Nature's Many Attempts to Evolve a Nostr

The innovative concept is that npub/nsec along with sending notes is trivially simple. The content does not need to encrypted, there is a huge value on publishing clear text messages that are crypto-verifiable. You also didn't had this feature on groove and others. I'd argue that NOSTR has indeed pioneered them into mainstream.

Also, beyond just no positive incentives, there are nontrivial negatives... they're hubs for an entire network, which can be a lot of traffic and bandwidth if peers are sharing anything other than text. That's a potentially significant cost for literally just being a dumb router. The idea of charging for this doesn't make sense... you don't choose a router, it's automatic based on location, so there's no incentive for quality. That ends up being a race to the bottom, which there's no room for arbitrage; prices are driven down to near-zero profit.

Abuse-wise, the model is fundamentally flawed. Economically, the idea kinda works so long as hub traffic is low enough to be swallowed in background noise for whoever manages the hub. Beyond that the model breaks pretty quickly.

As I have said in other replies to this post, read up on the outbox model. Global relays are useful, but are interchangeable and totally replaceable. As soon as you've connected with someone you can retrieve their updates, because you know their preferred relays, and can query them directly.

And there are incentives to running a global or community relay. Read up on Zaps. With Nostr, you can give real value via the lightning network, and it is built into the protocol. This allows you to charge for usage if you so desire. And then there's all the other reasons why people run community web sites or global services.

My experience on the internet does not reflect this, this is a very pessimistic view of people, bordering on perl-clutching.

Most raw user generated feeds are not great sure, but it’s mostly mediocre jokes and mildly provocative takes from bored trolls, and that’s usually a loud minority. Most people either lurk or make a modest effort now and then, particularly in niche communities like this where most people aware of it will already be fairly deeply immersed in tech. People have better things to do than to constantly be aggressively offensive, I imagine it gets old fast, and you really need to go out of your way to write something that legitimately hurts an adult.

Sure of course there are bubbles that are cesspits of hate, but they tend to band together and it is quite hard to bump into them accidentally. And when you do, you just feel slightly disgusted for a second, turn back and forget about it.

Some moderation is critical, but it usually needs to only be enforced for a few bad apples, most people act with decency and common sense, even when anonymous. At least that’s my experience.

Doesn't this same line of thinking apply to the Internet as a whole? Couldn't your question of "Why would anyone use Nostr?" equally be asked for "Why would anyone use a web browser?"

in fact, the further mainstream social networks evolve, the more social rank it started to bring not to be there, and/or having been booted. it's early on this path, but i started to notice the signs.

I think the point is that "opening all other existing social networks" to get a rounded point of view has immense friction, especially in an enshittified world. Even with supposedly non-enshittified solutions like Mastodon, for example, you have to subscribe with different users to distinct instances that allow only a subset of the network and manage that for you. They can alter their banlist behind your back, for starters, so you have to manage that as well.

The proposal of Nostr is that you can follow as many relays as you want, in the same app, with the same user. Compare to having separate accounts for Facebook, X, Threads, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, <woke-friendly Mastodon instance> and <reactionary-friendly Mastodon instance>.

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

I don't appreciate the content either but a protocol that doesn't create high value targets for corruption (e.g. certificate authorities) is useful independent of the regrettable vibes that its fan club has.

Nostr is a very simple protocol that could have been invented in essence in 1995. There's a reason it wasn't invented until recently, because it's difficult to build robust protocols with good guarantees about discoverability and reliability with a foundation that is as limited as it is.

I think the blogosphere is the most succesful distributed social network. People just dont like viewing it that way.

(Whether the author is convincing on the other hand...)

It's crazy that some functionality on e.g. the IRS website requires me to verify my identity using a private company (ID.me).

A wallet is easier to lose than a bank vault, but it also holds less money for the same reason. Crypto keys can be designed the same way, with high importance keys managed by safer means like m of n schemes mixed with traditional "hard" storage in geographically distributed safe deposit boxes or whatever, while less important keys can be treated in a more relaxed fashion.

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

sneak’s law: “Users can not and will not securely manage key material.”

It is inefficient, but the inefficiency seems to lie at some fundamental problem with p2p. Centralized systems need to do the same synchronization, but between fewer actors, and may outsource some of the verification for an exponential increase in speed.

Why would "every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message"?

Relays get one client pushing one message. That one message is pushed to multiple relays. To your own preferred relays, as well as to the preferred relays of others who are involved in the conversation, as well as to a couple of global relays for easy discoverability.

These global relays are useful, but are interchangeable and totally replaceable. As soon as you've connected with someone you can retrieve their updates, because you know their preferred relays, and can query them directly.

In this way Nostr has the benefits of centralised networks for discoverability, federated networks for communities, and private individual web site for p2p and archival purposes.

- You publish to, say, 3 relays. - I follow you or want to browse your content for any reason. - I connect to your 3 relays and fetch your content.

If I want to follow someone else and they publish to other relays I fetch their posts from those relays.

If some of your relays start censoring you you can move to other relays, or run your own, and I'll start fetching your content from those.

Disagree though, people manage keys just fine, or they can be thought.

But even if there are people in the world that never get it, it could be outsourced to a central identity provider that manages your key and messages. For the end user they would have a user/password combo they can reset.

If the network becomes more popular someone will definitely build something like that.

The technical capabilities (remote signers, bunkers, ...) already exist

Spam is basically a solved issue. There's both proof of work and paid relays, not to mention web or trust. It has been at absolute worst a minor annoyance.

There's plenty of ways to discover content on Nostr, from hashtags to channels to location based chats to just following some interesting people. It's perhaps not as frictionless as X, but imho that's a feature not a bug.

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

NOSTR was a response to the situation where virtually all other social media platforms could basically block your identity and delete all your posts. There is no such possibility at this platform. Sure enough that relays might refuse to receive messages from a user but they will never be capable of silencing that user and he can continue sending his (verifiable) messages to any other relay out there in the internet.

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

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

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