Nostr
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The discussion around Nostr, a decentralized social media protocol, highlights its potential benefits and drawbacks, including concerns about censorship, content moderation, and the need for a more nuanced approach to free speech.
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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.
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.
If you feel that is wrong, please describe the steps to replicate such situation.
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.
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.
> you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years
Since feb 2023, apparently;)
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.
also you'll be committing an offence. the first thing you do is report it to authorities, not doing it is illegal. so that's half your day gone. then blogging about how to find it before it's taken down probably also illegal. literally no one wants any of this on a random day)
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?
I did find the client I used; it was called "branle". I'm not in the habit of installing random shit on my iphone, thanks. Deploying things to Netlify is super easy, especially when the software is designed for it explicitly.
I will not be trying again, because as I said elsewhere in the thread, I don't actually care about nostr. Bluesky is working fine for me these days, and in the event that stops being the case, I won't be revisiting the one I already wrote off.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're lying about me lying.
Its on the individual to block that kind of stuff.
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.
Question. Do you prefer open or closed networks? I'm sure you are aware that the internet is an open network.
The content (images, videos) itself is often quickly removed by blossom/media relay runners, especially if people report it and once they're cleared the spam notes are basically worthless to anyone because they're just dead links and spammy/abusive hashtags. Due to the hashtags is still quite easy to purge them.
I run my own relay and self reported it whenever one of these notes or uploads hit my systems. I built a quick shell script using AI to take care of almost all of that.
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.
Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?
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.
> 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
I think the point of the quote is that Mastodon tries to be both a topic-centered community platform as well as a "everything goes" public social network like Twitter/X but the federation aspect is not true decentralization because you can easily lose your social graph/reach if some instance admin doesn't like you or your own instance gets #fediblocked.
Only if you're on a Bluesky-operated PDS. That's straightforward to fix, at which point the most Bluesky can do to “ban” you is stick a label on your account that non-Bluesky applications/clients are free to ignore.
> to my knowledge their promises of being decentralized are comparable to Telegram being E2E encrypted.
AFAICT your knowledge is about a year out of date.
You don't change social media by building yet another closed protocol. You'd be building more of the same. The only option left is to build open protocols, and nostr is another attempt. Checkmate.
That's basically the point of nostr.
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?
The "algorithm" in any social media is a blessing and a curse. Nostr shifts the responsibility of what to show to the clients.
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.
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...
My guess is that the better the network becomes the more that specific content will take a backseat
Even the #art is 95% Bitcoin and nostr fan art.
https://bitchat.free now uses nostr for non-mesh contacts somehow, but I see no-one there either.
Network effects are everything. The tech can be good but the product may not be - solely because of the network effect. Still - pretty good tech!
Last year one of users on mastodon I was casually talking to decided to move to Nostr - he claimed in his last posts that some features like pools and voting are locked behind payments there. Can someone shed some light on that? I couldn't find any info if that platform does contain paid features.
Then there is https://www.amethyst.social/ which is excellent because it brings out more of the potential of the platform.
You and your 3 friends tend to do the same every time NOSTR is mentioned just because you use another platform. Please be honest and admit the affiliation.
I wasn't "blasted" with NSFW but it was definitely present (and not very far down the feed). And the feed seems to be chronologically ordered, so depending on your timing something like that could be front and center.
Jumble.social is a good web client.
Lots of people also like Primal. It's well polished and replicates Twitter/X reasonably well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur20vi40NYY
Not reliable for larger values.
Monero has other things working for it though, like the absence of liquidity issues you might face using Lightning.
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.
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.
That 51% attack on Monero never happened, despite much noise and headlines saying initially otherwise. You can verify this for yourself.
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.
Anyways thank you for mentioning Trampoline payments, I've learned something new.
I don't get it. It's like saying bank transactions are private enough for all sorts of micro payments for content creators, but not private enough for organized crime to move large sums. Technically true, but...
It's either private or not.
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.
> It is noteworthy that zapps are based on lightning (which is Layer-2 for bitcoin), and similar in privacy as monero (and instantaneous).
Entire subthread was 99% about your lightning "privacy" claim, which was incorrect.
The difference between minutes vs seconds might be interesting or crucial to many, but that wasn't the most important thing you've been called out on.
Hope this helps with understanding the other guy.
P.S: anon1395 is likely a new, mere troll account. Well played.
The real lesson is that most people don't care enough about the underlying risks - they care about convenience.
Hopefully future versions of Start9 or Umbrell make it easier. Or some hybrid solutions like Greenlight/Breez or Spark.
Lightning can't work distributed, by design. It's a silly architecture. I guess the problem that the proponents of the alternative were slightly mental, sealed the fate of the BTC. It really should have increased block size, multiple times by now, and don't bother with stuff that can't work.
Point 1. Increasing node storage size would not be very expensive, people are buying NAS storage for fun, some of the more idealistic ones would certainly do that for BTC. BTC chain today is less than one terabyte. Even increasing chain size x10 times would still mean that it would fit on a single cheap consumer HDD. Increasing it x100 times would require something like a 6-8 HDD stripe, under 1-2 thousand bucks in price. People do that for memes or hosting torrents every day, all across the globe.
Point 2. Increasing chain size by a lot would mean that the amount of full nodes would inevitably drop, lets say by half, or even by 3/4. Still a lot would remain and the system would be very decentralized. While with lightning crutch the decentralized part is clogged permanently and is unusable for any serious currency replacement use, while users are forced on a broken by design centralized Lightning.
In my opinion the answer is obvious, if we want to have a truly decentralized currency, and not some casino replacement for gambling and law avoidance.
If you have multiple channels you have more routing alternatives and can choose the best one for every single payment.
Even in the most absurdly centralized scenario, the system is practically unusable as soon as there are more than a handful users. Or people just stop pretending and use custodian tokens, aka bullshit IOUs.
Nostr has existed for at least 5 years. I remember people migrate there and promote it on Twitter during pandemic. Infancy?
We've been hosting some bounties like this one here: https://app.lightningbounties.com/issue/615dc5f7-ed91-4ecd-8...
"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.
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.
The sad irony of this is that this is really not all that innovative, it's just reinventing the 45 year old Usenet with public-crypto. The server-independence was present in Usenet right from the start, that's why Dejanews/GoogleGroups could exist, and why Usenet wasn't provided by a specific server, but by your ISP. The modern Internet has completely regressed in that regard, getting rid of protocol specific clients, and moving everything to the browser and HTTP that don't allow that kind of distribution, that's why Nostr feels fresh again.
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
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.
Maybe you could explain what they're lacking?
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 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Can't monetize that.
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.
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