish to to ban me at the same time there is no real way to "censor" someone in the way we are used to currently.
KetoManx64 2 hours ago [-]
Which is the point of free speech, right?
You should have the ability to say whatever you want, people just don't have to listen to you or be around you.
grumbel 2 hours ago [-]
Nostr relays can censor however much they want. And users can just add other relays and route around it. That's fundamentally different from most other protocols, where user identity and posts are tied to a single server, and there is no means to just broadcast to another one.
On Lemmy for example you can't even find a post another server, since post ids are tied to a server. So despite post actually being cached on multiple servers, it provides absolutely nothing that helps with censorship or crash tolleranze.
nunobrito 2 hours ago [-]
There is a feature called "follow" so just follow the people with topics you are interested, same as any network unless you prefer tiktok-style algorithms that choose everything for you.
reisen_ss 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
gigatexal 2 hours ago [-]
Nah it’s DOA because it was adopted by the alt right.
nunobrito 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, zero moderation and you can't talk to the manager.
Truly awful to have decentralized freedom.
grumbel 2 hours ago [-]
Nostr is a protocol, not a service. That's like saying HTML was adopted by the alt right.
__MatrixMan__ 2 hours ago [-]
Adoption by too narrow an audience can totally poison a protocol for the rest of us.
Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.
What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers.
There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.
That statement is false and if you disagree: please provide a source.
There is no such restriction on the NIP (protocol guidelines). I have been writing NOSTR software since years and there was NEVER such restriction in place. In fact, wouldn't even make sense because some relays (e.g. Primal) are super-aggregators for smaller relays.
> users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays
This is a false statement. NIP 65 provides a list of which servers the users declares to be using. This way readers for that user know at which door (server) to knock and ask for updates.
this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with.
there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.
This would be like the HTTP protocol not defining `POST`, and leaving it up to servers and clients to implement it based on however it feels like.
I really like the ideals behind Nostr, but I think its implementation and execution could be better.
The Nostr spec covers what matters, cryptographic identities and unique message ids, that make dumb relays that duplicating messages from elsewhere possible (an area where HTTP or Activity Pub fail at).
In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite.
People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced.
Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.
Same thing with email that you've been using for decades, doesn't get simpler than that.
Ordering a conversation between an unbounded set, where multiple participants have different views is a bad degradation of quality—the simple fix is what occurs: centralize. It seems like a small issue, but at scale quality really suffers when some universal, fine-resolution ordering can't be agreed upon.
You can devise many clever schemes to try to avoid centralization and achieve coherency, but if one service is more up to date with more info, it is preferable and offers a more coherent public conversation. Network effects still dominate despite the protocol.
All that said, if I wasn't very aligned with the spirit, I wouldn't care so much to think about it. I'm also aligned with the spirit of Bitcoin but the culture present in both doesn't help it. The fact that Nostr is Bitcoin aligned, meaning it rejects the technical options of protocols taking more risks, hurts it.
Insightful! We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin.
Email, RSS, and also Nostr are too simple. The core protocol does not contain any measures against spam, abuse and fraud. No accountability. Just launch a million fake identities and spam these network. Your Internet address got blocked? Try the a16z-funded startup that uses a USA-based phone farm. Decentralised accountability is unsolved.
My university lab has focused on decentralisation for decades, its hard. We need a decentralised trust framework (e.g. our TrustChain protocol), decentralised spam prevention (StarveSpam) and decentralised democracy (our TwoStepDemocracy protocol). Getting this deployed and do iterative improvements needs more resources then universities have. Another coordination problem for The Common Good.
Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...
1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM) 2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos 3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff 4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read 5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues 6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group 7. Like twitch with live video streams 8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w
In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.
The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:
- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)
- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)
- short posts like Twitter/X
- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit
- very long, blog-style posts
- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar
We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.
To paraphrase:
> If you Used Nostr your communication would be completely uncensored and decentralized.
> Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who use Nostr.
As of now it’s filled with BTC-maxis / crypto bros that mainly talk about how great Nostr and Bitcoin are … and not much else. I suppose there’s plenty of tasteless AI slop and gross adult scams if that suits your palate.
> Pro-censorship: The protocol is ownerless, relays are not
> 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 to read and from where.
When I setup my account I list 3-4 relays that will host my content, if any one relay decides they dislike me and bans me no big deal everyone who follows me already knows to check 3-4 different servers for me and will find my content on the others, and I can update that list at any point in time just as quickly as I'm banned... so unless you can get every relay (which ideally are all individual groups with likely different rules / regulations) I publish to to ban me at the same time there is no real way to "censor" someone in the way we are used to currently.
On Lemmy for example you can't even find a post another server, since post ids are tied to a server. So despite post actually being cached on multiple servers, it provides absolutely nothing that helps with censorship or crash tolleranze.
Truly awful to have decentralized freedom.
Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.