3 ms·

The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over. If governm

The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over. If governments do try to get things removed on Nostr they're going to have a much much harder time. Folks can re-pop-up on different relays. Governments can keep playing whack-a-mole but I have hard time seeing they'll have any success. Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me, seems to be way different from what I'd expect when this situation crops up. Not needing to host is a critical change of the game here, in my view.

acdha 4y ago
> The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over. The DNS system is decentralized and updates take seconds. We’ve seen this for decades with things like open source projects when someone gets tired of hosting it. > Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me Look at what happened with the TornadoCash guys — once legal action was taken, how many exchanges would allow transactions to or from their addresses? This would be similar: once enough people start using it, someone will do something illegal, and then governments are going to start telling server operators in their jurisdictions to stop allowing that traffic if they don’t want to be charged as accessories. Since those guys don’t want to go to jail or have their servers packed up by federal marshals, they’ll figure out whatever is necessary to block certain keys. Something like Nostr might make it slightly easier to replicate things or provide a less antiquated key management system than GPG but it won’t be a game-changer but an incremental improvement at best. I think this effort here is both overstating the problem of using GitHub and understating the challenges of replacing it. People use GitHub because running servers is a chore they don’t want to deal with. Relatively few people are donating hosting and the ones who do generally aren’t interested in hosting the few types of content which GitHub bans, either. They’re certainly not going to go to jail rather than help the police who tracked something illegal to their IPs.
- rektide 4y ago
  I don't feel like your recognizing a ton of really obvious differences. DNS is hardly a good shield for dealing with potential takedowns. It seems obviously true for a variety of reasons, including some mandated takedowns at the centralized DNS layer itself. Relays obviously allow a vault potentially infinitely replicated way means for unhosting that simply lacks many good modern parallels. TornadoCash again seems radically different from anything we are talking about, simply because it is so heavily in the highly regulatory financial regime, in a way that Nostro simply isn't. The government never really had to step in; the threat of it maybe having to made everyone change their tune very fast. And there just were very very very few actual decision makers involved. Nostr is far more decentralized in practice, even though the number of users is much lower than cryptocoin stuff. Elsewhere I've agreed that replacing GitHub is really really hard & long work, & I've pined for us to take smaller steps rather than make such big totalizing attempts. But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage. And you seem unwilling to deem any attempt worth starting. At some point the feelings against big centralized social networks leads us to trying new things, but I mostly read fatalistic why try from your people-dont-want-to-host-things, even though Nostr's whole point is to make being a relay at small interpersonal scales reslly easy, without having to tackle the hard big-scale computing hosting challenges. And if your relay goes down,... so what? Your small unhosted network is there.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I would strongly suggest you think about how such a system could actually work. For example, DNS is still decentralized unless you’re running something illegal in so many places that you can’t get a stable entry from one of thousands of choices around the world. If that’s the kind of thing you’re concerned with, I don’t see much advantage to replacing a DNS record with a public key on Nostr - that’s the easiest part of the problem compared to preserving the actual data, limiting access only to people you trust (how do you know who that really is?), etc. > But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage This is why so many people are comparing this to blockchains/web3 — people seem to have started by saying everyone needs to adopt a particular technology but it’s like pulling teeth to get a proponent to give a concrete example of a real problem experienced by non-hypothetical people which is competitively solved by using it. If you ask for details the response is not to provide them but say “you don’t get it”, which in my experience is one of the most reliable indicators of a technology which will fail. I first used self-hosted development tools in the 90s so assume I’m familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of working that way. What I’m missing here is a benefit from Nostr which would be so beneficial that people would give up the advantages of the systems everyone has settled on. For example, if the big pitch is “censorship resistance” I’d start by establishing who’s being censored on a scale noticeable enough to support a large development effort, followed by convincing analysis that the proposed system will actually accomplish its goals.

acdha 4y ago

> The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over. The DNS system is decentralized and updates take seconds. We’ve seen this for decades with things like open source projects when someone gets tired of hosting it. > Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me Look at what happened with the TornadoCash guys — once legal action was taken, how many exchanges would allow transactions to or from their addresses? This would be similar: once enough people start using it, someone will do something illegal, and then governments are going to start telling server operators in their jurisdictions to stop allowing that traffic if they don’t want to be charged as accessories. Since those guys don’t want to go to jail or have their servers packed up by federal marshals, they’ll figure out whatever is necessary to block certain keys. Something like Nostr might make it slightly easier to replicate things or provide a less antiquated key management system than GPG but it won’t be a game-changer but an incremental improvement at best. I think this effort here is both overstating the problem of using GitHub and understating the challenges of replacing it. People use GitHub because running servers is a chore they don’t want to deal with. Relatively few people are donating hosting and the ones who do generally aren’t interested in hosting the few types of content which GitHub bans, either. They’re certainly not going to go to jail rather than help the police who tracked something illegal to their IPs.

rektide 4y ago
I don't feel like your recognizing a ton of really obvious differences. DNS is hardly a good shield for dealing with potential takedowns. It seems obviously true for a variety of reasons, including some mandated takedowns at the centralized DNS layer itself. Relays obviously allow a vault potentially infinitely replicated way means for unhosting that simply lacks many good modern parallels. TornadoCash again seems radically different from anything we are talking about, simply because it is so heavily in the highly regulatory financial regime, in a way that Nostro simply isn't. The government never really had to step in; the threat of it maybe having to made everyone change their tune very fast. And there just were very very very few actual decision makers involved. Nostr is far more decentralized in practice, even though the number of users is much lower than cryptocoin stuff. Elsewhere I've agreed that replacing GitHub is really really hard & long work, & I've pined for us to take smaller steps rather than make such big totalizing attempts. But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage. And you seem unwilling to deem any attempt worth starting. At some point the feelings against big centralized social networks leads us to trying new things, but I mostly read fatalistic why try from your people-dont-want-to-host-things, even though Nostr's whole point is to make being a relay at small interpersonal scales reslly easy, without having to tackle the hard big-scale computing hosting challenges. And if your relay goes down,... so what? Your small unhosted network is there.
- acdha 4y ago
  I would strongly suggest you think about how such a system could actually work. For example, DNS is still decentralized unless you’re running something illegal in so many places that you can’t get a stable entry from one of thousands of choices around the world. If that’s the kind of thing you’re concerned with, I don’t see much advantage to replacing a DNS record with a public key on Nostr - that’s the easiest part of the problem compared to preserving the actual data, limiting access only to people you trust (how do you know who that really is?), etc. > But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage This is why so many people are comparing this to blockchains/web3 — people seem to have started by saying everyone needs to adopt a particular technology but it’s like pulling teeth to get a proponent to give a concrete example of a real problem experienced by non-hypothetical people which is competitively solved by using it. If you ask for details the response is not to provide them but say “you don’t get it”, which in my experience is one of the most reliable indicators of a technology which will fail. I first used self-hosted development tools in the 90s so assume I’m familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of working that way. What I’m missing here is a benefit from Nostr which would be so beneficial that people would give up the advantages of the systems everyone has settled on. For example, if the big pitch is “censorship resistance” I’d start by establishing who’s being censored on a scale noticeable enough to support a large development effort, followed by convincing analysis that the proposed system will actually accomplish its goals.