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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 tr

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.
- rektide 4y ago
  > 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. The infrastructure is decentralized, but it's one of the most centralized systems in the world, in terms of what's available/what you'll find. > 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. I think a lot of it is a pretty simple desire: we want to chat with each other, and be able to have access to the data. Literally no social media system on the planet actually lets you take your conservations out. You're limited to 24 hours of caching at most. If you quit or get banned, your words vanish. If someone else quits or gets banned, their words vanish. Memories up in smoke. With Nostr, the data is yours to do with. In general I think there's a pretty obvious calling here, for people to have something/anything. Right now we literally have no option to start from, no ability to do anything or try other things, on any of the major incumbent systems. Your criticism seems very "no one can explain what it's for" conservative, but the progressives don't care about what it's for. We want something where we can figure out what it's for, we want a way to start to figure out what progress might look like. We need a starting place to explore what is possible. There's already a ton of really neat & interesting NIPS. There's already social networks forming. We already can archive and relay our data, over any available medium including offline. There are interesting capabilities here which are unmirrored. I don't think anyone here is concerned about the normies right now: the alpha geeks want to serve themselves, want to build freedom & possibility, which is what's denied right now. They are building possible starting places we can adapt and adopt to many uses. And they're doing an excellent job, doing new things, that no one else can, in part because no one else can do anything at all (because giant megacorporations own all the other mediums)_and in part because they have good technical underpinnings with potentiate a much wider space of possibility than the limited centralized site-based hosting systems we have today. Contrary to your shade, I don't think the Nostr people are fanatics about their tech. It's a starting place, that techies find to be a reasonably good place to start building exploring from. There's not a lot of contenders, to be honest. We need something, and very little else right now fits.
  - 4y ago

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.

rektide 4y ago
> 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. The infrastructure is decentralized, but it's one of the most centralized systems in the world, in terms of what's available/what you'll find. > 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. I think a lot of it is a pretty simple desire: we want to chat with each other, and be able to have access to the data. Literally no social media system on the planet actually lets you take your conservations out. You're limited to 24 hours of caching at most. If you quit or get banned, your words vanish. If someone else quits or gets banned, their words vanish. Memories up in smoke. With Nostr, the data is yours to do with. In general I think there's a pretty obvious calling here, for people to have something/anything. Right now we literally have no option to start from, no ability to do anything or try other things, on any of the major incumbent systems. Your criticism seems very "no one can explain what it's for" conservative, but the progressives don't care about what it's for. We want something where we can figure out what it's for, we want a way to start to figure out what progress might look like. We need a starting place to explore what is possible. There's already a ton of really neat & interesting NIPS. There's already social networks forming. We already can archive and relay our data, over any available medium including offline. There are interesting capabilities here which are unmirrored. I don't think anyone here is concerned about the normies right now: the alpha geeks want to serve themselves, want to build freedom & possibility, which is what's denied right now. They are building possible starting places we can adapt and adopt to many uses. And they're doing an excellent job, doing new things, that no one else can, in part because no one else can do anything at all (because giant megacorporations own all the other mediums)_and in part because they have good technical underpinnings with potentiate a much wider space of possibility than the limited centralized site-based hosting systems we have today. Contrary to your shade, I don't think the Nostr people are fanatics about their tech. It's a starting place, that techies find to be a reasonably good place to start building exploring from. There's not a lot of contenders, to be honest. We need something, and very little else right now fits.
- 4y ago