5 ms·

nostr never goes down

by jonstaab 6mo ago

pfraze 6mo ago
All support to other decentralizers but nothing never goes down.
- jonstaab 6mo ago
  1000x redundancy makes it vanishingly unlikely. Although I know we're due for a pole shift so all bets are off I suppose.
  - numpad0 6mo ago
    Wasn't aware there are ~2k relays now. Have inter-relay sharing situation improved? When I tried it long time ago, the idea was just a transposed Mastodon model that the client would just multi-post to dozen different servers(relays) automatically to be hopeful that the post would be available in at least one shared relays between the user and their followers. That didn't seem to scale well.
    - jonstaab 6mo ago
      Getting clients to do the right thing is like herding cats, but there has been some progress. Early 2023 Mike Dilger came up with the "gossip model" (renamed "outbox model" for obvious reasons). Here's my write-up: https://habla.news/hodlbod/8YjqXm4SKY-TauwjOfLXS https://habla.news/hodlbod/8YjqXm4SKY-TauwjOfLXS The basic idea is that for microblogging use cases users advertise which relays their content is stored on, which clients follow (this implies that there are less-decentralized indexes that hold these pointers, but it does help distribute content to aligned relays instead of blast content everywhere). Also, relays aside, one key difference vs ActivityPub is that no third party owns your identity, which means you can move from one relay to another freely, which is not true on Mastodon.
      - numpad0 6mo ago
        Thanks! Not to be critical - more like thinking out loud - and don't have solutions to following myself - but that sounds like it could 1) affect negatively to power concentrating into the top popular relays -> potentially leading to same kind of speech issues as semi-centralized ActivityPub, and 2) it won't solve need to maintain multiple firehose connections. I've been wondering if the multi-firehose architecture is really where decentralized censorship resistant microblogging should be the way forward; I remember the Windows Mobile clients for 2ch.net(today 5ch.io) that would scrape thread deltas from bunch of subdomains under it was plenty fast on 128k(advertised) connection to get thousands of posts in late 2000s, and so I think an RSS style of systems getting delta updates from multiple domains could work without having to do the insanity of early Nostr, or massive liabilities for instance operators with Mastodon, especially if those multiple domains could be set up with relative ease. Yeah, I don't exactly understand why you have to sign up every time to Mastodon servers and server operators to have to be responsible about users. It worked when it was urgently needed, which was brilliant, but the ID system had under baked spots.
        jonstaab 6mo ago
        Yeah, any time you need either an index or a caching layer you have to re-centralize one way or another. But decoupling those "services" from the data storage itself helps, and credible exit makes the gatekeepers far less powerful. An example: a few weeks ago nostr.band, one of nostr's main indexers/search services went away. Search is still somewhat impacted (evidence that we were centralized around it), but indexing (i.e. finding users' relay lists) is still covered by several other services.
    - chr15m 6mo ago
      A difference with Mastodon is your account is independent of any relay. > scale well It is up and it is growing.
- nout 6mo ago
  The comparison here is to something like TCP/IP. TCP/IP never goes down. TCP/IP is a protocol, the servers may go down and cause disruption, but the protocol doesn't really have the ability to "go down". Nostr is also a protocol. The communication on top of Nostr is pretty resilient compared to other solutions though, so that's the main highlight here. If tens of servers go down, then some people may start noticing a bit of inconvenience. If hundreds of servers go down, then some people may need to coordinate out of bound on what relays to use, but it still generally speaking works ok.
  - arter45 6mo ago
    That's because TCP/IP is a protocol, not a (centralized or decentralized) server. A protocol cannot go down. It can trigger failures, it can be abused, but it cannot go down. It's like saying "English never burns". Sure, you can't burn English but you can burn specific books, newspapers and so on.
    - nout 6mo ago
      That's... literally the point I just made in my reply?
      - ramblejam 6mo ago
        Right but that's kind of meaningless, saying the nostr protocol never goes down, because the AT Protocol didn't go down in this bluesky case either. Protocols don't "go down". Stuff making use of protocols does.
- bit1993 6mo ago
  Bitcoin, BitTorrent never go down.
jandrese 6mo ago
If nostr went down would people even notice?
- jonstaab 6mo ago
  probably not
- nout 6mo ago
  If any major nostr relay goes down, no one notices. That has happened many times, the network is very resilient to that.
- yangm97 6mo ago
  The good thing about nostr is that, contrary to popular federated protocols, your identity is not tied to any single server, you own the keypair to your account, so you can continue using it just fine even if some relays experience a downtime.
  - ramblejam 6mo ago
    until one day when a quantum computer comes along, then goodbye your control of your nostr identity in both the future and the past!
emidoots 6mo ago
There's stark contrast for an average human visiting the landing page of bsky.app vs nostr.org
- jonstaab 6mo ago
  That's what decentralization looks like. You might also try: nostr.com nostr.how nostr.net nostrich.love nostrhub.io usenostr.org And of course https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

nostr never goes down

pfraze 6mo ago

All support to other decentralizers but nothing never goes down.

jonstaab 6mo ago
1000x redundancy makes it vanishingly unlikely. Although I know we're due for a pole shift so all bets are off I suppose.
- numpad0 6mo ago
  Wasn't aware there are ~2k relays now. Have inter-relay sharing situation improved? When I tried it long time ago, the idea was just a transposed Mastodon model that the client would just multi-post to dozen different servers(relays) automatically to be hopeful that the post would be available in at least one shared relays between the user and their followers. That didn't seem to scale well.
  - jonstaab 6mo ago
    Getting clients to do the right thing is like herding cats, but there has been some progress. Early 2023 Mike Dilger came up with the "gossip model" (renamed "outbox model" for obvious reasons). Here's my write-up: https://habla.news/hodlbod/8YjqXm4SKY-TauwjOfLXS https://habla.news/hodlbod/8YjqXm4SKY-TauwjOfLXS The basic idea is that for microblogging use cases users advertise which relays their content is stored on, which clients follow (this implies that there are less-decentralized indexes that hold these pointers, but it does help distribute content to aligned relays instead of blast content everywhere). Also, relays aside, one key difference vs ActivityPub is that no third party owns your identity, which means you can move from one relay to another freely, which is not true on Mastodon.
    - numpad0 6mo ago
      Thanks! Not to be critical - more like thinking out loud - and don't have solutions to following myself - but that sounds like it could 1) affect negatively to power concentrating into the top popular relays -> potentially leading to same kind of speech issues as semi-centralized ActivityPub, and 2) it won't solve need to maintain multiple firehose connections. I've been wondering if the multi-firehose architecture is really where decentralized censorship resistant microblogging should be the way forward; I remember the Windows Mobile clients for 2ch.net(today 5ch.io) that would scrape thread deltas from bunch of subdomains under it was plenty fast on 128k(advertised) connection to get thousands of posts in late 2000s, and so I think an RSS style of systems getting delta updates from multiple domains could work without having to do the insanity of early Nostr, or massive liabilities for instance operators with Mastodon, especially if those multiple domains could be set up with relative ease. Yeah, I don't exactly understand why you have to sign up every time to Mastodon servers and server operators to have to be responsible about users. It worked when it was urgently needed, which was brilliant, but the ID system had under baked spots.
      - jonstaab 6mo ago
        Yeah, any time you need either an index or a caching layer you have to re-centralize one way or another. But decoupling those "services" from the data storage itself helps, and credible exit makes the gatekeepers far less powerful. An example: a few weeks ago nostr.band, one of nostr's main indexers/search services went away. Search is still somewhat impacted (evidence that we were centralized around it), but indexing (i.e. finding users' relay lists) is still covered by several other services.
  - chr15m 6mo ago
    A difference with Mastodon is your account is independent of any relay. > scale well It is up and it is growing.
nout 6mo ago
The comparison here is to something like TCP/IP. TCP/IP never goes down. TCP/IP is a protocol, the servers may go down and cause disruption, but the protocol doesn't really have the ability to "go down". Nostr is also a protocol. The communication on top of Nostr is pretty resilient compared to other solutions though, so that's the main highlight here. If tens of servers go down, then some people may start noticing a bit of inconvenience. If hundreds of servers go down, then some people may need to coordinate out of bound on what relays to use, but it still generally speaking works ok.
- arter45 6mo ago
  That's because TCP/IP is a protocol, not a (centralized or decentralized) server. A protocol cannot go down. It can trigger failures, it can be abused, but it cannot go down. It's like saying "English never burns". Sure, you can't burn English but you can burn specific books, newspapers and so on.
  - nout 6mo ago
    That's... literally the point I just made in my reply?
    - ramblejam 6mo ago
      Right but that's kind of meaningless, saying the nostr protocol never goes down, because the AT Protocol didn't go down in this bluesky case either. Protocols don't "go down". Stuff making use of protocols does.
bit1993 6mo ago
Bitcoin, BitTorrent never go down.

jandrese 6mo ago

If nostr went down would people even notice?

jonstaab 6mo ago
probably not
nout 6mo ago
If any major nostr relay goes down, no one notices. That has happened many times, the network is very resilient to that.
yangm97 6mo ago
The good thing about nostr is that, contrary to popular federated protocols, your identity is not tied to any single server, you own the keypair to your account, so you can continue using it just fine even if some relays experience a downtime.
- ramblejam 6mo ago
  until one day when a quantum computer comes along, then goodbye your control of your nostr identity in both the future and the past!

emidoots 6mo ago

There's stark contrast for an average human visiting the landing page of bsky.app vs nostr.org

jonstaab 6mo ago
That's what decentralization looks like. You might also try: nostr.com nostr.how nostr.net nostrich.love nostrhub.io usenostr.org And of course https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr