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Nostr is an inclusive communication commons
- tolerance 2mo agoNostr is in need of benevolent shills.
- Bluestein 2mo agoFound this intro informative: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w
- treyd 2mo agoThe thing with Nostr is that the protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other. What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers. There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.
- therein 2mo agoWell put, that's exactly what I think of Nostr as well.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 2mo agothere are relays built exactly for this, for rebroadcasting. You can do whatever you want in nostr btw. this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with. there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.
- abhayraizada 2mo agoit doesn't explicitly forbdit it. It just doesn't spec it out, because it doesn't need it for the protocol to work. There are already many relays and clients that do just this.
- dannyw 2mo agoI think GP's point (which I agree with) is that the functionality is almost essential. When it's not part of the spec, then you end up with differing off-spec implementations, and again, centralization risk. This would be like the HTTP protocol not defining `POST`, and leaving it up to servers and clients to implement it based on however it feels like. I really like the ideals behind Nostr, but I think its implementation and execution could be better.
- grumbel 2mo agoIt would be more analog to HTTP not specing out how CDNs should work, or Usenet not specing out how DejaNews is going to work. It's infrastructure stuff neither the client nor the simple server has to care about. The Nostr spec covers what matters, cryptographic identities and unique message ids, that make dumb relays that duplicating messages from elsewhere possible (an area where HTTP or Activity Pub fail at).
- inigyou 2mo agoIt's actually more analogous to HTTP saying that proxies and reverse proxies are banned.
- davotoula 2mo agoBut part of the protocol is that user profiles also list the relays where to find their content (where their posts go to) and a second user connects to those relays to fetch their content directly?
- nunobrito 2mo ago> protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other. That statement is false and if you disagree: please provide a source. There is no such restriction on the NIP (protocol guidelines). I have been writing NOSTR software since years and there was NEVER such restriction in place. In fact, wouldn't even make sense because some relays (e.g. Primal) are super-aggregators for smaller relays. > users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays This is a false statement. NIP 65 provides a list of which servers the users declares to be using. This way readers for that user know at which door (server) to knock and ask for updates.
- notarobot123 2mo ago> sticky defaults... makes client authors the kingmakers. Isn't this true of any protocol (to a greater or lesser degree)?
- digitalbase 2mo agoWhat the hell are you talking about? What forbids? The idea of nostr is that you can do whatever the you like. An open protocol. There is no forbidding of anything
- inigyou 2mo ago> There is no forbidding of anything Promise not to prosecute me if I spam the network?
- siwatanejo 2mo ago> spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other. And how do you exactly envision enforcement? Ohhhh, you copied some bits, you going to jail!!
- Cameri 2mo agoFalse. The protocol doesn’t forbid it. Theres actually a negentropy NIP for relay sync. Did you read the actual protocol or are you just making things up on HN?
- inigyou 2mo agoI also remember reading somewhere that relays aren't allowed to copy other relays.
- hardran3 2mo agoThere are relays built with copying from other relays as a main feature. Personal use only https://github.com/barrydeen/haven https://github.com/barrydeen/haven This one will copy every note of every person you follow, plus their follows. https://github.com/barrydeen/wot-relay https://github.com/barrydeen/wot-relay
- mw888 2mo agoNostr breaks down along the longstanding ambiguity around what 'decentralization' means. In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite. People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced. Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.
- nunobrito 2mo agoWhat "awkward" coordination? Clients fetch updates from whatever servers they follow. Same thing with email that you've been using for decades, doesn't get simpler than that.
- john_owl 2mo agoJust like a RSS feed client or a podcast client that connects to multiple feeds to update your timeline.
- synctext 2mo ago> decentralization of power Insightful! We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin. Email, RSS, and also Nostr are too simple. The core protocol does not contain any measures against spam, abuse and fraud. No accountability. Just launch a million fake identities and spam these network. Your Internet address got blocked? Try the a16z-funded startup that uses a USA-based phone farm. Decentralised accountability is unsolved. My university lab has focused on decentralisation for decades, its hard. We need a decentralised trust framework (e.g. our TrustChain protocol), decentralised spam prevention (StarveSpam) and decentralised democracy (our TwoStepDemocracy protocol). Getting this deployed and do iterative improvements needs more resources then universities have. Another coordination problem for The Common Good.
- doublepg23 2mo agoNostr is cute but I feel it runs into xkcd 191. To paraphrase: > If you Used Nostr your communication would be completely uncensored and decentralized. > Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who use Nostr. As of now it’s filled with BTC-maxis / crypto bros that mainly talk about how great Nostr and Bitcoin are … and not much else. I suppose there’s plenty of tasteless AI slop and gross adult scams if that suits your palate.
- dgellow 2mo agoThe website mentions the network is pro-censorship: > Pro-censorship: The protocol is ownerless, relays are not > Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" — it simply recognizes that different people have different morals and preferences and each server, being privately owned, can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please and users are free to choose what to read and from where.
- monkeywork 2mo agoFrom what I've gathered it's pro-censorship however since the user is entirely mobile and can change relays at will without friction that the power still remains with the user... the relay doesn't have much power in anything they can't keep their users from finding you, and they can't keep you from publishing elsewhere they can only choose to not accept your posts. When I setup my account I list 3-4 relays that will host my content, if any one relay decides they dislike me and bans me no big deal everyone who follows me already knows to check 3-4 different servers for me and will find my content on the others, and I can update that list at any point in time just as quickly as I'm banned... so unless you can get every relay (which ideally are all individual groups with likely different rules / regulations) I publish to to ban me at the same time there is no real way to "censor" someone in the way we are used to currently.
- KetoManx64 2mo agoWhich is the point of free speech, right? You should have the ability to say whatever you want, people just don't have to listen to you or be around you.
- monkeywork 2mo agoFunny timing on this - I just came across my backed up keys recently and signed back into it. Poking around over the last 24 hours has left me underwhelmed in terms of actual interesting content (I'm not a cryptobro) nor overly innovative things built on top of the protocol. Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...
- abhayraizada 2mo agoSocial media is one of its most underwhelming usecases, there's loads of productivity apps building on it like if you look that formstr ecosystem (about.formstr.app) and gaming ecosystem as well, it's really just a new communication medium
- monkeywork 2mo agocan you expand on the gaming ecosystem around it?
- davotoula 2mo agoIt's a very rich protocol with many advanced features but here are the basics: 1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM) 2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos 3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff 4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read 5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues 6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group 7. Like twitch with live video streams 8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)
- SheilferZepeda 2mo agoI build edtechs apps with it. Lets me develop tech like the ability to create scholarships with learning, cross-platform badges/achievements and cool stuff like that.
- Tepix 2mo agoNostr is very useful when using it as underlying network for trystero
- KetoManx64 2mo agoSeems to be surviving just fine bases on the comment feeds I see utilizing it in Podcast 2.0 apps. Sorry, nobody cares about your police, we're just here for the tech
- gigatexal 2mo agoNah it’s DOA because it was adopted by the alt right.
- grumbel 2mo agoNostr is a protocol, not a service. That's like saying HTML was adopted by the alt right.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo agoAdoption by too narrow an audience can totally poison a protocol for the rest of us. Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.
- ttoinou 2mo agoI doubt widespread adoption was slowed down with mainstream news about BitTorrent, or what are you talking about more specifically ? Others peer to peer sharing platforms got much more popular despite mainstream news about them like LimeWire and eMule
- bmacho 2mo agoMaybe they want to torrent Linux ISOs but can't because their ISP/VPN blocks the torrent protocol. Http for server->client downloading is inferior but we are stuck with it.
- ttoinou 2mo agoWhich ISP is blocking bittorrent ?
- grumbel 2mo agoLack of BitTorrent support in browsers is big thing that is missing. Brave and Opera have it, but all the mainstream browsers don't. Thus torrent downloads never got out of its specific niche. That said, I don't think piracy is to blame here, but more the murky nature of copyright in general, with BitTorrent you automatically become redistributor of everything you download and that's just a huge liability and privacy risk that I can easily see browser developers wanting to avoid. Also browser developers have gotten lazy, they couldn't even find the resources to keep FTP alive, so I doubt BitTorrent would have survived for long even if they tried adding it.
- reisen_ss 2mo agoNostr is a very interesting protocol with many potential use cases. Just recently, a Discord-like alternative built on Nostr [1] was released [2]. [1] https://denchat.top https://denchat.top [2] https://x.com/DEGMods/status/2089367984309448975 https://x.com/DEGMods/status/2089367984309448975
- kkfx 2mo agoFor me, the great idea behind Nostr is that identity is a self-generated key pair, which can then be used wherever you want (and the economic model, with much potentials). In terms of decentralisation, however, I'm not convinced; I find the model of the late ZeroNet, the KAD network and others, essentially DHT, far superior, because it allows content to stay alive as long as there's interest in it, and every member of the network donates a certain amount of storage and bandwidth (adjustable at will) without being able to choose which specific scrap of content to host. In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose. The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now: - relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR) - chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too) - short posts like Twitter/X - long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit - very long, blog-style posts - VoIP with a Coturn server or similar We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.
- FreeTrade 2mo agoI tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.
- sharperguy 2mo agoI honestly think it would be completely legit to build a completely separate ecosystem on top of the same protocol. A separate set of relays, separate apps which connect to those relays by default, no lighting payments, different defaults, marketed to a different audience. Ultimately it is not just a single network. If users need interoperability eventually they can easily add other relays. But it's true that many people are put off by the current community.
- siwatanejo 2mo ago> no lighting payments Nah, you didn't understand it. Lightning is a layer-2 protocol on top of bitcoin. Nostr is the so-called layer-3. Good luck trying to build Nostr without Lightning.
- teekert 2mo agoFalse. Nostr is not “Layer 3” in any standard technical sense. Nostr is an open, decentralized protocol for exchanging and publishing messages/events. It doesn't sit on top of Bitcoin or Lightning in the way Lightning sits on Bitcoin. You absolutely can build/use Nostr without Lightning. Stop with this (anti-crypto)-bro fear mongering (yes anti-crypto in brackets as 1 thing). It's not helping FOSS, it's doing big-tech's work. You're just lying because you hate crypto. That is as bad as the blind evangelizing of cryptocurrencies.
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- donpdonp 2mo agofor those simply looking to try nostr for the first time, https://iris.to https://iris.to is a great way to get started.
- maeln 2mo agoTook a look and when I got there, the first post was about bitcoin, the second was an add for a cryptocurrency app, the next one was about nostr and bitcoin. The fourth was actually unrelated to either ! But then it was crypto or nostr again. Terrible way to make a first impression (unless you are into crypto I suppose).
- nunobrito 2mo agoTry following things you are interested. My topics are radio tech and my feed comes up with things that actually interest me.
- maelito 2mo agoThe homepage could be a description of ATProto. Except lots of people around me already use ATproto, and a successful European instance has just been launched, Eurosky, focusing on expanding the protocol with apps doing other things than micro-messages (Bluesky). Why should I care ? Honest question.
- jillesvangurp 2mo agoThe nice thing about open, federated protocols is that it is relatively easy to connect them together. There actually is a Mastodon to Bluesky bridge already for example. These protocols should compete on merit. There's no good fundamental reason for them to not federate each other's content. But there are lots of non technical reasons. For example mastodon users particularly are quite picky about how their content is filtered and used. Even implementing a search engine is something that gets a lot of pushback. The reason people might care is taking ownership of how they filter and curate their feed. Instead of outsourcing that to some algorithm owned by a company, having a federated network allows you to pick and choose or even implement your own filtering if you self host. It also gets advertising as the primary revenue mechanism out of the way and that removes a conflict of interest between what users want to see and what advertisers want them to see. Of course the drooling masses on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. seem to be perfectly happy to have their endocrine system manipulated by self tuning algorithms. But there are some legitimate concerns about whether that's actually healthy for them. Federated social networks provide an alternative to this.
- lost_1256 2mo agoto tell the world GM
- lez 2mo agoBecause Eurosky can ban you.
- pjc50 2mo agoThe ability to ban people, and the choice of who is banned, is actually the defining feature of social networks.
- ciefa 2mo agoPhahaha, Nostr and inclusive? Oh come on now.
- curtisblaine 2mo agoWhy is it not? I'm sincerely curious. It seems to include users that were excluded from other platforms, by virtue of making centralized censorship impossible, so I would argue it's more inclusive than anything else. Or do you mean its follow-based mechanism doesn't allow you to silence users you not only don't want to hear, but you don't want anyone to hear? This, again, makes it more inclusive to me, not less.
- jasonvorhe 2mo agoWhat a helpful comment.
- curtisblaine 2mo agoI really like nostr because it gives you freedom of association. You can unfollow other users and, if you run a relay, you can refuse to accept content from users you don't like, but you can't ban other relays (like mastodon does) and you can't refuse content based on relays other users use, because you don't know. In other words, you only can ignore people you don't like but you can't meaningfully deplatform them or prevent them from looking at or following your content. That's how it should be and, incidentally, that's what makes people in favour of deplatforming furious, which can only be a good thing :) Unfortunately nostr has little network effect because the current ecosystem was stood up by bitcoin enthusiasts, and there's no much generalist discourse on it. Luckily, it's a simple protocol and it's really hard to kill protocols in the first place. Maybe the next censorship debacle on the current alternative social media platforms will give it a boost, or maybe it will remain a small niche group of ecosystems for specialized users? Who knows, but I'm glad it exists.
- exabyte 2mo agoThe discussion in this thread doesn't seem to be a level of quality I would expect from Hacker News. Many people attacking a protocol because they don't like how it's being used. It's sad, I was hoping to see something more constructive.
- nairboon 2mo ago> I want to claim that Nostr has discovered a new fundamental architecture for distributed protocols. Not federated, not P2P. What exactly is the fundamentally new architecture in Nostr?
- greekrich92 2mo agoHow does this impractical crypto nonsense keep making it to the front page?
- curtisblaine 2mo agoWhat does nostr have to do with crypto?
- greekrich92 2mo agoIt was created by a popular Bitcoin person and crypto people are its primary user base. Tipping people with crypto is part of the protocol.
- xigoi 2mo agoThe part where, instead of “liking” posts, you “zap” them, which involves paying Bitcoin to the poster.
- marc26z 2mo ago[dead]
- marc26z 2mo ago[dead]
- pc86 2mo ago> An open social protocol with a chance of working > ...with a chance of working [citation needed] I think.