7 ms·

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 ide

by tasuki 10mo 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 10mo ago
You don't need "karma" to edit Wikipedia.
- lambdaone 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
timeon 10mo ago
> That... seems extremely irrelevant. I find it pretty relevant who is behind what.

by tasuki 10mo ago

squigz 10mo ago

You don't need "karma" to edit Wikipedia.

lambdaone 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago

timeon 10mo ago

> That... seems extremely irrelevant. I find it pretty relevant who is behind what.