4 ms·

> 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

> 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.

acdha 4y ago
> Your criticism seems very "no one can explain what it's for" conservative, but the progressives don't care about what it's for. Progressives have goals. That doesn’t always mean solutions, but nobody should struggle to say what they’re trying to improve. That’s somewhat conspicuously absent in Dorsey’s bounty listing, and that’s why I’ve been asking. Ultimately, the problem is that a service like GitHub or GitLab uses a fair amount resources to run. You have non-trivial storage needs, multiple separate systems making changes which aren’t a simple write-once structure (think about what git rebase does to your storage needs), and non-trivial services like CI. Most projects started out running those themselves (possibly starting in the CVS or Subversion eras), got tired of it and switched to something like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. and in general that’s been a popular choice. They have paid services which generate a fair amount of revenue to support their businesses but the free tiers allow many open source projects to work without thinking about infrastructure. This means the very first question I have is the still unanswered one: what is going to motivate someone to spend time working on this or take the risk of switching to it? Nostr isn’t designed for this problem so it’ll be harder to solve there and you’re still going to have to pay for servers since relays don’t guarantee storage unless you run them, and I don’t see very many people who are unsatisfied enough with the status quo that they’re going to donate millions of dollars worth of development time.

acdha 4y ago

> Your criticism seems very "no one can explain what it's for" conservative, but the progressives don't care about what it's for. Progressives have goals. That doesn’t always mean solutions, but nobody should struggle to say what they’re trying to improve. That’s somewhat conspicuously absent in Dorsey’s bounty listing, and that’s why I’ve been asking. Ultimately, the problem is that a service like GitHub or GitLab uses a fair amount resources to run. You have non-trivial storage needs, multiple separate systems making changes which aren’t a simple write-once structure (think about what git rebase does to your storage needs), and non-trivial services like CI. Most projects started out running those themselves (possibly starting in the CVS or Subversion eras), got tired of it and switched to something like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. and in general that’s been a popular choice. They have paid services which generate a fair amount of revenue to support their businesses but the free tiers allow many open source projects to work without thinking about infrastructure. This means the very first question I have is the still unanswered one: what is going to motivate someone to spend time working on this or take the risk of switching to it? Nostr isn’t designed for this problem so it’ll be harder to solve there and you’re still going to have to pay for servers since relays don’t guarantee storage unless you run them, and I don’t see very many people who are unsatisfied enough with the status quo that they’re going to donate millions of dollars worth of development time.