4 ms·

> Resilience is provided by the protocol being simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice. Platform lock-in is impossible, since any cl

by neilk 3y ago

> Resilience is provided by the protocol being simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice. Platform lock-in is impossible, since any client can republish any note to a different relay if one misbehaves or enacts a disagreeable policy. That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email and both are effectively controlled by large companies. Twitter is centralized due to being the creation of a single company, but that's not the fundamental problem. The web and email got effectively centralized because distributed protocols create problems of search, filtering, abuse, identity, community continuity, etc. You can't easily solve them in a distributed way, and even if you _can_, you can't easily get everyone in the network to upgrade. Hence, providers arise that say "We're Nostr, only better!(tm)" or "We're the best way to find what you want on Nostr!" and they work on locking in their customers. If you want to be resilient to monopolization you have to show how you're going to solve those other problems.

irusensei 3y ago
The identity is controlled by a cryptographic key on the client side so even if you get kicked of a server you and whoever is in contact with you can just grab your data from other relays.
dangoor 3y ago
> The web and email got effectively centralized… Woah there. I don't agree with this. The web is certainly not centralized (this is on Hacker News and not Facebook, right?) It follows a power law distribution where you have some players getting lots of traffic and then there are lots and lots of small traffic sites. But it's definitely decentralized. _Google_ is something of a monopoly providing some of the features you list for the web at large, but there are others (Duck Duck Go, Bing) that are just a click away. Gmail took a huge share of the email market by being a better product for the first several years of its existence (and being free also helped). That doesn't mean email is centralized: I've been using Fastmail for the last several years and it works _just fine_. I don't have the problems you list. Anyhow, I agree with your point that a decentralized _social network_ needs to solve the problems you're listing. I just think the web and email are actually examples of technologies that remain decentralized.
- rektide 3y ago
  Here here! As a web developer, I think we've figured out maybe 1% of what the web is good for & capable of. There's still so much possibility, so many options, that any given person can go off & explore & play around with & succeed on. The field has never been more open for, more ready for new exciting possibilities, better set to start changing if we can make a real authentic honest outreach to users, that is a fair shake from tech, & not leaving cloud-giants holding all the cards & us with a couple magic beans. The doom & gloom look at the macro of what the web is is really sad. It's a constant pity party. The ability to control & shape our information spaces to our liking & pick our paths has never been higher, has only gotten better as more protocols & standards, focused at purer social networking levels than the web medium at large, have arisen. As a developer, it's been a one way street with us crafting better and better means of web development and deployment every single year, and what we're excitingly starting to see is more genuine & personal involvement not just with creating sites, but with creating interconnection, creating interlink, creating intermedia, not just on one big property, but across many voices. Nostr highlighting the idea of a relay, that who we relay is a vote of amplification, is semi-covert social commentary on picking your traffic, on selecting what gets to get shared out. There's no headier better more promising time than today (and the web continues to be the premier delightful connectable blank slate from with which to experiment & iterate).
- drexlspivey 3y ago
  Email is centralized in the sense that you might run your own server/domain but if Google decides you are bad and stops federating with you you might as well not exist. Who are you going to exchange mail with if most people are on Gmail? That’s very different than Google banning your account where you can just switch to Bing for search.
  - dangoor 3y ago
    Fair point, though I suspect that Google not accepting mail from a particular provider without good reason would cause a bit of an uproar. I definitely wouldn't recommend that folks try to run their own mail servers, so it's true that email is more consolidated than the web.
leesalminen 3y ago
A big topic of conversation at nostrica (nostr's first conference) last month was how to maintain decentralization. One of the biggest concerns was having a client or relay provider build features outside of the protocol to gain market share and enable them to lock-in users. You are correct that there is no easy solution to these problems. There are draft NIPs that attempt to solve many of the problems you've described. You're welcome to join us in the conversation and work with us to try and solve these hard problems! https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls PS- I don't think the web is effectively controlled by large companies. Email is a different story though. Hopefully we can build nostr to be more like the web than email.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  Maybe nostr needs a Law of Jante/tall poppy lopper - any client or relay that gets too special gets blacklisted/punished by all the other clients/relays (to the extent possible through the protocol). Sorry if that is in a NIPS, there are 84 in that link and I can't read through them all.
- Logans_Run 3y ago
  To be clear: I am the submitter not the author. The link is just something I stumbled across while browsing ReclaimTheNet.
jrm4 3y ago
I think your "effectively controlled" is mostly meaningless. There's orders of magnitude of difference between "started off as scattered and big companies now do a majority of the maintenance" vs actually CENTRALIZED, like Twitter. My website and my email, from my domain, both exist generally as equals without any meaningfully strong influence from google or whatnot, e.g. censoring my website would be a practically completely different thing from the ridiculous mess that Twitter is becoming (if it isn't already.)
Logans_Run 3y ago
Rebuttal/response to/of your comment/thought/input. From the Wiki - I ran across Nostr when I was looking for an excuse to do some network programming. I have a thing for small standards, and the Nostr spec was 75 lines of exactly what I was looking for.
redder23 3y ago
Email is not "controlled" by large companies. People choose to use large companies and let them read their emails because they are stupid. Email has not evolved in any way BECAUSE its NOT controlled by some company. If Google could, they would do even more evil with email that "just" reading all your mails. To compare Twitter with email makes absolutely no sense. Yes Twitter is a totally controlled thing by a single company, email is not. You could say it for the web when it comes to net neutrality and where it does not exist anymore ...
- thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
  What percentage of your reach do you lose if google blacklists your domain?
  - rvz 3y ago
    *silence*
    - yellowapple 3y ago
      FYI: comments like yours are more effective when posted at least a day later, lest they end up looking silly when the "silence" is eventually broken - as it is now.
      - rvz 3y ago
        It is still very effective, it took you a day later to respond to the parent. OP Comment: 25 April 2023, 00:41:52 AM Yours: 26 April 2023, 03:18:06 AM I was expecting a response much earlier than that since the answer is very obvious. Instead you decided to come up with a typical anecdote which can easily be dismissed. The main fact is, almost everyone knows that you lose LOTS of users emailing you once a provider like GMail blocks you as it is the most used email provider. [0] [0] https://mailchimp.com/resources/most-used-email-service-providers https://mailchimp.com/resources/most-used-email-service-prov...
        3y ago
0xpgm 3y ago
> That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email Really? Web browsers, web servers and mail servers are beasts. I don't see them being 'simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice'
- revelio 3y ago
  Not now but in the beginning they were. The first version of HTML was basically just a hack that glued an SGML parser to the NeXTStep text view control. The web didn't support inline images because the NeXTStep control TBL used didn't support it. Then companies like Netscape came along and started adding features. The rest is history.

by neilk 3y ago

irusensei 3y ago

The identity is controlled by a cryptographic key on the client side so even if you get kicked of a server you and whoever is in contact with you can just grab your data from other relays.

dangoor 3y ago

> The web and email got effectively centralized… Woah there. I don't agree with this. The web is certainly not centralized (this is on Hacker News and not Facebook, right?) It follows a power law distribution where you have some players getting lots of traffic and then there are lots and lots of small traffic sites. But it's definitely decentralized. _Google_ is something of a monopoly providing some of the features you list for the web at large, but there are others (Duck Duck Go, Bing) that are just a click away. Gmail took a huge share of the email market by being a better product for the first several years of its existence (and being free also helped). That doesn't mean email is centralized: I've been using Fastmail for the last several years and it works _just fine_. I don't have the problems you list. Anyhow, I agree with your point that a decentralized _social network_ needs to solve the problems you're listing. I just think the web and email are actually examples of technologies that remain decentralized.

rektide 3y ago
Here here! As a web developer, I think we've figured out maybe 1% of what the web is good for & capable of. There's still so much possibility, so many options, that any given person can go off & explore & play around with & succeed on. The field has never been more open for, more ready for new exciting possibilities, better set to start changing if we can make a real authentic honest outreach to users, that is a fair shake from tech, & not leaving cloud-giants holding all the cards & us with a couple magic beans. The doom & gloom look at the macro of what the web is is really sad. It's a constant pity party. The ability to control & shape our information spaces to our liking & pick our paths has never been higher, has only gotten better as more protocols & standards, focused at purer social networking levels than the web medium at large, have arisen. As a developer, it's been a one way street with us crafting better and better means of web development and deployment every single year, and what we're excitingly starting to see is more genuine & personal involvement not just with creating sites, but with creating interconnection, creating interlink, creating intermedia, not just on one big property, but across many voices. Nostr highlighting the idea of a relay, that who we relay is a vote of amplification, is semi-covert social commentary on picking your traffic, on selecting what gets to get shared out. There's no headier better more promising time than today (and the web continues to be the premier delightful connectable blank slate from with which to experiment & iterate).
drexlspivey 3y ago
Email is centralized in the sense that you might run your own server/domain but if Google decides you are bad and stops federating with you you might as well not exist. Who are you going to exchange mail with if most people are on Gmail? That’s very different than Google banning your account where you can just switch to Bing for search.
- dangoor 3y ago
  Fair point, though I suspect that Google not accepting mail from a particular provider without good reason would cause a bit of an uproar. I definitely wouldn't recommend that folks try to run their own mail servers, so it's true that email is more consolidated than the web.

leesalminen 3y ago

A big topic of conversation at nostrica (nostr's first conference) last month was how to maintain decentralization. One of the biggest concerns was having a client or relay provider build features outside of the protocol to gain market share and enable them to lock-in users. You are correct that there is no easy solution to these problems. There are draft NIPs that attempt to solve many of the problems you've described. You're welcome to join us in the conversation and work with us to try and solve these hard problems! https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls PS- I don't think the web is effectively controlled by large companies. Email is a different story though. Hopefully we can build nostr to be more like the web than email.

oh_sigh 3y ago
Maybe nostr needs a Law of Jante/tall poppy lopper - any client or relay that gets too special gets blacklisted/punished by all the other clients/relays (to the extent possible through the protocol). Sorry if that is in a NIPS, there are 84 in that link and I can't read through them all.
Logans_Run 3y ago
To be clear: I am the submitter not the author. The link is just something I stumbled across while browsing ReclaimTheNet.

jrm4 3y ago

I think your "effectively controlled" is mostly meaningless. There's orders of magnitude of difference between "started off as scattered and big companies now do a majority of the maintenance" vs actually CENTRALIZED, like Twitter. My website and my email, from my domain, both exist generally as equals without any meaningfully strong influence from google or whatnot, e.g. censoring my website would be a practically completely different thing from the ridiculous mess that Twitter is becoming (if it isn't already.)

Logans_Run 3y ago

Rebuttal/response to/of your comment/thought/input. From the Wiki - I ran across Nostr when I was looking for an excuse to do some network programming. I have a thing for small standards, and the Nostr spec was 75 lines of exactly what I was looking for.

redder23 3y ago

Email is not "controlled" by large companies. People choose to use large companies and let them read their emails because they are stupid. Email has not evolved in any way BECAUSE its NOT controlled by some company. If Google could, they would do even more evil with email that "just" reading all your mails. To compare Twitter with email makes absolutely no sense. Yes Twitter is a totally controlled thing by a single company, email is not. You could say it for the web when it comes to net neutrality and where it does not exist anymore ...

thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
What percentage of your reach do you lose if google blacklists your domain?
- rvz 3y ago
  *silence*
  - yellowapple 3y ago
    FYI: comments like yours are more effective when posted at least a day later, lest they end up looking silly when the "silence" is eventually broken - as it is now.
    - rvz 3y ago
      It is still very effective, it took you a day later to respond to the parent. OP Comment: 25 April 2023, 00:41:52 AM Yours: 26 April 2023, 03:18:06 AM I was expecting a response much earlier than that since the answer is very obvious. Instead you decided to come up with a typical anecdote which can easily be dismissed. The main fact is, almost everyone knows that you lose LOTS of users emailing you once a provider like GMail blocks you as it is the most used email provider. [0] [0] https://mailchimp.com/resources/most-used-email-service-providers https://mailchimp.com/resources/most-used-email-service-prov...
      - 3y ago

0xpgm 3y ago

> That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email Really? Web browsers, web servers and mail servers are beasts. I don't see them being 'simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice'

revelio 3y ago
Not now but in the beginning they were. The first version of HTML was basically just a hack that glued an SGML parser to the NeXTStep text view control. The web didn't support inline images because the NeXTStep control TBL used didn't support it. Then companies like Netscape came along and started adding features. The rest is history.