7 ms·

I recommend Anna's Archive get a Nostr account. Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized acceler

I recommend Anna's Archive get a Nostr account. Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly. Nostr is the only decentralized manner (no, Mastodon/fediverse is dependent on domain names, which are getting seized by courts in relation to this -- it is not decentralized at all when it comes down to it) that people can reliably use to have a latest content feed distributed. "Check Wikipedia to evade the court order" just encourages legal action against Wikipedia. Even linking to copyright violations is, under current court precedent, able to bring civil liability upon third parties. It is draconian and our framers would have considered it a clear First Amendment violation, but unfortunately the current jurisprudence says that is the law.

tasuki 9mo ago
Trying to understand nostr, I looked up its Wikipedia page... > In 2024, in an article reporting on the project's funding, Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had found two websites previously published by this person to disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right conspiracy theorist. That... seems extremely irrelevant. If fiatjaf is contributing something useful and significant to the commons, why does it matter that he used to spread far-right conspiracy theories in the past? > As a result of its ability to quickly and discreetly create accounts and publish posts to relays, Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked. A notable example includes a case where multiple protocol bridges have been used to conduct spam waves on the Bluesky social network (itself connected to a competing protocol, the AT Protocol) by creating posts on Nostr, bridging the post to ActivityPub and bridging it again to Bluesky. Surely they also had to create a Bluesky account for that? I don't see how Nostr is to blame here. Perhaps Bluesky forgot to use anti-spam measures when bridging things over from other sources? That's kind of on Bluesky, no? This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. I don't think I have the necessary Wikipedia karma to get it amended, but gee do I have opinions on this...
- squigz 9mo ago
  You don't need "karma" to edit Wikipedia.
  - lambdaone 9mo ago
    Some pages have 'semi-protection' or 'extended semi-protection', where a user must have a Wikipedia account which must have made a certain number of edits and be older than a specified time period. However, this isn't one of them. You can edit it immediately, either with or without creating an account.
- sanskritical 9mo ago
  > This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. It's well known that corporations and governments pay people fulltime to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a whole article detailing the extent of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o... Of course, these days the people paid to do this have learned not to do edits from their own corporation or government office's announced IP blocks. But in times passed finding many of this category of edits was as simple as sorting edits on Wikipedia by the originating IP address and looking for which ones came from institutionally announced subnets. Point being, massive amounts of capital and intelligence resources have been dedicated to censoring social media. There's nanny employees in every single social media company making sure "important" complainers are heard and their desires to silence voices fulfilled. I follow a large number of people on Nostr that have been banned from every other platform. Facebook. Twitter. Bluesky. "Free speech" sites like Gab and ActivityPub servers that advertise "free speech". But Nostr has the same entrance requirements and cryptographic sovereignty that Bitcoin provides. Generate a keypair and you can publish. People that want to find your content can simply subscribe to your public key. This results in a subversion of countless state and corporate capital expenditures. If people use Nostr, they will permanently lose the ability to moderate content in this oppressive manner. They absolutely do not want this to happen. > Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked. Nowhere have I had a worse problem with spam than Twitter and Facebook. For all the alleged vulnerability of Nostr to spam, it has not currently materialized as an issue. Note that filtering out actual spam without a centralized moderator is one of the most solved problems on the Internet. If you've ever installed Spamassassin or other well subscribed to Bayesian filters on an email server, you know that you never see spam ever again. In actuality, spam is a much bigger problem when you are dependent on fickle human moderation.
- xvector 9mo ago
  Definitely a smear campaign, ironically one that seems to be organized by left-leaning individuals on Wikipedia, Business Insider, etc. Which is bizarre to me because aren't these the people that would want the ability to disseminate information in the face of fascism? They are attacking their own side (again.) When will idealists learn that this is not the way?
  - sanskritical 9mo ago
    The defining feature of fascism is these kind of tyrannical public-private partnerships. It was the entire basis of Mussolini's fascism. They are the literal fascists. Redifining fascism as meaning "racism and anti-semitism" (certainly attitudes which by the current definition far predate fascism) has been one of the most clever acts of sleight of hand by the regime, giving it unlimited freedom to enact the most totalitarian form of fascism ever conceived.
  - Matl 9mo ago
    > left-leaning individuals Here we go again. As a 'left-leaning individual' it's funny because if you look up anti-war left leaning outlets and such on Wikipedia, they don't tend to have exactly glowing entries on there. Wikipedia and the other outlets described as 'left-leaning' are neoliberal institutions. Believe me that there's no love for these on the left. When it's convenient for smears, neoliberals are left but then at other times it's the communists etc. In other words, 'left-leaning' is a grab bag of what one doesn't like these days, rather than any really meaningful group.
    - marcosdumay 9mo ago
      > Wikipedia and the other outlets described as 'left-leaning' are neoliberal institutions. What exactly do you think 'neoliberal' means? I do agree Wikipedia is not 'left-leaning', mainly because 'right' and 'left' are bullshit names that don't mean anything. But it doesn't even have the power to act in a situation that would make it neoliberal.
      - Matl 9mo ago
- timeon 9mo ago
  > That... seems extremely irrelevant. I find it pretty relevant who is behind what.
monerozcash 9mo ago
> Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly. Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem.
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
  > Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem. The copyright-industrial complex is internationally very well-connected.
  - monerozcash 9mo ago
    That may be, but you can't just keep going to the same US court for warrants.
    - goku12 9mo ago
      As long as there is centralization, there is always an avenue for abuse with money. The DNS root itself is heavily influenced by a group of allied nations, through the ICANN if I'm right. That can be used to exert pressure on TLD registries, including ccTLD registries. Of course, that cannot be used for surgical control single domains like Anna's Archives'. But DNS blocking is an old technique by now. The copyright cartel needs to get it banned only in a few populous countries to destroy the value of a domain. We can keep finding workarounds. But at some point, they won't have to worry about people who can actually do that.
      - monerozcash 9mo ago
        For what it's worth, that doesn't seem to ever have worked.
flipped 9mo ago
Better have a .onion. It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar. Onions should be the default, it's secure (you own the keys), decentralized and far better than relying on CAs for encryption.
- sanskritical 9mo ago
  Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category. > It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER This also remains true for Nostr. But furthermore, as an operator of several Tor hidden services corresponding to public web services. I can assure you that many users, especially those on mobile devices, will stop using your service in large numbers if you direct them to a hidden service. iPhones don't allow background processes without special dispensation from Apple so the Tor/I2P circuit dies every time someone switches between apps. It's also an extreme development challenge, as they don't allow subprocesses either, and then of course your app will have to abide by the GPL at least for I2P (nonstarter for some). "Just ruin your experience for all iOS users and switch to the GPL for all your client code" is not a realistic suggestion. Not that Annas-Archive has a their own client app.
  - flipped 9mo ago
    Operational excellence is of course dependent on the operator but I would still think it's far easier to bring up onion as it's disposable and works behind NAT'ed VMs which makes it further easy to run. I don't know anything about Nostr since it does not focus on anonymity and isn't as old as Tor (more than 2 decades of research and application), I wouldn't rely on Nostr for anything serious.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    Laundering the code through OpenAI to see if the GPL sticks through training, would make for an interesting court case if you asked ChatGPT to write an I2P clients "from scratch" for a closed source iOS client.
supermatt 9mo ago
I highly doubt nostr’s suitability as a petabyte DFS/CDN.
- sanskritical 9mo ago
  This is a discussion on whether or not it is better to use it to announce new domain names post-suspension than Wikipedia, not if it can sustain petabytes of data.
  - supermatt 9mo ago
    Given the archives use of BT, probably better to just use BEP-44 on mainline DHT if you want to store an arbitrary address somewhere - or use something like IPNS, or .onion as others have mentioned. As nostr relies on gossip, there is no guarantee you will have access to latest address.
    - sanskritical 9mo ago
      I am unaware of an app that sees present day use for communicating short messages that uses BEP-44 or mainline DHT. Nostr works today for millions of people. These services have normal people using them, not Hacker News commentators that are extremely sophisticated -- imagine telling someone who only knows how to use normal web services and apps they install from the app store to "just retrieve a BEP-44 message from the DHT".
      - supermatt 9mo ago
        I’m not aware of any laypeople who use nostr either. But if you are going to build some nostr-based “resolver” into a browser you could instead use any of the other protocols - 2 of which are designed specifically for resolution, and the other already having a robust resolver implementation built on top of it? I quite like nostr, but let’s not pretend it solves every problem.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
dmantis 9mo ago
Tor and I2P is a better fit. Nostr is very weird. It sells itself as decentralized, but basically all frontends provide same several relays. When those relays get subpoenas and remove your resource, you're done. You can use some unknown relays to publish, but who's gonna use them as clients outside of the defaults? It's effectively designed for shadowbans.
- sanskritical 9mo ago
  Many clients automatically seek, or prompt an action in 1 click to retrieve content from additional relays that a Nostr pubkey announces if said content is referenced but not available on already subscribed relays. As a publisher, you announce what relays you are currently publishing to in your identity metadata. So even if you don't specifically subscribe to a smaller relay, you can still access the content on it. Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.
  - dmantis 9mo ago
    Where does the nostr pubkey announce it? Let's say you are banned from main default relays. Is there any side channel?
    - sanskritical 9mo ago
      You announce all the relays you publish to to the relays you are publishing to. If someone quotes your post in a post of their own, in many clients subsequent readers will be able to retrieve your content from the relays which they don't currently follow. Relay discovery mechanisms grow progressively better. I don't know of any pubkey ever banned from major relays. The operator of Damus, one of the more successful clients in history and one of the main default relays, openly engages with dissident personalities in a welcoming manner. You could probably get a "filtering transparency report" from him and others and ask if they've blacklisted any specific pubkeys and why. I am unaware of any that are currently blacklisted, and generally the network seems to defer to WoT mechanisms by clients to blacklist content. Regardless, this remains a far more resilient persistent source of information that you don't operate than "check Wikipedia".

tasuki 9mo ago

Trying to understand nostr, I looked up its Wikipedia page... > In 2024, in an article reporting on the project's funding, Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had found two websites previously published by this person to disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right conspiracy theorist. That... seems extremely irrelevant. If fiatjaf is contributing something useful and significant to the commons, why does it matter that he used to spread far-right conspiracy theories in the past? > As a result of its ability to quickly and discreetly create accounts and publish posts to relays, Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked. A notable example includes a case where multiple protocol bridges have been used to conduct spam waves on the Bluesky social network (itself connected to a competing protocol, the AT Protocol) by creating posts on Nostr, bridging the post to ActivityPub and bridging it again to Bluesky. Surely they also had to create a Bluesky account for that? I don't see how Nostr is to blame here. Perhaps Bluesky forgot to use anti-spam measures when bridging things over from other sources? That's kind of on Bluesky, no? This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. I don't think I have the necessary Wikipedia karma to get it amended, but gee do I have opinions on this...

squigz 9mo ago
You don't need "karma" to edit Wikipedia.
- lambdaone 9mo ago
  Some pages have 'semi-protection' or 'extended semi-protection', where a user must have a Wikipedia account which must have made a certain number of edits and be older than a specified time period. However, this isn't one of them. You can edit it immediately, either with or without creating an account.
sanskritical 9mo ago
> This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr. It's well known that corporations and governments pay people fulltime to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a whole article detailing the extent of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o... Of course, these days the people paid to do this have learned not to do edits from their own corporation or government office's announced IP blocks. But in times passed finding many of this category of edits was as simple as sorting edits on Wikipedia by the originating IP address and looking for which ones came from institutionally announced subnets. Point being, massive amounts of capital and intelligence resources have been dedicated to censoring social media. There's nanny employees in every single social media company making sure "important" complainers are heard and their desires to silence voices fulfilled. I follow a large number of people on Nostr that have been banned from every other platform. Facebook. Twitter. Bluesky. "Free speech" sites like Gab and ActivityPub servers that advertise "free speech". But Nostr has the same entrance requirements and cryptographic sovereignty that Bitcoin provides. Generate a keypair and you can publish. People that want to find your content can simply subscribe to your public key. This results in a subversion of countless state and corporate capital expenditures. If people use Nostr, they will permanently lose the ability to moderate content in this oppressive manner. They absolutely do not want this to happen. > Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked. Nowhere have I had a worse problem with spam than Twitter and Facebook. For all the alleged vulnerability of Nostr to spam, it has not currently materialized as an issue. Note that filtering out actual spam without a centralized moderator is one of the most solved problems on the Internet. If you've ever installed Spamassassin or other well subscribed to Bayesian filters on an email server, you know that you never see spam ever again. In actuality, spam is a much bigger problem when you are dependent on fickle human moderation.
xvector 9mo ago
Definitely a smear campaign, ironically one that seems to be organized by left-leaning individuals on Wikipedia, Business Insider, etc. Which is bizarre to me because aren't these the people that would want the ability to disseminate information in the face of fascism? They are attacking their own side (again.) When will idealists learn that this is not the way?
- sanskritical 9mo ago
  The defining feature of fascism is these kind of tyrannical public-private partnerships. It was the entire basis of Mussolini's fascism. They are the literal fascists. Redifining fascism as meaning "racism and anti-semitism" (certainly attitudes which by the current definition far predate fascism) has been one of the most clever acts of sleight of hand by the regime, giving it unlimited freedom to enact the most totalitarian form of fascism ever conceived.
- Matl 9mo ago
  > left-leaning individuals Here we go again. As a 'left-leaning individual' it's funny because if you look up anti-war left leaning outlets and such on Wikipedia, they don't tend to have exactly glowing entries on there. Wikipedia and the other outlets described as 'left-leaning' are neoliberal institutions. Believe me that there's no love for these on the left. When it's convenient for smears, neoliberals are left but then at other times it's the communists etc. In other words, 'left-leaning' is a grab bag of what one doesn't like these days, rather than any really meaningful group.
  - marcosdumay 9mo ago
    > Wikipedia and the other outlets described as 'left-leaning' are neoliberal institutions. What exactly do you think 'neoliberal' means? I do agree Wikipedia is not 'left-leaning', mainly because 'right' and 'left' are bullshit names that don't mean anything. But it doesn't even have the power to act in a situation that would make it neoliberal.
    - Matl 9mo ago
timeon 9mo ago
> That... seems extremely irrelevant. I find it pretty relevant who is behind what.

monerozcash 9mo ago

> Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly. Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem.

aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
> Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem. The copyright-industrial complex is internationally very well-connected.
- monerozcash 9mo ago
  That may be, but you can't just keep going to the same US court for warrants.
  - goku12 9mo ago
    As long as there is centralization, there is always an avenue for abuse with money. The DNS root itself is heavily influenced by a group of allied nations, through the ICANN if I'm right. That can be used to exert pressure on TLD registries, including ccTLD registries. Of course, that cannot be used for surgical control single domains like Anna's Archives'. But DNS blocking is an old technique by now. The copyright cartel needs to get it banned only in a few populous countries to destroy the value of a domain. We can keep finding workarounds. But at some point, they won't have to worry about people who can actually do that.
    - monerozcash 9mo ago
      For what it's worth, that doesn't seem to ever have worked.

flipped 9mo ago

Better have a .onion. It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar. Onions should be the default, it's secure (you own the keys), decentralized and far better than relying on CAs for encryption.

sanskritical 9mo ago
Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category. > It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER This also remains true for Nostr. But furthermore, as an operator of several Tor hidden services corresponding to public web services. I can assure you that many users, especially those on mobile devices, will stop using your service in large numbers if you direct them to a hidden service. iPhones don't allow background processes without special dispensation from Apple so the Tor/I2P circuit dies every time someone switches between apps. It's also an extreme development challenge, as they don't allow subprocesses either, and then of course your app will have to abide by the GPL at least for I2P (nonstarter for some). "Just ruin your experience for all iOS users and switch to the GPL for all your client code" is not a realistic suggestion. Not that Annas-Archive has a their own client app.
- flipped 9mo ago
  Operational excellence is of course dependent on the operator but I would still think it's far easier to bring up onion as it's disposable and works behind NAT'ed VMs which makes it further easy to run. I don't know anything about Nostr since it does not focus on anonymity and isn't as old as Tor (more than 2 decades of research and application), I wouldn't rely on Nostr for anything serious.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  Laundering the code through OpenAI to see if the GPL sticks through training, would make for an interesting court case if you asked ChatGPT to write an I2P clients "from scratch" for a closed source iOS client.

supermatt 9mo ago

I highly doubt nostr’s suitability as a petabyte DFS/CDN.

sanskritical 9mo ago
This is a discussion on whether or not it is better to use it to announce new domain names post-suspension than Wikipedia, not if it can sustain petabytes of data.
- supermatt 9mo ago
  Given the archives use of BT, probably better to just use BEP-44 on mainline DHT if you want to store an arbitrary address somewhere - or use something like IPNS, or .onion as others have mentioned. As nostr relies on gossip, there is no guarantee you will have access to latest address.
  - sanskritical 9mo ago
    I am unaware of an app that sees present day use for communicating short messages that uses BEP-44 or mainline DHT. Nostr works today for millions of people. These services have normal people using them, not Hacker News commentators that are extremely sophisticated -- imagine telling someone who only knows how to use normal web services and apps they install from the app store to "just retrieve a BEP-44 message from the DHT".
    - supermatt 9mo ago
      I’m not aware of any laypeople who use nostr either. But if you are going to build some nostr-based “resolver” into a browser you could instead use any of the other protocols - 2 of which are designed specifically for resolution, and the other already having a robust resolver implementation built on top of it? I quite like nostr, but let’s not pretend it solves every problem.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]

dmantis 9mo ago

Tor and I2P is a better fit. Nostr is very weird. It sells itself as decentralized, but basically all frontends provide same several relays. When those relays get subpoenas and remove your resource, you're done. You can use some unknown relays to publish, but who's gonna use them as clients outside of the defaults? It's effectively designed for shadowbans.

sanskritical 9mo ago
Many clients automatically seek, or prompt an action in 1 click to retrieve content from additional relays that a Nostr pubkey announces if said content is referenced but not available on already subscribed relays. As a publisher, you announce what relays you are currently publishing to in your identity metadata. So even if you don't specifically subscribe to a smaller relay, you can still access the content on it. Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.
- dmantis 9mo ago
  Where does the nostr pubkey announce it? Let's say you are banned from main default relays. Is there any side channel?
  - sanskritical 9mo ago
    You announce all the relays you publish to to the relays you are publishing to. If someone quotes your post in a post of their own, in many clients subsequent readers will be able to retrieve your content from the relays which they don't currently follow. Relay discovery mechanisms grow progressively better. I don't know of any pubkey ever banned from major relays. The operator of Damus, one of the more successful clients in history and one of the main default relays, openly engages with dissident personalities in a welcoming manner. You could probably get a "filtering transparency report" from him and others and ask if they've blacklisted any specific pubkeys and why. I am unaware of any that are currently blacklisted, and generally the network seems to defer to WoT mechanisms by clients to blacklist content. Regardless, this remains a far more resilient persistent source of information that you don't operate than "check Wikipedia".