A big misconception I've seen is the assumption that Nostr relays are federated and share messages between one another. This is not how it works. So if you're building a "Twitter clone" the client app must search multiple relays and post to multiple relays. If clients are not using a relay in common they cannot see one another.
The end result is a bad experience for both user and developer. Using a single relay is centralised and defeats the point. Using multiple relays is slow and cumbersome and requires the user to know/care which relays they are connecting to.
When I played with Nostr a couple years ago the "NIPs" were already a complete mess. Later NIPs supersede earlier NIPs changing how clients are supposed to interpret messages. At least some are flagged as "unrecommended: deprecated" now.
Relays can federate. The point is that Nostr as a protocol is saying nothing about this and does not care either.
I'm running an indexer (a relay) which federates with other relay indexers. Similar how activitypub relays work. Any client can connect to indexer to help bootstrapping and find metadata around events. There are many ways to discover stuff from clients even without being connected to the same relay.
This is a valid observation and hurdle of sorts. One to me, which is a fascinating problem to work on.
There are a few approaches to solve this. For instance NIP65, where one defines on their profile meta which relays they read/write to, giving clients the ability to discover all the right content. That's just one approach, and some are exploring other ideas. It seems like a very solvable problem anyway.
There are some messed up things on a few NIP because the technology evolved fast.
Most NIP are fine and continuously improved.
This is trivial to solve when there is there a periodic release of the NIP as done in other specs. So far there hasn't been much need for that formality, most developers understand quickly how to create tools on top of it.
Most clients now support outbox, so you don't need a common relay. Users have inbox and outbox relays, and clients use these to retrieve and send notes.
Nostr’s UX on Primal is 10x better than Mastodon imo. I haven’t looked into how it works but every time I try an application with it, it’s been an unpleasant experience.
That's a misconception: you don't "use" relays (in the sense that you don't have to have a static list of relays you always use), you write to relays. When reading you connect to the relays of whatever the people you want to read from.
Some apps indeed use this method of selecting a static set of relays, and if that was the protocol you would be correct about centralization or bloat, but this is legacy from a naïve unfinished early implementation, most apps do the correct thing now and the rest is transitioning.
My back-burner idea: the equivalents of Nostr relays, Mastodon instances, Discord servers, etc. needs to be self-hostable in client apps for decentralized social media to work.
Not only classical P2P software did exactly this, it worked/works beautifully. The only reason classical P2P software did not work and did not replace WWW as application was because of piracy prosecutions that makes users responsible for hosting data with unknown content that would be later revealed to users to have been pirated content that the user would be criminally responsible a la illegal substances through airport checkpoints.
That's bad - both the fact that users' passive actions are incriminating, and substances too. So the next-gen P2P would have to have plausible logging content filters such as AI-based CP and Hollywood detectors that would stop relaying of such content so that users can defend themselves in criminal courts. Or the systems could also be in-circle specific so nothing of value is lost if everyone in a terrorist group would be prosecuted together, though I imagine that could hamper network growth.
But fundamentally, I think the model has to be that all clients are also servers. That's the best way to decentralize a social media.
This is cool but P2P doesn't work. Iroh also relies on "relays" in a sense. Nostr makes that explicit and gives relays identities so they can freely enact policies instead of having to hack that in weird ways.
Glad to see Nostr on top of HN. It is in its infancy, but Nostr allows for "zapps" (basically sending instant micropayments via bitcoin-lightning) - so instead of using ads and dubious algorithms, you can show your appreciation to content creators by small payments. This is a model for an ad-free, decentralized social media system.
I almost want to sign up now because I read comments like this and it sounds abhorrent and stupid, but then I go click explore on the actual page, and the first page of stuff I see is people actually making and selling real stuff. Sure, they take payment in Bitcoin, but they're selling ghee and cacao and there's a community of people interested in alternative schooling. It's not "I'll show you my diary and you pay me for it" that you're describing here. Real goods and services, not "content."
Only for tax purposes in the US. If you're worried that your speech will be censored by the government (importantly: corporate social media can censor you on their platforms but can't censor your BTC usage in most developed countries), then declaring BTC for tax purposes is probably the least of your worries in most places.
And extremely centralized in the so-called Lightning version. Due to ridiculously absurd requirements of the Lightning layer (bidirectional channels on L1, locking funds in advance, solving NP-hard problem thousand times per second a scale etc.) everyone basically resorts to using very few centralized entities as a pseudo-bank, who issues virtual paper, IOUs, which which wallets trade on L2. Basically all negatives of the banks and all negatives of crypto-tokens combined, with no positive sides at all.
As far as I understand as a non-US citizen, the recent presidential bills anchor your (US citizen-) right to deal in bitcoin between private entities. So the "good" kind of regulation.
What has that todo with anyhting? For Nostr you need bitcoin (lightning) and there is plenty of ways to acquire/buy it anywhere in the world. No need to limit yourself to coinbase.
P.S: anon1395 is likely a new, mere troll account. Well played.
Lightning is not anywhere near as private as monero. It's a band aid at best. If it was actually private it would get banned and suppressed like monero.
What's the "meta" like to find payment channels? That's the thing I found weirdest with LN, I needed to find a channel with enough funding. I presume the custodial LN providers just have their own payment channels?
There is a sweet spot between custodial and self-custodial wallets: "non-custodial" wallets like Phoenix Wallet or Electrum. You keys, your coins - but expect higher fees (which are still way less than CC providers or other payment processors). No need to manage channels yourself.
And attention that Monero isn't the only privacy coin in town, but it is the one that is without doubt more attacked by governments due to its privacy. You don't see the same treatment for neither LN nor bitcoin, instead you see governments supporting it. There is a big difference.
Your link is from 2022 - blinded paths are now here in lightning. Async- and trampoline payments are around the corner. The article is heavily outdated.
I am involved in Lightning and run my own node - it is pretty much private enough for all sorts of micro payments for content creators. Not private enough for organized crime to move large sums, agreed.
You also forget to mention the 51% attack monero recently suffered. Lightning is bitcoin based and way more resilient to that.
The paper does not state what you make it out to be (it sees theoretical privacy-lowering attacks, but not as you state it "lack of privacy"). Practical attacks are not even proven.
And it - too - does not look into trampoline payments. Trampoline payments are a new feature that are not yet in a BOLT standard, but tried and tested in beta and used i.e. by Phoenix Wallet or Electrum.
You do not even acknowledge that monero payments take minutes (plus waiting for X confirmations) up to hours to finally settle. Lightning payments are instantenous, and take seconds (!). While moneros privacy might be higher that lightning, it is completely unusuable as a web micro-payment network.
I don't think you ever used Monero because payments are settled in a few minutes and the user gets fast notification of incoming transaction.
So that point you raise is fake. However, if you want to pick a more realistic reason then complain about the fees which are still high when doing for example a payment of 5 cents and the fee will often also be 5 cents whereas it should be free.
Anyways, I'm not even a fan of Monero being used for that purpose. The conversation here was about privacy and the lack of it on some virtual coins.
There is no point discussing with you, you twist every argument around - "...payments are settled in a few minutes and the user gets fast notification of incoming transaction." is not even contrary to what I wrote, you repeated my point. Minutes to clear a transaction vs. a second (sometimes a couple of seconds) is not even close to comparable. Anyway, I am out of this thread.
Something I don’t quite get about these new social networks that are clearly aimed at technical people: my model of a truly decentralized social network is more like a network of privately hosted personal websites, à la the original web. Not yet another platform I need to make an account to interact on separately.
Have there been any attempts to make more of a “network” that incentivizes operating personal websites but adds a mechanism for typical social media features like chat, a feed, etc. in a centralized way? The only thing I can think of is RSS, and that is only a way to follow content publication.
"Accounts" in this case are just a public/private key pair. You can host your own relay (and nobody will hear what you have to say unless they subscribe to it), but you can use the same public key ("account") on any nostr relay. You can broadcast your posts to all relays, or just some, or just your own, depending on how you feel.
You can, in theory, generate a new key for every post if you want to. The relays don't care.
This is something Mastodon etc. lacks (accounts are tied to servers, so you can't move your self-hosted Mastodon to your self-hosted Akkomo without keeping Mastodon running, and you can't move from one instance to another if your instance admin doesn't let you).
On the other hand, the complete lack of account recovery, even for sysadmins, is something many people will have an issue with.
That's more or less how nostr works, except instead of websites there are notes (a generic type which can be anything - including website content), and instead of servers there are 'relays'.
Yeah the more I read about it, the more it does sound somewhat similar to what I was proposing.
However, the copywriting there is not in this vein at all. IMO the metaphor of personal websites is a simple, universal one that most people can understand. Nostr seems unintelligible to anyone that isn't pretty technical.
That's for sure how it is right now. A mix of early adopter techy types. In this case (nostr.com) it's just a website, and not actually apart of nostr. In the same way that weather.com isn't a spokesperson for the weather
At least in the case of Nostr, the introduction text is definitely written for someone that understands tech vocab:
Nostr is an apolitical communication commons. A simple standard that defines a scalable architecture of clients and servers that can be used to spread information freely. Not controlled by any corporation or government, anyone can build on Nostr and anyone can use it.
This an interesting question. Forgive my meandering take on this.
We already have a mix of technologies to achieve that effect. Sort of. Simplified, you can host a personal website on shared hosting, a VPS, or wherever, at the same time chat via IRC or XMPP, and use RSS to create feeds to share tidbits about yourself. Nothing stops you from combining different programs and services to get that.
So, what are the problems you're actually trying to solve here?
Do you want to improve accessibility, that is: lower the bar for non-technical people to join feeds, publish their own thoughts, join group chats,...?
Do you want to improve discoverability across what we already have? Make it easier for everyone to serendipitous finding information? Like, search, recommendations, linking, pub/sub, and so on?
Do you want to solve sustainability? Developing models that also cover the expenses involved i.e. either covering the costs in maintaining tech, or redistributing the costs?
Do you want to solve governance, the issue of providing enough affordances to communities to moderate/govern themselves?
These are big questions, and once you try to solve them together, you'll have to make trade-offs, inevitably. Decentralizing everything sounds great, but that has an impact on discoverability, as well as accessibility. Not having another account sounds great, but that hides complex debates about online and offline, distributed identities.
Even more so, if you dig deeper, our approach these affordances is based on our values. And those can be very different depending on who you talk to. That's where things enter the murky, ambiguous teritory of sociology, culture, and so on where few absolute truths are offered.
That doesn't mean we should just accept throw up hands and accept the status quo, though. Talking in terms of a single "network" or a single "protocol" is too crude to approach these questions. The intrinsic value the Internet offers us, can be found in a handful foundational design principles like standardization, composition, openness,... which allow us to create many networks that host many diverse communities. Each to their own isn't a bad thing as it's too naive to think that there's a catch-all solution that caters to everyone's needs. Balkanization, such as it is, becomes really problematic if it erodes common beliefs we hold about a free, open and accessible digital global network.
Many "technical" people who are active in these niches like Mastodon, Nostr, the Fediverse, or even the Smolweb, do so because they are steeped in a particular (counter)culture that espouses the same values that also led to the birth of the early Internet. Cyberspace really is a marketplace of ideas first. Technologies are an expression of that.
Very thoughtful points. One thing about nostr is that it does tend to balkanize due to the technical architecture, allowing for different groups of people to use it in different ways (different relay policies, client features, filtering, etc). But the tradeoffs you list are real, and enforce real constraints (the biggest of which is bare keys as identifiers). Many of these constraints can be designed away, which keeps me optimistic. We've had 30 years of research and development into password management, but far less into end-user key management. Even if nostr itself has some fatal flaw, I think a lot of interesting ideas are coming out of it, just because it provides a very different set of affordances for digital spaces.
Yeah, I mean I am not personally working on a project in this space, nor do I have any super-strong feelings about it.
It's more that I like personal websites, from both an ownership and creative perspective. And so I wish there were more approaches which attempted to incentivize that model without creating a complicated new protocol, platform, etc. That might involve making it easier to create and self-host websites, an opt-in directory of personal sites with chat + forums attached, or something else like that.
For what it's worth, pubnix - public accessible UNIX systems - were/are that to an extent. You'd get a free account on some shared system, you log in via a terminal, and you get access to all those things: gopher/gemini/web hosting, chat, bulletin boards,...
But shell access doesn't appeal to non-tech users. It's the difference between engineering the electricity in your own house to become self-sufficient, and just expecting to magically get power when you plug a device in the socket.
You can zapp on nostr - lightning based payments. There were efforts to bring micro payments to the regular Web, but in the end it failed because in the traditional finance world, you can't just send 2cents to someone on the other side of the world - because intermediaeries will charge you 50cents of fees for that.
Even if you don't use Nostr as a microblogging social network, it can provide a useful layer. For example Trystero https://oxism.com/trystero (MIT licensed) can use it to establish P2P WebRTC connections without requiring a central server.
This is very interesting. In a similar vein, I was wondering a while ago if either Nostr or ATProto could potentially work as part of a peer-to-peer instant messaging system, specifically as a way to have persistent storage and offline messaging. (But using it to establish connections is pretty clever, too.)
Thats cool I have been thinking of using nostr , Bittorrent DHT and Mastadon as a cencership resistant multi channel redundant broadcast beakon. All methods must go down before your nodes can't find each other anymore.
wow this is amazing. was thinking about whipping something similar for my own project but glad that someone had same problem before. saved me some time.
Some people say that labeling yourself apolitical is 1, a polticial statement 2, a privilege itself which puts you into a certain socio-political position
This is exactly what struck my eye. As someone from RU, I came to strongly identify "apolitical" with silent status quo supporters. Under an authoritarian regime, that means prosecuting people and lack of freedom of speech. Nostr? They'll just declare hosting a relay illegal and criminalize use, like they already did for other services.
whats up with people being afraid of being political. its your duty as citizen to be political. in ancient grece apolotical people were called "idiots". literally thats the origin of the word.
Very interesting, but according to this well-referenced paragraph on Wikipedia, the use of that word was a bit more complex:
> It is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation. Thucydides quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration as saying: "[we] regard... him who takes no part in these [public] duties not as unambitious but as useless" ... However, neither he nor any other ancient author uses the word "idiot" to describe non-participants, or in a derogatory sense; its most common use was simply a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, professional, or expert. The derogatory sense came centuries later, and was unrelated to the political meaning.
I think you miss the point. On Nostr because technology is apolitical, you can be anything you want - political or not. A draw for some is exactly that; if they've been de-platformed elsewhere for political views, on nostr that can't happen.
This is authoritarian regime bread and butter. Create barriers that only right people can surmount, ban platforms where prominent opponents publish their media, block sources of income or just outright ban websites and newspapers and TG channels.
If everything is political, then nothing is political.
I believe that author(s) just don't want to participate in non-technical discussions around his creation.
I would interpret it as anyone is welcome. The only barrier to entry is an internet connection, and even that is needed for just part of your experience.
I'd guess it's context is the censorship seen in the last decade on most social media platforms.
"Welcome" is in the eye of the beholder. Everyone can join, but I am sure as it is also with our real worldwide community, not everyone is welcome or is accepted equally.
But the point is, nostr does not intent to judge that. It happens automatically while communicating. Nostr is just the means to communicate.
Software is inherently apolitical. Claiming otherwise would be like saying that a hammer or drill are political, which is absurd. Political views are placed on software depending on the author's beliefs, but it's perfectly valid to release software in the public domain without any restrictions or expectations.
>Software is inherently apolitical. Claiming otherwise would be like saying that a hammer or drill are political, which is absurd.
No one sells "apolitical hammers" or "apolitical drills." If one has to specify that software is apolitical, it isn't.
No software exists in a vacuum, even the license terms are a political statement. Certainly nostr was created as an expression of fiatjaf's specific political ideals, and those ideals will tend to attract certain political demographics, and repel others.
Last time I tried navigating the Nostr ecosystem I found their Twitter-equivalent platform and it was full of people posting about cryptocurrencies and other topics that weren't of particular interest to me.
Are there any major figures of interest primarily participating on any Nostr platform? Or is there any kind of uniquely interesting content that is being primarily produced and shared on Nostr?
Network effects are difficult to replicate. You need lots of users to get a few solid consistent "content" creators. You need even more users to get the content that YOU like. So, it just amounts to having more users. Some might say it's impossible to replicate some existing social platform like X, and that may be true - but at the end of the day, you can vote with your attention and can contribute in ways you would like your space to be, so if you like say... log cabin content, then you can create it yourself and start amassing a log cabin enthusiast audience who will then start sharing their passion for log cabins.
Nostr doesn't have an "algorithm" that tries to find posts that you engage with. You should follow your own list of people, and then you will see their content. There are some clients trying to be more smart, though.
The "algorithm" in any social media is a blessing and a curse. Nostr shifts the responsibility of what to show to the clients.
Right, and I'm asking if there any interesting figures primarily using this platform to share interesting content because I don't know of any, and I didn't find any niches that were best served by this platform.
In the past, the way that I would typically get to know people online was either through niche topic-specific forums or IRC channels. Then eventually if we got to know each other well enough, we would connect on other platforms. The modern version of this seems to be Discord. These platforms are all topic focused, rather than being user-first.
Discoverability is important! And one of the limitations of search or tag based discoverability is that you're limited to finding things which you already know about. But it doesn't help you find new things that you don't know about! This doesn't mean that algorithmic discoverability is the only option, for example: you could find some way to map the user's interest spaces and search for unexplored or undiscovered nodes.
Discoverability is a huge challenge in any decentralized social protocol.
We've been talking a lot about this problem in nostr which can't be summarised in a quick HN comment but gathered some threads if you're really interested
It's still pretty niche. Built mostly for and by bitcoiners, but has potential as a new way of doing social media that isn't reliant on major tech companies.
Hope this doesn't come accross as rhetorical, it's a genuine question!
Nostr users, how does this differ in your experience from Mastodon? At first glance it seems like the same idea but with the extra ingredient of blockchain, I'm not sure what this adds though, anonymity?
First of all there is some confusion because blockchain doesn't play a role here.
You start by creating a pair of public/private keys. That is your "account" but is independent from everything else (e.g. not tied to any specific tool nor web service).
Then you create texts (notes) which are digitally signed with your private key. Using the public key anyone can verify it was you writing it and nobody else.
There is no blockchain in the process, these simple text messages get sent to a multiple number of relays (you can even host them yourself) and other people can read them very freely.
The main difference to mastodon is that exists no central server where someone registers an account and has the power to kick you out from the site (deplatform). This also solves the problem with the mastodon servers decides to stop the service and suddenly everything is gone.
On NOSTR your texts are your texts, and there are multiple copies everywhere (more than 1000 free relays at the momment).
So with Nostr - it's decentralised to the point that I'm (me the user) the individual point that's sending et, rather than Mastodon which is decentralised less such that there's multiple servers with many users.
That is correct. Plus, these are just plain text messages in the end of the day.
So you can always download and read them easily. I'm an old person from the forum days and was really annoying that whenever a forum would go down, all the useful posts and info shared over the years would disappear too. With this kind of mechanism, it is easier to rescue that data.
NOSTR isn't just about twitter-clones, it can basically be used to replicate blogs, forum and chat apps that exchange messges.
From my observation the federation is largely split between sides that don't like each other. The main block where the main instance lies is very trigger happy to block entire instances and if a server administrator doesn't follow the group think other server administrators will block you out of "lack of moderation". Account portability exists but requires that you be in good terms with the server admins. Which is fine. Their database and they do what they want but it felt like Reddit with less professional moderators.
On Nostr your account is your signature so there is no such thing as creating an account on someone else's database. You push to multiple relays where people can follow you so even if relay operators ban you there will always be some relay willing to host your stuff.
Others already pointed out there is no blockchain involved other than using the same secp256k1 as Bitcoin for signatures.
Last time I checked(years ago), it was like Mastodon but there are only dozen servers, and posting once in standard clients post it on all servers. Everything is a tweet, and servers serve you contents based on what it remembers about you. The core principle is that bans and refusals by server operators are at best customary since users can receive the same information elsewhere, even transparently.
Though, they did happily filter Macau casino spams flooding the system, so I wouldn't be so sure. Workload of posting to and receiving from dozen servers was also not trivial when I was trying it out, and architecture changes to reduce duplicates and/or syncing databases across hosts were actively discussed. I guess those works were never completed judging by comments here?
It's very unlike mastodon in that server operators have minimal control over user identities and content. Spam control is still a work in progress, but has come a long way through web of trust and more responsible relay operation. I invite you to give it another try!
The fundamental difference is that with Mastodon, or any Fediverse service, the server still has full control over the user. It's basically no different from regular Facebook or Twitter, just with some optional federation on top that can be switched off at any time (and often is).
On Nostr the server is just a dumb relay, it controls and owns nothing. User identities are proper public key pairs. If a relay goes evil, you can just use another one or use multiple at once to begin with, since the location of the messages is irrelevant, everything is held together by public keys.
There is no blockchain, only basic cryptographic signatures on each message. And users are not tied to any servers, they can read from multiple or write to multiple. They can (locally) aggregate data from many servers or connect to a specific server, same for publishing, it's very flexible and different clients choose to do it in different ways and expose different interfaces to users.
Imagine it this way, freenet needs electricity and servers to keep running. NOSTR messages can be printed in paper (handwritten even) and you'd still be able to verify it belongs to a specific person.
Basically freenet builds a network for communication (roads) but NOSTR is only about messages (cars) and doesn't really care about which road is using.
There is no centralization because there is no coordination. There is not even knowledge of what can be happening elsewhere because these messages might not even be using internet to be shared (e.g. radio or paper messages)
On the other side this is what makes it so powerful. You can download the full set of text messages from someone into your disk, that disk be found centuries later and digital archaeologists could easily read the contents because it is plain text.
So it isn't competing against freenet, it will use it very happily when available as option.
It would be cool if you could somehow form chains of trust with this, maybe even with links to other social media, where you could "follow other people that this guy has vetted". I want my social media censored and curated, but I want to choose my own censors and curators.
Nostr actually has web of trust (WoT) implementations. I think Coracle has this and some others. Nostur even lets you specify how far you want your web of trust to reach. Pretty cool stuff!
There is the concept of Data Vending Machines (DVMs) and curated follow lists now.
There’s also work on a Web of Trust in some clients that filters notes from people that don’t meet the WOT score. It’s essentially a weighted score based on who you follow and who they follow
> Nostr is an apolitical communication commons. A simple standard that […] can be used to spread information freely. Not controlled by any corporation or government …
One could argue that this is a deeply political thing, just not one that the usual suspects would care for. +1.
I still don't understand how Nostr would behave in this hypothetical scenario - a bad actor creates 100k key pairs (via residential proxies) and posts 10 LLM-generated replies to each new post. Who would fight with that wave of spam exactly and how?
You only read from the relays you want, relays have all the tools in the world to reject spam, therefore the solution is just to have clients that help the user enforce selecting only what they deem as "safe" relays in order to read replies from.
Don't know much about Nostr, but wondered re the spam problem, if it would make sense to introduce the idea of proof-of-work for the identities? A quick search shows that the have optional PoW proposals for notes (i.e., individual posts), but I didn't see anything about PoW for identities.
People could spend $1, or $5, or $50 of compute for an identity, and others could use the cost of the identity as a filter. Having a $5 ID put on a blacklist would make poor behavior of any sort more costly.
Identity on nostr is just a public/private keypair.
You can enhance that identity by sending a kind0 (metadata) note with your name, bio, pictures. So i guess you're suggestion to add PoW for kind0 events which is covered by NIP13 too.
Right, so the general NIP13 could be used to define a "ID proof-of-work" note attached to an ID. You could add PoW notes after ID creation, or create new, more difficult notes if the original one turned out to be insufficient.
But although there's the technical components available to easily build such a thing, you're not aware of such a standard having been discussed, much less defined?
EDIT: To be clear, the idea for this would be a equivalent of the "blue check mark", but 1) you pay it yourself and 2) you can make it as cheap or expensive as you want.
Yes, that makes sense and that can be used later by relays and clients in order to decide whether to store or display notes from identities. In fact that's a pretty good idea.
I've tried to use it many times, through Damos on iOS, but it's littered with dead and abandoned projects and an alternative UI that worked one day, will just be gone later.
In the end the content I was seeing there was almost exclusively about Nostr and Crypto so it wasn't that interested to keep using it.
Yeah, it takes people to get good content worth paying attention to but if everyone says "it's dead" then it will remain dead. But if people voted with attention and said "yeah, it's kind of dead, but if I hang out here and my friends join, then it will be less dead and people will notice and also join..." You basically create the future you want.
That just describes any social network cold-start problem. If you want to solve that it needs to be really easy for regular users to join and contribute.
Example: Click "Join Nostr" on the nostr.com landing page and the first thing you see is "private" and "public" keys. Click next, you land on 4 example nostr clients. One is broken, the other one is filled with japanese content, the other one is a GitHub repository etc.
It's a cool project from a technical pov as the system is quite simple but you can not expect regular content to start popping up if the experience is only tailored towards motivated tech nerds.
I tried to improve that by making it easy to syndicate the content of Kirby (A blogging framework) to Nostr (https://github.com/dewey/kirby-posse/pull/9) but ran into many issues with how the various clients support and show images and lost interest along the way.
The Nostr protocol as such does not look like a huge revelation. JSON, hashes, signatures, and that’s about it. JSON is not a cryptographer’s best friend, by the way.
Effectively, everything else is left to be implemented.
That probably explains try-everything-see-what-works approach to client apps?
You're missing the point if you are evaluating it by looking at random facets like JSON and hashes.
Nostr is an interoperable data layer. Anyone can build on it, and users don't get locked in, since the data layer is separate from the apps (clients). It puts the onus on app developers to make a compelling experience, and not F over The (not their) users. This upending is imo what the revelation is.
Likewise, that everything is left to be implemented paints a picture of how developers can make it how they want. Like lego but you can design the bricks too. Cool.
There's also Stacker News which is centralized like Reddit or HN but uses BTC micropayments over Lightning in lieu of upvotes. It's a lot slower than HN but so far the SNR is a lot higher. It's also a bit dominated by Bitcoin content (much like some Nostr stuff.) Whether that's just a function of size or not is yet to be seen.
Is there any concept of private key rotation or something else? In case a client with a nostr key on it got compromised or something similar? With a traditional password passed logins I would just set a new password from another machine. Regeneration of a new nostr key would mean it's a new account isn't it?
https://yakihonne.com/ tends to be a good experience for browser and has apps, after that https://primal.net is also quite good as introduction since their UI is similar to what you are used in other platforms.
Then there is https://www.amethyst.social/ which is excellent because it brings out more of the potential of the platform.
One of the most depressing things about the decentralised protocol space is the adversarial attitude to other projects - whether that's Nostr v. ActivityPub v. ATproto v Nostr, XMPP v. Matrix v. IRCv3 v. Deltachat, etc.
Imagine if the energy spent on positioning yourself relative to other open-source projects (who should be fellow travellers, if anything) was instead invested into competing with the centralised proprietary incumbents instead.
The same applies to open source as a whole, but it's depressing to see the same vibes leach into the literal tagline of the project.
Doesn't help that all of the major decentralized protocols have been very effectively undermined and pushed aside.
GTalk first de-federated (weakening XMPP as a whole), then killed XMPP support completely. Reader effectively killed RSS for casual users. Email has been swallowed whole by the oligopoly of GMail+Yahoo+Outlook+iCloud+etc; spam is a real problem, so if you're self-hosting your email, you kinda expect to be blocked by default by the large networks.
Existing, corporate-backed efforts are "open-washing" their services.
Signal is supposed to be using an open protocol, but IIRC won't even let you join their network if you use an alt client.
Following Twitter's demise, Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet?
Actually open networks? Mastodon took off like crazy, but everyone tried to register on the "main", biggest instance - we got bamboozled so hard, we can't even comprehend what "decentralized" is actually supposed to mean.
One potential positive of the recent censorship and deplatforming targeting the left is that it may accelerate the development of censorship-resistant platforms like Nostr, given the left has far more technologists than the right.
I don't understand. Can someone explain it to me from a technical/IT perspective? Is it like HTTP or JSON, or like XMPP...?
"An open protocol with a chance of working" = ?huh?
"Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech"" = ???huh?
"BEEP BOOP" ???wtf??
Please don't explain technical things as if you were talking to children. Explain them as if you were talking to a colleague sitting next to you. Talk to them as a person and as a professional.
It is a standard of how one thing talks to another thing. It is JSON with some fingerprinting/hashing send over Websocket. Thats basically it. What you do with it, remains up to your implementation.
Thank you! Exactly this "It is JSON with some fingerprinting/hashing send over Websocket" should be write there somewhere + put a link to the documentation and an example of how to use it. I don't want to watch an hour-long video.
Nostr is decentrialized, working with public/private keys. there is a very basic message format, messages are sent to "relays" that forward and store messages to other relays. It is up to the relays (anybody can be a relay) to connect to each others, chose a policy what/whose content to forward, whom to grant access, and how long to store and re-broadcast messages.
If you are familiar with the IRC chat system, it is similar to IRC but with JSON messages and the ability to store & resend messages on the servers. Servers have to connect to each other and are free to each have their own policies.
You write an email (note/message) but instead of sending it to one server, you can send it to multiple servers of your choice. Each message is digitally signed with your keys and a time stamp, so you can verify that the identity is truly yours no matter where the message came from.
In my opinion is the most innovative way of communicating that I've seen in the last 20 years. There is no concept of server nor permanent location.
A relay can refuse to receive your messages, but they can't block your account because you can always write new notes, sign them and send to wherever people want to read your texts.
Imagine the case with Trump when he got blocked from Twitter. With a click of a button they have deplatformed him, with NOSTR he would have just continued writing and people would simply tune to another relay to keep reading his texts.
On top of that are other good developments. For example, file sharing also became decentralized. So files, images and other media can be sent to the relays and you mention them from the notes based on the file hash which is good save content when someone else hosting your texts and media decides to stop hosting.
I like the idea of nostr but when I tried to use it it was a lot of CP which made me instantly stop using it. I guess the issue with this type of protocols is that there must be a way to prevent these very dark and illegal content.
As a user I don't want to see it and the submitter should be found and jailed for distributing it. Right now, it's hard to know where it even comes from since it can come from any of the relay you are connected to. Most apps do not show which relay the content originates from and honestly, what can you do?
I guess one solution is to only use paid relayes or heavily restricted ones that require invitation. But if that is the case, it kind of defeats the purpose of Nostr to begin with IMO.
That statement is wrong at best scenario and fake at worst.
I'm a long time user of NOSTR. When you enter the network through any of the main clients you will only see curated topics (trending). The WoT assures that the best content comes up.
Either of them. I can't even fathom how this would be your first time experience there, other people here on this topic confirm that it doesn't happen.
If you feel that is wrong, please describe the steps to replicate such situation.
What relays were you on? I have never seen CP on nostr.
Did you start off following the crypto spammer mentioned or that was just what caused you to find nostr?
I'd be curious how you built your initial follow list, as that and the relays you were on is the source of what you see. Kind of like if you go to weird ass websites you'll see that content, but nostr itself doesn't expose anything to a user, it's only a network for content read/write.
Heck, you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years.
It is very unbelievable that you followed such a complicated process, even went to effort of deploying to a server (what?!?) and then somehow you see disturbing content without looking explicitly for it.
In case you are sincere, try it again using any of the common methods.
Do you really think somebody would try out a new platform 2 years ago, immediately drop it due to shady stuff and remember all the non trivial steps involved in this process?
> you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years
He just detailed a very weird and vague way that is unbelievable.
I'm a user since January 2023, there were plenty of well-known web clients already available back at that time (e.g. coracle, amethyst, etc). You enter the clients, there is a WoT by default and shows the most proeminent conversations typically.
My experience was never as the one he describes. Not even at the beginning, as you can see for many others here on this same publication. Those few (3?) cases mentioning otherwise will never provide real details for their claims.
it is possible if it is a protocol not a platform. Like there can be illegal stuff over http, there can be illegal stuff over nostr and a normal person can come across it. Actually way more likely on nostr because on web we have centralized https certs and dns which is used all the time to block cp and the like
It's funny when people first say "nostr is just a protocol and completely not subject to censorship" then "there is no way a new user would encounter bad stuff on nostr". pick one?
Sweden has a website called "dumpen.se" which tricks and publishes pedophile that are trying to abuse children.
The leftist media hates this website because they are doing an effective job. They are calling them all kinds of things.
When people are effective in tracking or publishing about pedos, there are always a lot of people saying you are the problem, not the pedos. I wonder why. There are a lot of pedos out there (just look at dumpens work it's kinda obvious) and they are of course using services that are anonymized and decentralized like any other.
Usually they are also very active online and attack people that try to cut their illegal actions online. Just look at my original post, it is downvoted. I just wanted some kind of action towards cutting pedo content and it is frowned upon by these people.
Very much unrelated to NOSTR which is a transparent network with a Web Of Trust enabled as default for users.
It is a grave and unfair accusation to associate NOSTR with such nefarious activities, that was the reason why so many protested against that labelling.
What exactly is wrong about my statement? Stating that my experience is wrong is stupid.
I don't know how the app I used works. I simply used the "Snort" app, connected to a few relays and did not use it for a couple of months. Then I came back and instantly saw CP freely shared. Instantly removed the app from the phone.
You can't say that it don't exist when people like me have seen it with their own set of eyes. This only makes protocols/projects like nostr set to fail, since regular people won't fucking care and just think of the nostr as something pedophiles are using, which they would not be incorrect in thinking at this moment.
I was betting on nostr in the beginning, I was running my own relay and started on a nostr client. But I gave up since clients came popping up everywhere so I didn't really have time to compete.
Yeah, when a layperson says $SOCIAL_MEDIA is full of child pornography, it often just means legal anime content that would be on advertisements everywhere in Tokyo, especially anime contents that are LESS explicitly sexualized.
This happens because Japan always has disproportionately massive online presence with significantly better democratized attention engineering, and so content selections naturally mimic a crossing at Akihabara(despite it almost has been entirely superseded by Chinese tech cultural centers such as Shenzhen), not the Times Square(in NYC), which infuriates a lot of somewhat vocal people.
And, the reason why I must bring this up is that it is not merely it is inaccurate labeling, but it is also counter productive to not face it straight on. Such as, people would move away from pornography, making it less actually pornographic, which is more child-pornographic by the standards of people using this term in this manner, because that is what are considered LESS sexualized contents by its producers, which by the way exist in orders of millions in Japan and leaking out fast into Asia at large.
TLDR. Hating anime, fine. Just don't call it CP. Your words sound opposite of intent. That's what brought us here. So stop.
1. I am not a layperson. I used nostr while it was still under active development and when it only had a few NIPs finished.
2. I have been to Japan several times, I know the difference between anime/hentai/lolita and stuff like that. This is not what I was experiencing.
3. I have nothing against pornography in general.
The issue is that when people bring up shit like this, we are not taken seriously and this hurts projects like nostr. It will never reach momentum if no steps are taken to prevent illegal material and dark shit like CP.
Calling me a liar makes me believe that you are intentionally are downplaying the experiences I and others have, which is helping pedophiles and similar people share their illegal content freely and without consequences. Why I do not know and you should seriously think about it and stop.
-> The disagreement is in the definition of $thing.
It can't get clearer. How else would you explain it? Either you're lying(I guess not), or your definition is way off, or those secret underground organizations made some mistake and their secret Facebook group illegal content leaked out(no such thing on Nostr). By far the most likely scenario is that you're grouping from traffic cones to boxes of oranges to parrots in a forest into the exact same category of offensive contents by standards that nobody else could even understand.
And.. why would I lie? I used nostr for a little while in the very early days. Stopped using it then came back and had this experience on a major nostr app.
What I would consider is that nostr doesn't show you content. The content you see is a function of:
1. The people you follow
2. The relays you read from
3. The clients (apps) you use
I can't think of any clients which surface weird stuff (I've never seen any on nostr).
I think to reach this situation a user must follow weird accounts and thus get their content - but then I can't see that as being nostr related, since someone could do that on the internet or other networks.
It's euphemism for anime. Listening to these draw lines between porn and not-porn ever clearer, which users interpret that inside the line is free-for-all, and anime wins and obliterates everything even harder after the fix is implemented or strengthened.
These people come back fuming hot with more derogatory, still indirect, descriptions, and cycle repeats. This has been a "problem" for social media for almost as long as I've been online.
Yeah, they could say such and such handles are spreading content disgusting in such and such ways, e.g. "users like Sam Altman are posting astronauts riding horses on the Moon". They don't have to be so specific that exact contents would be actually accessible, only plausible. The mental imagery would not have to be precisely imaginable to disgusting details.
It's odd that they see "tons of" things that they can't describe beyond it belongs in the category, as if, just as if, actually characterizing it beyond making trust me remarks would lead to formation of broad consensus against them rather than against the contents.
Not really. Cryptos are born out of criticism for current systems and they are an ever evolving technology fueled by those same critics.
What doesn't make sense is when the other party starts making stories just to tarnish other competing technologies. Just now the OP was asked to provide details to replicate his findings and those were indeed very "fuzzy" to say the least.
> Cryptos are born out of criticism for current systems
Nope. Most are born out of people not understanding how existing systems work and/or looking to get rich quick.
> an ever evolving technology fueled by those same critics.
No, it's mostly a self-perpetuating self-congratulatory hype machine busily re-inventing the systems they criticise
> What doesn't make sense is when the other party starts making stories just to tarnish other competing technologies.
What does make sense is the extremely fragile ego of crypto bros who can't stand any criticism towards their scams and hype, or the mention of any possible issues.
All of that is correct, albeit not the full picture.
Crypto wasn't created as a "get rich quick". I say this because I was there since the early days and participated quite a bit on the related BBS. Back then you'd already make good money building bots for day trading on stocks, crypto was really about a type of currency that no government could touch.
Nowadays the large majority of users are desperate to make some money through pyramid schemes and pure speculation to "get rich quick" albeit they usually end up losing money. The small minority is doing what they've always done: looking at systems, criticizing systems and building their own solutions to those systems.
There is really good stuff being built. Not many do it, granted.
> Relays have to become more whitelisted and less open, and clients have to implement outbox model and stop relying on 2 or 3 big relays, then we can just stop worrying about this.
I find open protocols the most naive endeavour in tech nowadays.
The reason why social media protocols work is because the incentive is to have them siloed, controlled, and artificially convincing people through algorithmic suggestions that posting what they had for lunch is somewhat interesting.
These protocols seem to think that people actually want an alternative to what Instagram, Facebook, X etc. give them. They don't, we all just want the comfort of our own little bubble and a constant feeling of perceived fame.
The rest, and all the talk about the protocol that underlines this is just fluff for nerds that will have zero impact in a society dominated by tech capital.
Do you wanna change social media? Try and find and effective way to bring them down.
even nostr seems to want bubbles, under Why not just use Mastodon/Fediverse? they write:
> The most interesting feature of Mastodon is that by its nature it creates communities with shared values that grow in each of its servers. Or, should I say, that should be a feature if it actually worked like that. In fact these are not really communities, but a mashup of users that may share some interests among each other, but also have other interests and those other interests end up polluting the supposed "community" with things that do not interest the other users.
ie. they're complaining that federated communities are too diverse and multi-faceted, instead of being divided into nice little laser-focused grids of shared interests
My approach for bringing them down is working on better systems/UX than what the closed-silos currently offer...And we have a long way to go.
But...Nostr (and other decentralised social media protocols) can offer things the existing platforms can not do: interoperability.
Imagine the people you follow to be the same from FB, to strava, to spotify...
Imagine the content (signed notes) you make are available on different clients/platforms
That UX, perhaps for use-cases and projects we can't imagine today will be so much better than what we have today. I've tasted a little bit of just that switching between my Nostr twitter-like client (Primal/Yakihonne) and the Podcast app (foundtain.fm). It blew my mind.
This opens use cases the existing platforms can only dream about.
Pushing for strict regulation that forces them to have disclaimers like cigarettes, and treating them officially like the public health disaster they are.
The free market, despite what the capitalistic religion leads you to think, is still not the only option.
A big misconception I've seen is the assumption that Nostr relays are federated and share messages between one another. This is not how it works. So if you're building a "Twitter clone" the client app must search multiple relays and post to multiple relays. If clients are not using a relay in common they cannot see one another.
The end result is a bad experience for both user and developer. Using a single relay is centralised and defeats the point. Using multiple relays is slow and cumbersome and requires the user to know/care which relays they are connecting to.
When I played with Nostr a couple years ago the "NIPs" were already a complete mess. Later NIPs supersede earlier NIPs changing how clients are supposed to interpret messages. At least some are flagged as "unrecommended: deprecated" now.
Relays can federate. The point is that Nostr as a protocol is saying nothing about this and does not care either.
I'm running an indexer (a relay) which federates with other relay indexers. Similar how activitypub relays work. Any client can connect to indexer to help bootstrapping and find metadata around events. There are many ways to discover stuff from clients even without being connected to the same relay.
"So if you're building a "Twitter clone" the client app must search multiple relays and post to multiple relays."
Why "build" a "Twitter clone"?
Honest question
Is it something to do with surveillance, advertising and "reach"
Or something else maybe. What is it
Nostr was designed for small group (private) communication
This is a valid observation and hurdle of sorts. One to me, which is a fascinating problem to work on. There are a few approaches to solve this. For instance NIP65, where one defines on their profile meta which relays they read/write to, giving clients the ability to discover all the right content. That's just one approach, and some are exploring other ideas. It seems like a very solvable problem anyway.
There are some messed up things on a few NIP because the technology evolved fast.
Most NIP are fine and continuously improved.
This is trivial to solve when there is there a periodic release of the NIP as done in other specs. So far there hasn't been much need for that formality, most developers understand quickly how to create tools on top of it.
Most clients now support outbox, so you don't need a common relay. Users have inbox and outbox relays, and clients use these to retrieve and send notes.
Yep. There is no common model for message propagation, so there is no “net force” or clear direction.
It is somehow misleading to feature a Twitter clone on the front page when Mastodon is a better way to achieve that.
The protocol's real value lies in other use cases.
Nostr’s UX on Primal is 10x better than Mastodon imo. I haven’t looked into how it works but every time I try an application with it, it’s been an unpleasant experience.
That's a misconception: you don't "use" relays (in the sense that you don't have to have a static list of relays you always use), you write to relays. When reading you connect to the relays of whatever the people you want to read from.
Some apps indeed use this method of selecting a static set of relays, and if that was the protocol you would be correct about centralization or bloat, but this is legacy from a naïve unfinished early implementation, most apps do the correct thing now and the rest is transitioning.
Some nostr apps to demonstrate what it's capable of: https://www.openux.app/ - Mobbin alternative https://kinostr.com/ - movies with chat room https://zap.stream/ - live streaming similar to Twitch https://dtan.xyz/ - torrents https://zapstore.dev/ - permissionless app store https://nostrnests.com/ - audio room chats https://zapmeacoffee.com/ - like buy me a coffee
I've been working on a Quora/StackOverflow alternative (on top of Nostr).
https://asknostr.site/
I hope this demonstrates how a distributed social protocol can solve many use cases and the advantage to the end-user:
- do not get rugpulled by (VC backed) companies that own your data
- receive zaps/money by contributing
- data is truely available to everyone (but signed by author)
My back-burner idea: the equivalents of Nostr relays, Mastodon instances, Discord servers, etc. needs to be self-hostable in client apps for decentralized social media to work.
Not only classical P2P software did exactly this, it worked/works beautifully. The only reason classical P2P software did not work and did not replace WWW as application was because of piracy prosecutions that makes users responsible for hosting data with unknown content that would be later revealed to users to have been pirated content that the user would be criminally responsible a la illegal substances through airport checkpoints.
That's bad - both the fact that users' passive actions are incriminating, and substances too. So the next-gen P2P would have to have plausible logging content filters such as AI-based CP and Hollywood detectors that would stop relaying of such content so that users can defend themselves in criminal courts. Or the systems could also be in-circle specific so nothing of value is lost if everyone in a terrorist group would be prosecuted together, though I imagine that could hamper network growth.
But fundamentally, I think the model has to be that all clients are also servers. That's the best way to decentralize a social media.
I think this is how iroh works. They have "relays" which are servers that help establish a connection between 2 clients if necessary.
https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/relay
This is cool but P2P doesn't work. Iroh also relies on "relays" in a sense. Nostr makes that explicit and gives relays identities so they can freely enact policies instead of having to hack that in weird ways.
Glad to see Nostr on top of HN. It is in its infancy, but Nostr allows for "zapps" (basically sending instant micropayments via bitcoin-lightning) - so instead of using ads and dubious algorithms, you can show your appreciation to content creators by small payments. This is a model for an ad-free, decentralized social media system.
You can also earn zaps for pull requests working on Nostr clients.
We've been hosting some bounties like this one here: https://app.lightningbounties.com/issue/615dc5f7-ed91-4ecd-8...
I almost want to sign up now because I read comments like this and it sounds abhorrent and stupid, but then I go click explore on the actual page, and the first page of stuff I see is people actually making and selling real stuff. Sure, they take payment in Bitcoin, but they're selling ghee and cacao and there's a community of people interested in alternative schooling. It's not "I'll show you my diary and you pay me for it" that you're describing here. Real goods and services, not "content."
Bitcoin is regulated as hell
Only for tax purposes in the US. If you're worried that your speech will be censored by the government (importantly: corporate social media can censor you on their platforms but can't censor your BTC usage in most developed countries), then declaring BTC for tax purposes is probably the least of your worries in most places.
And extremely centralized in the so-called Lightning version. Due to ridiculously absurd requirements of the Lightning layer (bidirectional channels on L1, locking funds in advance, solving NP-hard problem thousand times per second a scale etc.) everyone basically resorts to using very few centralized entities as a pseudo-bank, who issues virtual paper, IOUs, which which wallets trade on L2. Basically all negatives of the banks and all negatives of crypto-tokens combined, with no positive sides at all.
As far as I understand as a non-US citizen, the recent presidential bills anchor your (US citizen-) right to deal in bitcoin between private entities. So the "good" kind of regulation.
There is a world outside of USA, and there is even a world within it too - where you can just do things.
Why do you think i'm in the USA...? I am in the UK and it is impossible to buy bitcoin without regulations.
With "impossible" you mean you can't use Tor Browser and fire up Robosats to buy Bitcoin via Revolut or Wise?
What if I need to buy something on Coinbase Commerce?
What has that todo with anyhting? For Nostr you need bitcoin (lightning) and there is plenty of ways to acquire/buy it anywhere in the world. No need to limit yourself to coinbase.
P.S: anon1395 is likely a new, mere troll account. Well played.
You could just earn it on nostr...
bingo
I recommend hodlhodl.
Not everyone there is a bitcoin boomer. You'll find plenty of monero users and things that are a bit more serious than that.
It is noteworthy that zapps are based on lightning (which is Layer-2 for bitcoin), and similar in privacy as monero (and instantaneous).
Lightning is not anywhere near as private as monero. It's a band aid at best. If it was actually private it would get banned and suppressed like monero.
This is just an ignorant take on the technology used: https://x.com/SuperTestnet/status/1917510496376197446
Monero has other things working for it though, like the absence of liquidity issues you might face using Lightning.
Then let’s write a nip and create a Nostr client that uses monero. What are you waiting for?
Already here: https://github.com/moStard-org/moStard
Does lightning work now? A few years ago, I remember they had quite some difficulties. Maybe I should brush up my knowledge.
It is OK for small amounts like paying a coffee or a few cents.
Not reliable for larger values.
What's the "meta" like to find payment channels? That's the thing I found weirdest with LN, I needed to find a channel with enough funding. I presume the custodial LN providers just have their own payment channels?
There is a sweet spot between custodial and self-custodial wallets: "non-custodial" wallets like Phoenix Wallet or Electrum. You keys, your coins - but expect higher fees (which are still way less than CC providers or other payment processors). No need to manage channels yourself.
It works but requires technical knowledge. I zap (on nostr) every day
It nowhere similar to Monero in privacy, because it was never private to begin with. Please read: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/state-of-bitcoin-light...
And attention that Monero isn't the only privacy coin in town, but it is the one that is without doubt more attacked by governments due to its privacy. You don't see the same treatment for neither LN nor bitcoin, instead you see governments supporting it. There is a big difference.
Your link is from 2022 - blinded paths are now here in lightning. Async- and trampoline payments are around the corner. The article is heavily outdated.
I am involved in Lightning and run my own node - it is pretty much private enough for all sorts of micro payments for content creators. Not private enough for organized crime to move large sums, agreed.
You also forget to mention the 51% attack monero recently suffered. Lightning is bitcoin based and way more resilient to that.
By all means, here is a study from 2024 documenting the hard facts about lack of privacy and lack of resiliency: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030859612...
That 51% attack on Monero never happened, despite much noise and headlines saying initially otherwise. You can verify this for yourself.
The paper does not state what you make it out to be (it sees theoretical privacy-lowering attacks, but not as you state it "lack of privacy"). Practical attacks are not even proven.
And it - too - does not look into trampoline payments. Trampoline payments are a new feature that are not yet in a BOLT standard, but tried and tested in beta and used i.e. by Phoenix Wallet or Electrum.
It isn't just "theoretical", those are feasible attack vectors.
Anyways thank you for mentioning Trampoline payments, I've learned something new.
You do not even acknowledge that monero payments take minutes (plus waiting for X confirmations) up to hours to finally settle. Lightning payments are instantenous, and take seconds (!). While moneros privacy might be higher that lightning, it is completely unusuable as a web micro-payment network.
I don't think you ever used Monero because payments are settled in a few minutes and the user gets fast notification of incoming transaction.
So that point you raise is fake. However, if you want to pick a more realistic reason then complain about the fees which are still high when doing for example a payment of 5 cents and the fee will often also be 5 cents whereas it should be free.
Anyways, I'm not even a fan of Monero being used for that purpose. The conversation here was about privacy and the lack of it on some virtual coins.
There is no point discussing with you, you twist every argument around - "...payments are settled in a few minutes and the user gets fast notification of incoming transaction." is not even contrary to what I wrote, you repeated my point. Minutes to clear a transaction vs. a second (sometimes a couple of seconds) is not even close to comparable. Anyway, I am out of this thread.
> > Glad to see Nostr on top of HN. It is in its infancy, but Nostr allows for "zapps"
Nostr has existed for at least 5 years. I remember people migrate there and promote it on Twitter during pandemic. Infancy?
Not technology wise, and I was refering to zapps. I meant not many people have a connected lightning wallet to be able to send/receive zapps.
Something I don’t quite get about these new social networks that are clearly aimed at technical people: my model of a truly decentralized social network is more like a network of privately hosted personal websites, à la the original web. Not yet another platform I need to make an account to interact on separately.
Have there been any attempts to make more of a “network” that incentivizes operating personal websites but adds a mechanism for typical social media features like chat, a feed, etc. in a centralized way? The only thing I can think of is RSS, and that is only a way to follow content publication.
"Accounts" in this case are just a public/private key pair. You can host your own relay (and nobody will hear what you have to say unless they subscribe to it), but you can use the same public key ("account") on any nostr relay. You can broadcast your posts to all relays, or just some, or just your own, depending on how you feel.
You can, in theory, generate a new key for every post if you want to. The relays don't care.
This is something Mastodon etc. lacks (accounts are tied to servers, so you can't move your self-hosted Mastodon to your self-hosted Akkomo without keeping Mastodon running, and you can't move from one instance to another if your instance admin doesn't let you).
On the other hand, the complete lack of account recovery, even for sysadmins, is something many people will have an issue with.
That's more or less how nostr works, except instead of websites there are notes (a generic type which can be anything - including website content), and instead of servers there are 'relays'.
Yeah the more I read about it, the more it does sound somewhat similar to what I was proposing.
However, the copywriting there is not in this vein at all. IMO the metaphor of personal websites is a simple, universal one that most people can understand. Nostr seems unintelligible to anyone that isn't pretty technical.
That's for sure how it is right now. A mix of early adopter techy types. In this case (nostr.com) it's just a website, and not actually apart of nostr. In the same way that weather.com isn't a spokesperson for the weather
Why do you say they're "clearly aimed at technical people"? Do you know the minds of people who created them?
At least in the case of Nostr, the introduction text is definitely written for someone that understands tech vocab:
Nostr is an apolitical communication commons. A simple standard that defines a scalable architecture of clients and servers that can be used to spread information freely. Not controlled by any corporation or government, anyone can build on Nostr and anyone can use it.
This an interesting question. Forgive my meandering take on this.
We already have a mix of technologies to achieve that effect. Sort of. Simplified, you can host a personal website on shared hosting, a VPS, or wherever, at the same time chat via IRC or XMPP, and use RSS to create feeds to share tidbits about yourself. Nothing stops you from combining different programs and services to get that.
So, what are the problems you're actually trying to solve here?
Do you want to improve accessibility, that is: lower the bar for non-technical people to join feeds, publish their own thoughts, join group chats,...?
Do you want to improve discoverability across what we already have? Make it easier for everyone to serendipitous finding information? Like, search, recommendations, linking, pub/sub, and so on?
Do you want to solve sustainability? Developing models that also cover the expenses involved i.e. either covering the costs in maintaining tech, or redistributing the costs?
Do you want to solve governance, the issue of providing enough affordances to communities to moderate/govern themselves?
These are big questions, and once you try to solve them together, you'll have to make trade-offs, inevitably. Decentralizing everything sounds great, but that has an impact on discoverability, as well as accessibility. Not having another account sounds great, but that hides complex debates about online and offline, distributed identities.
Even more so, if you dig deeper, our approach these affordances is based on our values. And those can be very different depending on who you talk to. That's where things enter the murky, ambiguous teritory of sociology, culture, and so on where few absolute truths are offered.
That doesn't mean we should just accept throw up hands and accept the status quo, though. Talking in terms of a single "network" or a single "protocol" is too crude to approach these questions. The intrinsic value the Internet offers us, can be found in a handful foundational design principles like standardization, composition, openness,... which allow us to create many networks that host many diverse communities. Each to their own isn't a bad thing as it's too naive to think that there's a catch-all solution that caters to everyone's needs. Balkanization, such as it is, becomes really problematic if it erodes common beliefs we hold about a free, open and accessible digital global network.
Many "technical" people who are active in these niches like Mastodon, Nostr, the Fediverse, or even the Smolweb, do so because they are steeped in a particular (counter)culture that espouses the same values that also led to the birth of the early Internet. Cyberspace really is a marketplace of ideas first. Technologies are an expression of that.
Very thoughtful points. One thing about nostr is that it does tend to balkanize due to the technical architecture, allowing for different groups of people to use it in different ways (different relay policies, client features, filtering, etc). But the tradeoffs you list are real, and enforce real constraints (the biggest of which is bare keys as identifiers). Many of these constraints can be designed away, which keeps me optimistic. We've had 30 years of research and development into password management, but far less into end-user key management. Even if nostr itself has some fatal flaw, I think a lot of interesting ideas are coming out of it, just because it provides a very different set of affordances for digital spaces.
Yeah, I mean I am not personally working on a project in this space, nor do I have any super-strong feelings about it.
It's more that I like personal websites, from both an ownership and creative perspective. And so I wish there were more approaches which attempted to incentivize that model without creating a complicated new protocol, platform, etc. That might involve making it easier to create and self-host websites, an opt-in directory of personal sites with chat + forums attached, or something else like that.
For what it's worth, pubnix - public accessible UNIX systems - were/are that to an extent. You'd get a free account on some shared system, you log in via a terminal, and you get access to all those things: gopher/gemini/web hosting, chat, bulletin boards,...
Some modern day examples include: https://tilde.town/, https://tilde.club/ and https://sdf.org/.
But shell access doesn't appeal to non-tech users. It's the difference between engineering the electricity in your own house to become self-sufficient, and just expecting to magically get power when you plug a device in the socket.
> more like a network of privately hosted personal websites
Can't monetize that.
You can zapp on nostr - lightning based payments. There were efforts to bring micro payments to the regular Web, but in the end it failed because in the traditional finance world, you can't just send 2cents to someone on the other side of the world - because intermediaeries will charge you 50cents of fees for that.
Pretty sure that the main reason Flattr (whether 1.0 or 2.0) failed, was because it wasn't backed by the Silicon Valley ?
No, but maybe you can monetize the "connector" system.
Even if you don't use Nostr as a microblogging social network, it can provide a useful layer. For example Trystero https://oxism.com/trystero (MIT licensed) can use it to establish P2P WebRTC connections without requiring a central server.
This is very interesting. In a similar vein, I was wondering a while ago if either Nostr or ATProto could potentially work as part of a peer-to-peer instant messaging system, specifically as a way to have persistent storage and offline messaging. (But using it to establish connections is pretty clever, too.)
Thats cool I have been thinking of using nostr , Bittorrent DHT and Mastadon as a cencership resistant multi channel redundant broadcast beakon. All methods must go down before your nodes can't find each other anymore.
wow this is amazing. was thinking about whipping something similar for my own project but glad that someone had same problem before. saved me some time.
>apolitical communication commons
Some people say that labeling yourself apolitical is 1, a polticial statement 2, a privilege itself which puts you into a certain socio-political position
This is exactly what struck my eye. As someone from RU, I came to strongly identify "apolitical" with silent status quo supporters. Under an authoritarian regime, that means prosecuting people and lack of freedom of speech. Nostr? They'll just declare hosting a relay illegal and criminalize use, like they already did for other services.
whats up with people being afraid of being political. its your duty as citizen to be political. in ancient grece apolotical people were called "idiots". literally thats the origin of the word.
Very interesting, but according to this well-referenced paragraph on Wikipedia, the use of that word was a bit more complex:
> It is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation. Thucydides quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration as saying: "[we] regard... him who takes no part in these [public] duties not as unambitious but as useless" ... However, neither he nor any other ancient author uses the word "idiot" to describe non-participants, or in a derogatory sense; its most common use was simply a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, professional, or expert. The derogatory sense came centuries later, and was unrelated to the political meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot
I think you miss the point. On Nostr because technology is apolitical, you can be anything you want - political or not. A draw for some is exactly that; if they've been de-platformed elsewhere for political views, on nostr that can't happen.
I have never truly seen anyone deplatformed over political views. In the end they were always deplatformed for a lack of decency.
This is on front page today: https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way...
This is authoritarian regime bread and butter. Create barriers that only right people can surmount, ban platforms where prominent opponents publish their media, block sources of income or just outright ban websites and newspapers and TG channels.
what counts as decency is a political view
If everything is political, then nothing is political. I believe that author(s) just don't want to participate in non-technical discussions around his creation.
I would interpret it as anyone is welcome. The only barrier to entry is an internet connection, and even that is needed for just part of your experience. I'd guess it's context is the censorship seen in the last decade on most social media platforms.
> I would interpret it as anyone is welcome.
...which is a very much a political statement.
"Welcome" is in the eye of the beholder. Everyone can join, but I am sure as it is also with our real worldwide community, not everyone is welcome or is accepted equally.
But the point is, nostr does not intent to judge that. It happens automatically while communicating. Nostr is just the means to communicate.
Welcome in this context means you can use it the same as anyone. There is no everyone, nostr is just tech.
Is there a point you're making, or question?
> 2, a privilege itself which puts you into a certain socio-political position
And others say that we should use our positions of privilege to help others, which seems to apply in this case.
Those people can stick to their little Mastodon instances where they can play God.
>"those people"
Oh look I found the politics.
Those people are right. Most of the time "apolitical" is used naively or to hide a political context.
Software is inherently apolitical. Claiming otherwise would be like saying that a hammer or drill are political, which is absurd. Political views are placed on software depending on the author's beliefs, but it's perfectly valid to release software in the public domain without any restrictions or expectations.
>Software is inherently apolitical. Claiming otherwise would be like saying that a hammer or drill are political, which is absurd.
No one sells "apolitical hammers" or "apolitical drills." If one has to specify that software is apolitical, it isn't.
No software exists in a vacuum, even the license terms are a political statement. Certainly nostr was created as an expression of fiatjaf's specific political ideals, and those ideals will tend to attract certain political demographics, and repel others.
"apolitical" and the hero image is literally someone taking a swipe at "government inefficiency"
Last time I tried navigating the Nostr ecosystem I found their Twitter-equivalent platform and it was full of people posting about cryptocurrencies and other topics that weren't of particular interest to me.
Are there any major figures of interest primarily participating on any Nostr platform? Or is there any kind of uniquely interesting content that is being primarily produced and shared on Nostr?
Same here. I like the idea, have tried the social-network side a couple of times, but my kind of content is missing or I can't find it.
https://bitchat.free now uses nostr for non-mesh contacts somehow, but I see no-one there either.
Network effects are difficult to replicate. You need lots of users to get a few solid consistent "content" creators. You need even more users to get the content that YOU like. So, it just amounts to having more users. Some might say it's impossible to replicate some existing social platform like X, and that may be true - but at the end of the day, you can vote with your attention and can contribute in ways you would like your space to be, so if you like say... log cabin content, then you can create it yourself and start amassing a log cabin enthusiast audience who will then start sharing their passion for log cabins.
Nostr doesn't have an "algorithm" that tries to find posts that you engage with. You should follow your own list of people, and then you will see their content. There are some clients trying to be more smart, though.
The "algorithm" in any social media is a blessing and a curse. Nostr shifts the responsibility of what to show to the clients.
Right, and I'm asking if there any interesting figures primarily using this platform to share interesting content because I don't know of any, and I didn't find any niches that were best served by this platform.
In the past, the way that I would typically get to know people online was either through niche topic-specific forums or IRC channels. Then eventually if we got to know each other well enough, we would connect on other platforms. The modern version of this seems to be Discord. These platforms are all topic focused, rather than being user-first.
Discoverability is important! And one of the limitations of search or tag based discoverability is that you're limited to finding things which you already know about. But it doesn't help you find new things that you don't know about! This doesn't mean that algorithmic discoverability is the only option, for example: you could find some way to map the user's interest spaces and search for unexplored or undiscovered nodes.
Discoverability is a huge challenge in any decentralized social protocol.
We've been talking a lot about this problem in nostr which can't be summarised in a quick HN comment but gathered some threads if you're really interested
https://asknostr.site/question/note1es989rjaccw82gpp705u462y... https://asknostr.site/question/note12dp9ewpngxejq8w9s6699k5z... https://asknostr.site/question/note1cp5cw366g7q9c2txvtrws0h7... https://asknostr.site/question/note1zqjk556quu6rvyetzvhdv7p3... https://asknostr.site/question/note1ss842g38wafwcfexd78gx0sc...
Nostr supports #hashtags just as twitter.
As a 1 year nostr user i can relate to this sentiment. Most conversations today are either about crypto or about (building) nostr.
My guess is that the better the network becomes the more that specific content will take a backseat
It's still pretty niche. Built mostly for and by bitcoiners, but has potential as a new way of doing social media that isn't reliant on major tech companies.
Hope this doesn't come accross as rhetorical, it's a genuine question!
Nostr users, how does this differ in your experience from Mastodon? At first glance it seems like the same idea but with the extra ingredient of blockchain, I'm not sure what this adds though, anonymity?
First of all there is some confusion because blockchain doesn't play a role here.
You start by creating a pair of public/private keys. That is your "account" but is independent from everything else (e.g. not tied to any specific tool nor web service).
Then you create texts (notes) which are digitally signed with your private key. Using the public key anyone can verify it was you writing it and nobody else.
There is no blockchain in the process, these simple text messages get sent to a multiple number of relays (you can even host them yourself) and other people can read them very freely.
The main difference to mastodon is that exists no central server where someone registers an account and has the power to kick you out from the site (deplatform). This also solves the problem with the mastodon servers decides to stop the service and suddenly everything is gone.
On NOSTR your texts are your texts, and there are multiple copies everywhere (more than 1000 free relays at the momment).
Ahhh, that's a helpful explanation, thanks!
So with Nostr - it's decentralised to the point that I'm (me the user) the individual point that's sending et, rather than Mastodon which is decentralised less such that there's multiple servers with many users.
That is correct. Plus, these are just plain text messages in the end of the day.
So you can always download and read them easily. I'm an old person from the forum days and was really annoying that whenever a forum would go down, all the useful posts and info shared over the years would disappear too. With this kind of mechanism, it is easier to rescue that data.
NOSTR isn't just about twitter-clones, it can basically be used to replicate blogs, forum and chat apps that exchange messges.
From my observation the federation is largely split between sides that don't like each other. The main block where the main instance lies is very trigger happy to block entire instances and if a server administrator doesn't follow the group think other server administrators will block you out of "lack of moderation". Account portability exists but requires that you be in good terms with the server admins. Which is fine. Their database and they do what they want but it felt like Reddit with less professional moderators.
On Nostr your account is your signature so there is no such thing as creating an account on someone else's database. You push to multiple relays where people can follow you so even if relay operators ban you there will always be some relay willing to host your stuff.
Others already pointed out there is no blockchain involved other than using the same secp256k1 as Bitcoin for signatures.
Last time I checked(years ago), it was like Mastodon but there are only dozen servers, and posting once in standard clients post it on all servers. Everything is a tweet, and servers serve you contents based on what it remembers about you. The core principle is that bans and refusals by server operators are at best customary since users can receive the same information elsewhere, even transparently.
Though, they did happily filter Macau casino spams flooding the system, so I wouldn't be so sure. Workload of posting to and receiving from dozen servers was also not trivial when I was trying it out, and architecture changes to reduce duplicates and/or syncing databases across hosts were actively discussed. I guess those works were never completed judging by comments here?
It's very unlike mastodon in that server operators have minimal control over user identities and content. Spam control is still a work in progress, but has come a long way through web of trust and more responsible relay operation. I invite you to give it another try!
The fundamental difference is that with Mastodon, or any Fediverse service, the server still has full control over the user. It's basically no different from regular Facebook or Twitter, just with some optional federation on top that can be switched off at any time (and often is).
On Nostr the server is just a dumb relay, it controls and owns nothing. User identities are proper public key pairs. If a relay goes evil, you can just use another one or use multiple at once to begin with, since the location of the messages is irrelevant, everything is held together by public keys.
There is no blockchain, only basic cryptographic signatures on each message. And users are not tied to any servers, they can read from multiple or write to multiple. They can (locally) aggregate data from many servers or connect to a specific server, same for publishing, it's very flexible and different clients choose to do it in different ways and expose different interfaces to users.
How does it differ from the Freenet[1] project?
AFIK Freenet is the only truly resilient anonymous network that lasted +20 years without literally a single successful attack by the state actor.
It's like RAID over the internet over encryption with global replication of data. Amazing project for PHD thesis lol
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphanet
Both things serve different purposes.
Imagine it this way, freenet needs electricity and servers to keep running. NOSTR messages can be printed in paper (handwritten even) and you'd still be able to verify it belongs to a specific person.
Basically freenet builds a network for communication (roads) but NOSTR is only about messages (cars) and doesn't really care about which road is using.
There is no centralization because there is no coordination. There is not even knowledge of what can be happening elsewhere because these messages might not even be using internet to be shared (e.g. radio or paper messages)
On the other side this is what makes it so powerful. You can download the full set of text messages from someone into your disk, that disk be found centuries later and digital archaeologists could easily read the contents because it is plain text.
So it isn't competing against freenet, it will use it very happily when available as option.
It would be cool if you could somehow form chains of trust with this, maybe even with links to other social media, where you could "follow other people that this guy has vetted". I want my social media censored and curated, but I want to choose my own censors and curators.
Nostr actually has web of trust (WoT) implementations. I think Coracle has this and some others. Nostur even lets you specify how far you want your web of trust to reach. Pretty cool stuff!
There is the concept of Data Vending Machines (DVMs) and curated follow lists now.
There’s also work on a Web of Trust in some clients that filters notes from people that don’t meet the WOT score. It’s essentially a weighted score based on who you follow and who they follow
> Nostr is an apolitical communication commons. A simple standard that […] can be used to spread information freely. Not controlled by any corporation or government …
One could argue that this is a deeply political thing, just not one that the usual suspects would care for. +1.
I still don't understand how Nostr would behave in this hypothetical scenario - a bad actor creates 100k key pairs (via residential proxies) and posts 10 LLM-generated replies to each new post. Who would fight with that wave of spam exactly and how?
This is happening today.
The answer is trusted relays and Web of Trust
Long-time nostr user. My feeds are all spam free. Not to say there aren't any other problems :-)
I guess it's easier with commercial spam when they have to advertise something, and that could be detected (website, product, etc)
But when it's just a new account with a few LLM-generated replies - how would trusted relay automatically detect the malicious intent?
You only read from the relays you want, relays have all the tools in the world to reject spam, therefore the solution is just to have clients that help the user enforce selecting only what they deem as "safe" relays in order to read replies from.
Also, if you have iOS, you can join the TestFlight of the new better BitChat Nostr here: https://www.reddit.com/r/bitchat/comments/1nd1zh8/ive_create...
Don't know much about Nostr, but wondered re the spam problem, if it would make sense to introduce the idea of proof-of-work for the identities? A quick search shows that the have optional PoW proposals for notes (i.e., individual posts), but I didn't see anything about PoW for identities.
People could spend $1, or $5, or $50 of compute for an identity, and others could use the cost of the identity as a filter. Having a $5 ID put on a blacklist would make poor behavior of any sort more costly.
Here is the Network Implementation Proposal for POW (https://nips.nostr.com/13)
Identity on nostr is just a public/private keypair.
You can enhance that identity by sending a kind0 (metadata) note with your name, bio, pictures. So i guess you're suggestion to add PoW for kind0 events which is covered by NIP13 too.
Right, so the general NIP13 could be used to define a "ID proof-of-work" note attached to an ID. You could add PoW notes after ID creation, or create new, more difficult notes if the original one turned out to be insufficient.
But although there's the technical components available to easily build such a thing, you're not aware of such a standard having been discussed, much less defined?
EDIT: To be clear, the idea for this would be a equivalent of the "blue check mark", but 1) you pay it yourself and 2) you can make it as cheap or expensive as you want.
Yes, that makes sense and that can be used later by relays and clients in order to decide whether to store or display notes from identities. In fact that's a pretty good idea.
I've tried to use it many times, through Damos on iOS, but it's littered with dead and abandoned projects and an alternative UI that worked one day, will just be gone later.
In the end the content I was seeing there was almost exclusively about Nostr and Crypto so it wasn't that interested to keep using it.
Yeah, it takes people to get good content worth paying attention to but if everyone says "it's dead" then it will remain dead. But if people voted with attention and said "yeah, it's kind of dead, but if I hang out here and my friends join, then it will be less dead and people will notice and also join..." You basically create the future you want.
That just describes any social network cold-start problem. If you want to solve that it needs to be really easy for regular users to join and contribute.
Example: Click "Join Nostr" on the nostr.com landing page and the first thing you see is "private" and "public" keys. Click next, you land on 4 example nostr clients. One is broken, the other one is filled with japanese content, the other one is a GitHub repository etc.
It's a cool project from a technical pov as the system is quite simple but you can not expect regular content to start popping up if the experience is only tailored towards motivated tech nerds.
I tried to improve that by making it easy to syndicate the content of Kirby (A blogging framework) to Nostr (https://github.com/dewey/kirby-posse/pull/9) but ran into many issues with how the various clients support and show images and lost interest along the way.
The Nostr protocol as such does not look like a huge revelation. JSON, hashes, signatures, and that’s about it. JSON is not a cryptographer’s best friend, by the way.
Effectively, everything else is left to be implemented.
That probably explains try-everything-see-what-works approach to client apps?
You're missing the point if you are evaluating it by looking at random facets like JSON and hashes. Nostr is an interoperable data layer. Anyone can build on it, and users don't get locked in, since the data layer is separate from the apps (clients). It puts the onus on app developers to make a compelling experience, and not F over The (not their) users. This upending is imo what the revelation is. Likewise, that everything is left to be implemented paints a picture of how developers can make it how they want. Like lego but you can design the bricks too. Cool.
There's also Stacker News which is centralized like Reddit or HN but uses BTC micropayments over Lightning in lieu of upvotes. It's a lot slower than HN but so far the SNR is a lot higher. It's also a bit dominated by Bitcoin content (much like some Nostr stuff.) Whether that's just a function of size or not is yet to be seen.
Is there any concept of private key rotation or something else? In case a client with a nostr key on it got compromised or something similar? With a traditional password passed logins I would just set a new password from another machine. Regeneration of a new nostr key would mean it's a new account isn't it?
There is Frost Key Rotation and/or Key bunkers
https://asknostr.site/question/note1534t79a5nk8ajcx8xqlsa3pr...
But it's still early and not all clients support it.
What's a good place to get started? Any favorite apps from these? https://nostrapps.com/
https://yakihonne.com/ tends to be a good experience for browser and has apps, after that https://primal.net is also quite good as introduction since their UI is similar to what you are used in other platforms.
Then there is https://www.amethyst.social/ which is excellent because it brings out more of the potential of the platform.
Word of warning: was blasted with NSFW on the first page of that link.
Both good choices. Amethyst is a great choice for Android.
Jumble.social is a good web client.
I send this video to people a lot when they ask me to learn about nostr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur20vi40NYY
Damus was one of the first apps and is pretty good.
Lots of people also like Primal. It's well polished and replicates Twitter/X reasonably well.
> "An open protocol with a chance of working"
One of the most depressing things about the decentralised protocol space is the adversarial attitude to other projects - whether that's Nostr v. ActivityPub v. ATproto v Nostr, XMPP v. Matrix v. IRCv3 v. Deltachat, etc.
Imagine if the energy spent on positioning yourself relative to other open-source projects (who should be fellow travellers, if anything) was instead invested into competing with the centralised proprietary incumbents instead.
The same applies to open source as a whole, but it's depressing to see the same vibes leach into the literal tagline of the project.
Doesn't help that all of the major decentralized protocols have been very effectively undermined and pushed aside.
GTalk first de-federated (weakening XMPP as a whole), then killed XMPP support completely. Reader effectively killed RSS for casual users. Email has been swallowed whole by the oligopoly of GMail+Yahoo+Outlook+iCloud+etc; spam is a real problem, so if you're self-hosting your email, you kinda expect to be blocked by default by the large networks.
Existing, corporate-backed efforts are "open-washing" their services.
Signal is supposed to be using an open protocol, but IIRC won't even let you join their network if you use an alt client.
Following Twitter's demise, Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet?
Actually open networks? Mastodon took off like crazy, but everyone tried to register on the "main", biggest instance - we got bamboozled so hard, we can't even comprehend what "decentralized" is actually supposed to mean.
ActivityPub as a protocol? Ted Unangst decided to build his own client from the spec, and was constantly running into Mastodonisms. <https://flak.tedunangst.com/search?q=activitypub>
Matrix? It has effectively one client (Element) that isn't a security disaster. <https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...>
Anything left, worth of anyone's attention?
>Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet?
Related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291
One potential positive of the recent censorship and deplatforming targeting the left is that it may accelerate the development of censorship-resistant platforms like Nostr, given the left has far more technologists than the right.
I don't understand. Can someone explain it to me from a technical/IT perspective? Is it like HTTP or JSON, or like XMPP...?
"An open protocol with a chance of working" = ?huh? "Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech"" = ???huh? "BEEP BOOP" ???wtf??
Please don't explain technical things as if you were talking to children. Explain them as if you were talking to a colleague sitting next to you. Talk to them as a person and as a professional.
It is a standard of how one thing talks to another thing. It is JSON with some fingerprinting/hashing send over Websocket. Thats basically it. What you do with it, remains up to your implementation.
That helped me understand the protocol better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w
This also helps understand the whole basic concept: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
Thank you! Exactly this "It is JSON with some fingerprinting/hashing send over Websocket" should be write there somewhere + put a link to the documentation and an example of how to use it. I don't want to watch an hour-long video.
Nostr is decentrialized, working with public/private keys. there is a very basic message format, messages are sent to "relays" that forward and store messages to other relays. It is up to the relays (anybody can be a relay) to connect to each others, chose a policy what/whose content to forward, whom to grant access, and how long to store and re-broadcast messages.
If you are familiar with the IRC chat system, it is similar to IRC but with JSON messages and the ability to store & resend messages on the servers. Servers have to connect to each other and are free to each have their own policies.
Those phrases you mentioned do not sound like they were addressed to children, and they have more text afterwards that expand on them.
Maybe you could explain what they're lacking?
You can have a look at https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/#/pathological which is also mentioned on the website somehere quite hidden
It is basically email on steroids.
You write an email (note/message) but instead of sending it to one server, you can send it to multiple servers of your choice. Each message is digitally signed with your keys and a time stamp, so you can verify that the identity is truly yours no matter where the message came from.
In my opinion is the most innovative way of communicating that I've seen in the last 20 years. There is no concept of server nor permanent location.
A relay can refuse to receive your messages, but they can't block your account because you can always write new notes, sign them and send to wherever people want to read your texts.
Imagine the case with Trump when he got blocked from Twitter. With a click of a button they have deplatformed him, with NOSTR he would have just continued writing and people would simply tune to another relay to keep reading his texts.
On top of that are other good developments. For example, file sharing also became decentralized. So files, images and other media can be sent to the relays and you mention them from the notes based on the file hash which is good save content when someone else hosting your texts and media decides to stop hosting.
Nice way of phrasing it :-)
I like the idea of nostr but when I tried to use it it was a lot of CP which made me instantly stop using it. I guess the issue with this type of protocols is that there must be a way to prevent these very dark and illegal content.
As a user I don't want to see it and the submitter should be found and jailed for distributing it. Right now, it's hard to know where it even comes from since it can come from any of the relay you are connected to. Most apps do not show which relay the content originates from and honestly, what can you do?
I guess one solution is to only use paid relayes or heavily restricted ones that require invitation. But if that is the case, it kind of defeats the purpose of Nostr to begin with IMO.
That statement is wrong at best scenario and fake at worst.
I'm a long time user of NOSTR. When you enter the network through any of the main clients you will only see curated topics (trending). The WoT assures that the best content comes up.
I had almost exactly the same experience and lost interest for the same reason. Am I wrong or fake?
Same experience here, im still trying to but that's tough to get past.
Either of them. I can't even fathom how this would be your first time experience there, other people here on this topic confirm that it doesn't happen.
If you feel that is wrong, please describe the steps to replicate such situation.
Happy to help.
Step 1: In 2023, notice a crypto spam post on Mastodon with a weird account name.
Step 2: Look up what could have made that post, which was bridged from some other service.
Step 3: Set up a key, grab a client (I used a web client that deployed to Netlify's free tier).
Step 4: Follow some howtos, add relays, follow some accounts that repeat other accounts, try to figure out how discovery works.
Step 5: Start seeing really disturbing content.
Step 6: Delete all this stuff, and write it off in the same bucket as Freenet.
Step 7: Wait some years.
Step 8: Get called a liar on a web forum.
What relays were you on? I have never seen CP on nostr. Did you start off following the crypto spammer mentioned or that was just what caused you to find nostr? I'd be curious how you built your initial follow list, as that and the relays you were on is the source of what you see. Kind of like if you go to weird ass websites you'll see that content, but nostr itself doesn't expose anything to a user, it's only a network for content read/write.
Come on, so much effort writing and yet so vague.
The easiest way to try NOSTR is using any of the common web platforms like https://primal.net or https://yakihonne.com/
Heck, you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years.
It is very unbelievable that you followed such a complicated process, even went to effort of deploying to a server (what?!?) and then somehow you see disturbing content without looking explicitly for it.
In case you are sincere, try it again using any of the common methods.
Do you really think somebody would try out a new platform 2 years ago, immediately drop it due to shady stuff and remember all the non trivial steps involved in this process?
> you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years
Since feb 2023, apparently;)
He just detailed a very weird and vague way that is unbelievable.
I'm a user since January 2023, there were plenty of well-known web clients already available back at that time (e.g. coracle, amethyst, etc). You enter the clients, there is a WoT by default and shows the most proeminent conversations typically.
My experience was never as the one he describes. Not even at the beginning, as you can see for many others here on this same publication. Those few (3?) cases mentioning otherwise will never provide real details for their claims.
it is possible if it is a protocol not a platform. Like there can be illegal stuff over http, there can be illegal stuff over nostr and a normal person can come across it. Actually way more likely on nostr because on web we have centralized https certs and dns which is used all the time to block cp and the like
It's funny when people first say "nostr is just a protocol and completely not subject to censorship" then "there is no way a new user would encounter bad stuff on nostr". pick one?
Sweden has a website called "dumpen.se" which tricks and publishes pedophile that are trying to abuse children.
The leftist media hates this website because they are doing an effective job. They are calling them all kinds of things.
When people are effective in tracking or publishing about pedos, there are always a lot of people saying you are the problem, not the pedos. I wonder why. There are a lot of pedos out there (just look at dumpens work it's kinda obvious) and they are of course using services that are anonymized and decentralized like any other.
Usually they are also very active online and attack people that try to cut their illegal actions online. Just look at my original post, it is downvoted. I just wanted some kind of action towards cutting pedo content and it is frowned upon by these people.
Very much unrelated to NOSTR which is a transparent network with a Web Of Trust enabled as default for users.
It is a grave and unfair accusation to associate NOSTR with such nefarious activities, that was the reason why so many protested against that labelling.
What exactly is wrong about my statement? Stating that my experience is wrong is stupid.
I don't know how the app I used works. I simply used the "Snort" app, connected to a few relays and did not use it for a couple of months. Then I came back and instantly saw CP freely shared. Instantly removed the app from the phone.
You can't say that it don't exist when people like me have seen it with their own set of eyes. This only makes protocols/projects like nostr set to fail, since regular people won't fucking care and just think of the nostr as something pedophiles are using, which they would not be incorrect in thinking at this moment.
I was betting on nostr in the beginning, I was running my own relay and started on a nostr client. But I gave up since clients came popping up everywhere so I didn't really have time to compete.
Yeah, when a layperson says $SOCIAL_MEDIA is full of child pornography, it often just means legal anime content that would be on advertisements everywhere in Tokyo, especially anime contents that are LESS explicitly sexualized.
This happens because Japan always has disproportionately massive online presence with significantly better democratized attention engineering, and so content selections naturally mimic a crossing at Akihabara(despite it almost has been entirely superseded by Chinese tech cultural centers such as Shenzhen), not the Times Square(in NYC), which infuriates a lot of somewhat vocal people.
And, the reason why I must bring this up is that it is not merely it is inaccurate labeling, but it is also counter productive to not face it straight on. Such as, people would move away from pornography, making it less actually pornographic, which is more child-pornographic by the standards of people using this term in this manner, because that is what are considered LESS sexualized contents by its producers, which by the way exist in orders of millions in Japan and leaking out fast into Asia at large.
TLDR. Hating anime, fine. Just don't call it CP. Your words sound opposite of intent. That's what brought us here. So stop.
1. I am not a layperson. I used nostr while it was still under active development and when it only had a few NIPs finished.
2. I have been to Japan several times, I know the difference between anime/hentai/lolita and stuff like that. This is not what I was experiencing.
3. I have nothing against pornography in general.
The issue is that when people bring up shit like this, we are not taken seriously and this hurts projects like nostr. It will never reach momentum if no steps are taken to prevent illegal material and dark shit like CP.
Calling me a liar makes me believe that you are intentionally are downplaying the experiences I and others have, which is helping pedophiles and similar people share their illegal content freely and without consequences. Why I do not know and you should seriously think about it and stop.
- The smaller group says they see TONS of $thing,
- the larger group says they see NONE of $thing,
- both are looking at the EXACT same thing.
-> The disagreement is in the definition of $thing.
It can't get clearer. How else would you explain it? Either you're lying(I guess not), or your definition is way off, or those secret underground organizations made some mistake and their secret Facebook group illegal content leaked out(no such thing on Nostr). By far the most likely scenario is that you're grouping from traffic cones to boxes of oranges to parrots in a forest into the exact same category of offensive contents by standards that nobody else could even understand.
That's quite the bold faced lie. I've been on nostr for years and it's been pretty friendly and never offensive.
And.. why would I lie? I used nostr for a little while in the very early days. Stopped using it then came back and had this experience on a major nostr app.
You're lying about me lying.
3 people have shared this experience in the thread.
Is there a fundamental reason this wouldn't be true? Isn't it a place where people can anonymously share multimedia with minimal moderation?
In my experience even the most toy application exposed to the wider internet will face this issue.
What I would consider is that nostr doesn't show you content. The content you see is a function of: 1. The people you follow 2. The relays you read from 3. The clients (apps) you use
I can't think of any clients which surface weird stuff (I've never seen any on nostr). I think to reach this situation a user must follow weird accounts and thus get their content - but then I can't see that as being nostr related, since someone could do that on the internet or other networks.
It's euphemism for anime. Listening to these draw lines between porn and not-porn ever clearer, which users interpret that inside the line is free-for-all, and anime wins and obliterates everything even harder after the fix is implemented or strengthened.
These people come back fuming hot with more derogatory, still indirect, descriptions, and cycle repeats. This has been a "problem" for social media for almost as long as I've been online.
Everytime NOSTR is mentioned there are people from other networks coming here to spread FUD.
The best thing is asking them to provide steps for replicating their claims, which they won't since it is the not the common user experience at all.
Yeah, they could say such and such handles are spreading content disgusting in such and such ways, e.g. "users like Sam Altman are posting astronauts riding horses on the Moon". They don't have to be so specific that exact contents would be actually accessible, only plausible. The mental imagery would not have to be precisely imaginable to disgusting details.
It's odd that they see "tons of" things that they can't describe beyond it belongs in the category, as if, just as if, actually characterizing it beyond making trust me remarks would lead to formation of broad consensus against them rather than against the contents.
Every time a crypto user faces criticism over their favorite technology they frame it as FUD. Quite a marvel of nature.
Not really. Cryptos are born out of criticism for current systems and they are an ever evolving technology fueled by those same critics.
What doesn't make sense is when the other party starts making stories just to tarnish other competing technologies. Just now the OP was asked to provide details to replicate his findings and those were indeed very "fuzzy" to say the least.
> Cryptos are born out of criticism for current systems
Nope. Most are born out of people not understanding how existing systems work and/or looking to get rich quick.
> an ever evolving technology fueled by those same critics.
No, it's mostly a self-perpetuating self-congratulatory hype machine busily re-inventing the systems they criticise
> What doesn't make sense is when the other party starts making stories just to tarnish other competing technologies.
What does make sense is the extremely fragile ego of crypto bros who can't stand any criticism towards their scams and hype, or the mention of any possible issues.
All of that is correct, albeit not the full picture.
Crypto wasn't created as a "get rich quick". I say this because I was there since the early days and participated quite a bit on the related BBS. Back then you'd already make good money building bots for day trading on stocks, crypto was really about a type of currency that no government could touch.
Nowadays the large majority of users are desperate to make some money through pyramid schemes and pure speculation to "get rich quick" albeit they usually end up losing money. The small minority is doing what they've always done: looking at systems, criticizing systems and building their own solutions to those systems.
There is really good stuff being built. Not many do it, granted.
Everything I don't like is FUD.
Anytime I see something that is NSFW it is from the fediverse bridge.
I think this is a real problem of "an open network". Disgusting people will find the network and abuse it.
There is a very insightful thread on nostr about it -> https://asknostr.site/question/note1lhvk3kkmaev6qzlpzzns69vw...
The top voted answer was
> Relays have to become more whitelisted and less open, and clients have to implement outbox model and stop relying on 2 or 3 big relays, then we can just stop worrying about this.
> I think this is a real problem of "an open network". Disgusting people will find the network and abuse it.
Question. Do you prefer open or closed networks? I'm sure you are aware that the internet is an open network.
Its horrible but that kind of content means theres no censorship.
Its on the individual to block that kind of stuff.
[dead]
I find open protocols the most naive endeavour in tech nowadays. The reason why social media protocols work is because the incentive is to have them siloed, controlled, and artificially convincing people through algorithmic suggestions that posting what they had for lunch is somewhat interesting.
These protocols seem to think that people actually want an alternative to what Instagram, Facebook, X etc. give them. They don't, we all just want the comfort of our own little bubble and a constant feeling of perceived fame. The rest, and all the talk about the protocol that underlines this is just fluff for nerds that will have zero impact in a society dominated by tech capital.
Do you wanna change social media? Try and find and effective way to bring them down.
even nostr seems to want bubbles, under Why not just use Mastodon/Fediverse? they write:
> The most interesting feature of Mastodon is that by its nature it creates communities with shared values that grow in each of its servers. Or, should I say, that should be a feature if it actually worked like that. In fact these are not really communities, but a mashup of users that may share some interests among each other, but also have other interests and those other interests end up polluting the supposed "community" with things that do not interest the other users.
ie. they're complaining that federated communities are too diverse and multi-faceted, instead of being divided into nice little laser-focused grids of shared interests
Do you have any suggestions for an effective way to bring them down?
Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?
My approach for bringing them down is working on better systems/UX than what the closed-silos currently offer...And we have a long way to go.
But...Nostr (and other decentralised social media protocols) can offer things the existing platforms can not do: interoperability.
Imagine the people you follow to be the same from FB, to strava, to spotify... Imagine the content (signed notes) you make are available on different clients/platforms
That UX, perhaps for use-cases and projects we can't imagine today will be so much better than what we have today. I've tasted a little bit of just that switching between my Nostr twitter-like client (Primal/Yakihonne) and the Podcast app (foundtain.fm). It blew my mind.
This opens use cases the existing platforms can only dream about.
Pushing for strict regulation that forces them to have disclaimers like cigarettes, and treating them officially like the public health disaster they are. The free market, despite what the capitalistic religion leads you to think, is still not the only option.
People do want alternatives. Bluesky is a clear example of that. Nostr is clearly not as big, but it's a protocol.
> Do you wanna change social media? Try and find and effective way to bring them down.
That's basically the point of nostr.
We need to both bring down these big companies and also have decentralized platforms ready for the outflux
I downvoted this because I don't like the way it makes me feel.
That is admitting that you downvoted against the exact rules of HN, but suit yourself :D