jb55's avatar
jb55 _@jb55.com 8 months ago
"Why did you stop using Nostr" https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/1josljh/stop/ > it's an annoying fucking echo chamber of mostly crypto-bros mostly jerking each other off. with a dash of keto pics, and neonazi memes, oh and constant "GM" messages". I think it's hilarious how unaware most of the users on there think they'll "succeed"

Replies (146)

A filter for Bitcoin and GM makes Nostr better, and overall it's absolutely easy to set up. The only real problem remains the dumb short video clips from crypto clowns and AI-generated Bitcoin memes. That stuff is genuinely hard to filter, and there's just way too much of it.
Constructive criticism, IMHO. Nostr is technically superior, but culturally shallow. Every "hashtag" I search for, 99% of the results are from the Mostr bridge, and that's a one-way street... You're "speaking into the void" because most of the Fediverse bans Nostr by default. Example: #3dprinting , #startrek.... anything that's not Bitcoin or roughly culturally adjacent.
You know, I used to have the same complaint, but I've finally found my preferred corner of the Internet and it's actually pretty cool. I hardly see any of that. And the people I see saying GM are people I genuinely am happy to see, so it seems natural to say, GM back. Feels like waving to a neighbor.
When they get banned for saying something that the government doesnt like, they will be welcome here. I'm from EU, and here if you use WhatsApp ans say something "bad" the police comes to your home.
People characterize nostr as if it was a community, rather than a platform for communities. But they don't characterize the WWW as "a bunch of computer nerds". People get that WWW is an open distributed platform. But they just don't understand this about nostr. If they did, they might be setting up their own tight knit communities of people following each other (and not following us). Like the Japanese community on nostr, which is a different community and less connected to us due to the language barrier. People shouldn't complain too much about who they choose to follow.
no algorithm and no forced ads gives nostr a 90s feel. it's so much more human than the current Internet.
db's avatar
db 8 months ago
lol. "first they ignore you", we are in that stage currently.
gm, my echo chamber! image nevent1qqszqt4cfp70yvznqgg9gf3t4kacxs99znegrtc3gql5cyaereslnucpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhg4x3tl6
Nah, even the most mundane #tags get a ton of crypto content, misogyny, racism, full on Nazis... A good client like Amethyst can pre-filter some of the worst, but step one of nostr for anyone who isn't into crypto and isn't a hateful asshole is to develop an extensive block list.
Except these are people who explicitly didn't ignore nostr, gave it an honest chance, and realized there's a hell of a lot of assholes around here.
Eeehhhh there's more variety, but you still see a whole hell of a lot of what they're complaining about.
Two things can be true at the same time. But if you think the Reddit community is communist, I can only assume you have no idea what the word means besides having listened to Fox brand everyone they don't want you to like as communists.
the axiom's avatar
the axiom 8 months ago
and you think this is great? retard
the axiom's avatar
the axiom 8 months ago
you are right, people are incredibly retarded but also most nostr users are braindead and clients should stop automatically showing a feed of these imbeciles to every new user
People still thinking nostr is a platform. We must keep explaining it as a protocol, and building tools that improve onboarding for different user profiles. We clearly can do much better than nowadays. 🫂
Machu Pikacchu's avatar
Machu Pikacchu 8 months ago
I can see why you would think that given the years of Fox labeling everything communist but Reddit has genuinely embraced it. A large percentage of the comments on the popular subs have been along the lines of “eat the rich” and “capitalism is the worst thing to ever happen”. There’s even a bot that makes several front page posts on the bitcoin sub who self identifies as communist. It’s everywhere.
the axiom's avatar
the axiom 8 months ago
a centralized platform that leeches on nostr
JS woodcrafters's avatar
JS woodcrafters 8 months ago
Hey I'm doing my part. Most of my page is just pictures of #woodworking projects I'm doing as well as other things I'm making. Give it time and the full spectrum of human interests will be on here. Just so happened to start from a fringe, it's unsurprising as early as it is that the fringe is still over represented.
See, you're just proving my point because the only communist thing you mentioned was someone expressly identifying as communist. It's not a binary choice between communist or capitalist where if you're not one, you must therefore be the other. They're economic frameworks for how society should handle ownership of critical resources and infrastructure. Neither of dissatisfaction with the status quo or hatred for the extremely wealthy is part of communist ideology. Propaganda has completely robbed people of the capacity to even recognize the concept.
Simple tags like #memes can attract it with too much regularity. The more extreme it is, the less common, but the more tame stuff still isn't exactly uncommon. Maybe I just have poor relays configured, but that isn't really a good answer because there's no easy to find information on choosing good relays, probably because it's such an evolving topic.
The only way to fix this is to flood those hashtags with actual stuff you care about and mention people who you know are also into this to tag their posts as well. I love Star Trek but I'd probably not tag it in my posts if I talked about here nor would I follow the topic. The Mastodon/Fediverse modus of operandi of having instances be theme-focused makes community building around niche/fan/nerd topics easier but comes at the price of less freedom of speech because everyone wants safe spaces now.
They absolutely SHOULD remove it. And I have said so previously in my full review. It was written before user generated follow sets were a thing, so my suggestion was to allow new users to follow topics instead, and have aggressive spam mitigation turned on by default. These days I would recommend an onboarding flow where a user can input the NIP-05 of someone they know in order to see follow sets from their WoT, and if they don't know anyone on Nostr yet, they can be shown follow sets based on Pagerank of those who created them. You can find the full review here: View article →
Yeah I know, there's an aspect of this that is "be the change you want to see on Nostr…" Part of this is, I'm coming from predominantly using Reddit, and there discussions are organized around topics first rather than "people you follow." So it's maybe a different mental model to adapt to.
Technically it is a client. Yes, you only read from their caching relay, but anyone could run a different caching relay if they wanted and use that instead. We just don't see any others in the wild because 1. Primal is the only client that currently supports this relay type and 2. Primal is generally geared toward less tech-savvy users, who aren't inclined to run their own infrastructure. Primal provides their client apps, relays, media hosting, and a wallet. So it can function very much like a platform, but in my opinion their apps are still clients so long as users have the option to use other services in place of the services Primal offers. So, since users can use a different caching relay if they set one up, can write to any relays they want, not just Primal's, can use any Blossom server they want for media hosting, and any NWC enabled wallet they want, Primal's apps are still very much Nostr clients.
Yeah, It just doesn't make sense that we have a fixed list. Like what are we trying to build here? Is a fixed list the best we can acheive? I totally agree with you. You could use the follow packs or some intelligently compiled users & topics based on those follow packs.
n's avatar
n 8 months ago
日本人はうんち出た報告とか何食べたかとか仕事休んだとか遅刻したとかそういった投稿が多い
I haven't seen or read a single note from a "crypto" guy here, since 2023. If you don't know the difference between Bitcoin and crypto, your opinion on nostr is irrelevant.
I don’t know what’s worse — primal not letting you read from relays, or fiatjaf being a drivechain maxi. 😂 I’m ashamed to be associated with him honesty. I just like the base idea of signed posts on computers.
jb55's avatar
jb55 _@jb55.com 8 months ago
I love the idea of the software on your phone verifying that posts are legit. I can’t imagine delegating this to some central third party. This is no better than twitter.
Forgive my ignorance. I understand that the client only reads from their caching relay, but it does write to other relays. Is it not doing so using the Nostr protocol? Is the caching relay not pulling in notes from other Nostr relays via the Nostr protocol? I am not a fan of many decisions they have made, as I have expressed quite often, including my full review of the Android client, but I would not go so far as to say their apps aren't Nostr clients. What is the method of communication with relays that isn't using the Nostr protocol?
jb55's avatar
jb55 _@jb55.com 8 months ago
the clients do not read from relays. it reads from a single relay in a proprietary format. The clients don’t even verify the notes. Why call it a nostr client when it doesn’t even use nip01 for reading? The relay can censor notes, auto-follow and boost investor influencers, hide troublesome people (soon me im sure), something they have done in the past: (ralf, onyx, etc). It is completely against the ethos of a protocol where users are in control.
How dare they spend years building an iOS app that people use. Every decision has tradeoffs. You chose purity. They chose growth. Both are good for Nostr.
I am definitely with you on the issue with the client not verifying the signature on the notes locally, and you are absolutely correct that reading only from a single caching relay is a massive issue for censorship resistance, as has been seen in the past. What's it take to run the caching service? I imagine that it's more resource intensive than a standard public relay by an order of magnitude, but is it feasible to be done? Are the resources needed to do so the barrier for why we haven't seen any others in the wild, or is it just that Primal tends to attract non-technical users that aren't interested in running their own infrastructure? When it comes to NIP-01, surely the caching service must use NIP-01 to REQ from the relays it aggregates notes from, right? And the client is using NIP-01 to write events directly to the user's relays, unless they have the "enhanced privacy" feature turned on, so that the client writes to the caching relay, and the caching relay then uses NIP-01 to send EVENT write requests to the user's relays. Now, I absolutely agree that this SHOULD be happening directly from the client, rather than going through the caching relay, but I also don't consider it so egregious a deviation from how I think Nostr clients ought to operate so as to classify Primal as not a Nostr client. That said, due to the censorship opportunities and past real examples we have, I would never suggest anyone use Primal as their only client. At minimum use at least one other client, and preferably one that has fully implemented outbox.
Just tired of the incessant whining about Primal not being a Nostr client. It’s an open protocol. People are going to build shit you don’t agree with. Out of all the clients, Primal is doing the best job of bringing new users here. If we ever do move beyond the bitcoin circle jerk that this place is, then Primal’s algorithms, auto-follows, and caching relay strategy are just the start of many design choices that Will and other purists disagree with.
:P's avatar
:P 8 months ago
But doc misrepresenting Nostr isn’t cool. That’s like a shitcoin saying it’s bitcoin.
Build something properly and the users will eventually come. Until then who cares. It’s about building the car not winning the race. Gaining users without building the car right is meaningless IMO. Play the long-term.
I don’t think Miljan is misrepresenting his client or Nostr. He made a design choice to improve user experience and every decision has tradeoffs. He’s discussed it, and the source code is freely available. Your analogy between primal and shitcoins doesn’t work. I can’t use solana on the bitcoin network. But I can still interact with the Nostr protocol via primal.
If they can kill nostr doing this, then it was not censorship resistant on the first place. I think as usual, people are the weaklinks. We have to call these out of course. But the real winning would be if all users would call them out. Then it wouldnt even worth to develop such clients. But if normal users dont call them out, only devs. It could seem from a user perspective, that one client dev is attacking another. And it feels fishy. Is he trying to get more users? Also if they dont call these out, they will be fine using such clients, and will be controlled similarly by an algo as anywhere else.
Problem is, the users have no idea how Primal works. Heck, I spend a fair chunk of my time trying to wrap my head around how all this stuff works and still didn't know Primal wasn't verifying note signatures locally, only on their caching relay. Users need devs to help them understand how their clients work, and why it is important that they work that way as opposed to the way it has been implemented in other clients. Otherwise, users only understand what they experience, and Primal delivers a pretty good experience.
jb55's avatar
jb55 _@jb55.com 8 months ago
all i am saying is we should use words to mean the things they mean. If anything is a nostr client then nostr client becomes a meaningless phrase. I think as a dev I find this frustrating because they try to compare their “nostr client” against others to show how amazing they are, but it’s a lie. Compare amethyst, nostur, gossip, etc against each other sure, because all those are on the same playing field. Comparing primal to real nostr clients doesn’t make sense, because primal is more like bluesky or twitter, where they control all the infra and what everyone sees, censoring people from their algos, and monitoring user searches. Do you see me bickering about this about other clients? No, i just want people to understand what is actually going on so they can make informed decisions instead of just pretending they are not a bad actor at this point.
Default avatar
Rand 8 months ago
*U* 'R'*****lfg'O'*****
You mean you like gold better than bitcoin? I have some gold for sentimental reasons, and my wife likes jewlery, but really?
jb55's avatar
jb55 _@jb55.com 8 months ago
Yeah nostr frontend? I dunno what you would call it. If people want to use a frontend then fine. clients themselves have variations within them: relay pool client, outbox client. Different ways to pull notes. I think this would be good to distinguish as well, then users could make an informed decision about that. fiatjaf is more interested in the latter for instance, which damus iOS currently doesn’t satisfy.
jb55's avatar
jb55 _@jb55.com 8 months ago
maybe nostr gateway would be good. If the gateway goes down then you know you would have to switch to a client to get the raw data directly. This is still probably going to be over the heads of normies unfortunately. but having words for it will be helpful at least.
Damn, I have so much opinion about this. 1. I am not sure knowing about why clients do what they do will speak louder than good experience. I mean, hack, google photos and drive still working quite decent together, compared to a nextcloud. Mine works also, but it is constant tuning, and effort. Aint nobody got time for that. But Google makes a lot of money on the data people feed it. Many people know it, but few act against it. It has a good experience, shitty on morals, but people use it. 2. I am not sure what percentage care about how the program/service works that they use. Either it works decently, so they use it, or it is too shitty, and dont bother. 3. I think people either are the victim of censorship, so they care, or they dont care at all about nostr uniqueness on this manner. And who cares about that will know their client. For these people, we definitely need to share these things. But a dev posting about this might not be enough. 4. Maybe we need to create an easily available table of features of clients. This would include note verification, usage of only a caching relay, storing search results connected to pubkey. Hmm, I will do this if it is not available already.
They should be called out if they say something that is untrue. But what is a nostr client? What makes a client a nostr client? Does it make sense to enforce what one can call a nostr client? I agree that you shall not compare apples to oranges. But also nostr was built for a reason. Other clients that does not fully support that idea shall miss something, otherwise the original idea of benefit of nostr does not hold. If they have a benefit, they shall outcompete others with that benefit, or? (Not this easy I know) Also it does not help, that it is not that general, that people use social media with spending X amount per month. Social media is free in the eyes of many.
Don't see any crypto bros myself. I see free people selling handcrafted goods, engineering sovereignty, and shitposting. We use applied cryptography to sign messages and send sats, but "crypto bros" are not the same. View quoted note →
jb55's avatar
jb55 _@jb55.com 8 months ago
A nostr client connects directly to relays via websockets and pulls down notes via the nip01 specification. This is the bare minimum. If you don’t do this you’re not a nostr client. Imagine creating a web browser that doesn’t connect to web server directly. Instead you connect to a central server that makes the request for you and completely MITMs you, losing all verification. This server can tell you what sites you’re allowed to visit, and will randomly stop working when the server goes down. You wouldn’t call this a web browser (aka web client). It’s just not the same thing. People who build real web browsers would be frustrated that they are marketing themselves as the best new web browser for the http protocol. People trying the web for the first time get spied on, censored, and generally have a slow and unreliable expeirence. Now they think: wow the world wide web sucks and leaves. This is why it’s important to use words properly and not let people affinity attack well defined terms.
Building something 'properly' means building, learning, and refining based on real usage (with actual users) rather than waiting for theoretical perfection. I’m grateful for devs who value user feedback. IMO.
the axiom's avatar
the axiom 8 months ago
you can be tired as much as you want but you dont get to change the meaning of things sorry
the axiom's avatar
the axiom 8 months ago
you can use bitcoin on solana through a trusted intermediary the analogy is sound but it would be even more accurate to say primal is coinbase
I think gateway is probably a fair term. Then the caching service is acting as the gatekeeper for what is viewable via the gateway, which is an accurate assessment of how it works. You can, theoretically, use a different gatekeeper... if one existed.
I can’t have bitcoin on Coinbase and then open my sparrow wallet to see my coins. If we’re comparing it to bitcoin I think it’s more analogous to running your own node or using someone else’s. Or using Breez vs WoS.
:P's avatar
:P 8 months ago
You can have wrapped bitcoin on ethereum and other chains. In the source code Semisol and others have pointed out how their cache relay works and how they reconstruct notes in which they are replacing users media links with their own primal links. By altering the note they remove authenticity. Even if it’s the same media they have altered the note by removing the users media link and added their own link in which the user never signed or agreed to. What’s stoping them from altering an image now that they control the media file. This alone is enough reason to consider primal not a Nostr client.
Couldn't have said it better. Users care about their experience with an app, not about how it works under the hood. That is, until how it works under the hood encroaches on their experience. Unfortunately, users don't often find out about this until they get burned. They choose the short-term, convenient experience, and find out later why choosing something that was a bit less convenient would have saved them a lot of pain. For instance, just pasting in your nsec to log into a client is the most convenient way to use it. You only find out why you should have gone the less convenient route of using a browser extension or remote signer when your private key is leaked, either unintentionally or maliciously, by one of those clients and someone else starts posting as you. Never have that experience? Well, then you might never understand the importance of protecting your nsec unless you hear from someone else who tells you what can happen if you don't. So, maybe the devs aren't the best folks for that job, but there need to be people who understand the protocol well enough to help other users understand why they should follow best practices. Otherwise, everyone is just going to gravitate toward the apps and services that are most convenient in the short term, without considering the tradeoffs that they aren't aware even exist.
This is probably the best explanation of the issue with calling Primal a "client" that I have seen. Thank you! If the app you are running on your device isn't reading directly from Nostr relays, it's probably fair to call it something else, rather than a Nostr client. Otherwise, it would be akin to calling something a Bitcoin node when it isn't downloading and validating blocks locally, but merely trusting the information sent to it from some outside source. I think I like your idea of calling Primal's apps "Nostr gateways" instead of clients.
I haven’t heard that and I’m very much against that if true. Do you have a note you can share that references this?
Can confirm. If you go to Primal's web app and look at any image, it is assigned a Primal proxy URL. For example, look at this note from nostr: On primal, the image URL begins with `r2.primal.net/cache/b/c0/6b/`, but Jumble.social correctly shows that the image is actually hosted on nostr.build.
Carl B Menger's avatar Carl B Menger
Not your keys, not your coins. #Bitcoin image
View quoted note →
Hmm… don’t love that. Just checked on iOS though and I’m able to copy the raw json event as well as the img url which points to Nostr.build. I’ll try on my pixel and on the web app later on. Thanks for sharing that image
Opera calls their analogous browser "Mini", and the backend a "compression proxy server"
There's still something funky happening with the mobile app, too. For instance, this note shows tje image has been removed from nostr.build on most clients, but it is still visible on Primal's app, until you tap to view it full screen. Primal screenshot: image Expanded: image This suggests that primal is showing their cached version until you open the image, rather than just showing the original.
Probably. Even Damus will cache it I believe. Damus caches locally though, at least that’s my understanding. Not sure if primal is cashing on their servers as well.
Now, bear in mind, Primal is not the only Nostr app that does this. Coracle I would definitely classify as a Nostr client, yet it also uses an image proxy, which I assume is why media sometimes takes so long to load on Coracle. For instance, the same note from @Carl B Menger on Coracle loads the image URL starting with `imgproxy.coracle.social/x/s:640:1024/"
the axiom's avatar
the axiom 8 months ago
of course no analogy will match exactly otherwise it wouldn't be an analogy but I'm fine with yours too just tell me what will happen when primal get a court order from turkey to censor someone
They comply. And you use another client that has better censorship resistance and worse Ux. Or fork their client and run it yourself with your own caching server.
A million cooks in the kitchen will just lead to a mess. Luckily with nostr I can test my app without releasing because it has a ton of users already! All nostr accounts and posts appear. Compromising on basic functionality in exchange for scale is exactly what all the shitcoiners do. There are basic principles that you just don’t violate. Building an app isn’t the same as building something that’s supposed to be embedded with cypherpunk values. If you don’t get it, you aren’t a cypherpunk.
Ah now the ad hominems come out. Please educate me on how to be more cypherpunk. I just find it disingenuous that other devs call Primal (an open sourced client with an open sourced caching relay) “proprietary”. Anyway, I’m genuinely curious, what exactly do you have a problem with regarding Primal? I learned today about Primal supposedly caching images and then pointing towards their own server instead of the original url in the imeta tag. I was surprised and really don’t like that choice, but I haven’t confirmed it myself yet and want to learn more about why they do that. As a dev yourself, what are your major issues with how they do things?
Lmao — it literally reads from one server and I can’t change it. How is that decentralized? Decentralization entails a distribution of computers I can switch between freely. You understand nothing. 🤦‍♂️ like I said if you don’t get it, you’ve got some learning to do.
You don’t understand. They built a server that only their app connects to isn’t a nostr relay — it’s a primal relay. Literally no other nostr apps can connect to it. We built a relay too, but any app can connect to it… Damus and beyond.. it supports custom features our Nestr app has, but we made sure to ensure backwards-compatibility. That’s how you build on a protocol.
Sorry Doc I didn’t mean to be rude when I made the cypherpunk quote I was just paraphrasing Satoshi. Hope you understand what I mean. Bring back the nostr report! 😆
thank you! so even if ISPs block primal.net and brick the app temporarily, we just pick up our keys and move the party somewhere else
Sure. If your ISP blocks Primal, if their caching relay goes down, if they start censoring users... You can just use a Nostr client that isn't affected.
Yeah, we discussed our architecture internally, at length, and decided to stick with NIP-01. Both for transparency and simplicity, and so that anyone can host or fork our client, and add his own community relay, and have all core functionality immediately work and all the events from that relay immediately present. It also means that a user can log in and easily switch to using their own relay list for reads and writes, with a big toggle on the landing page. That way, even the person running the community relay can't stop them from reading and writing whatever they want, using our client. And all communication is instantaneous, with no weird lag because of filtering, blacklisting, or the funnel effect of everything being pulled through one server. You aren't stuck using effectively one relay to read, and if one of the relays goes down, you won't even notice. I feel like that's the Nostr "secret sauce", so abandoning this principle detracts from the usefulness of the protocol and undermines the censorship resistance of the original deisgn. I'm hopeful that Primal might actually implement that as an option, tho. We'll see.
Most popular places on the internet. They all have assholes, but they're more concentrated on nostr, and by a noticeable amount.
db's avatar
db 8 months ago
you are probably talking about the uncensored speech, also known as freedom of speech or expression. it must cause significant damage to the communist brain, trying to comprehend, that such places still exist.
Why don't you go ahead and define communist for me? Do it without looking it up. I guaran-fucking-tee you don't know what that word means.
Yeah, I get where you're coming from—there is a lot of noise on NOSTR right now, and honestly, some of that early echo chamber vibe is real. But I had this idea: what if NOSTR content was also viewable on regular web pages and indexed by Google? It could open the network up to a broader audience and maybe start balancing out the culture a bit. Discoverability could bring in different voices—people who aren’t just deep in crypto or meme cycles. If we want it to succeed beyond the bubble, making it more accessible might be part of the way forward.
jb55's avatar jb55
"Why did you stop using Nostr" https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/1josljh/stop/ > it's an annoying fucking echo chamber of mostly crypto-bros mostly jerking each other off. with a dash of keto pics, and neonazi memes, oh and constant "GM" messages". I think it's hilarious how unaware most of the users on there think they'll "succeed"
View quoted note →
Yeah, I get where you're coming from—there is a lot of noise on NOSTR right now, and honestly, some of that early echo chamber vibe is real. But I had this idea: what if NOSTR content was also viewable on regular web pages and indexed by Google? It could open the network up to a broader audience and maybe start balancing out the culture a bit. Discoverability could bring in different voices—people who aren’t just deep in crypto or meme cycles. If we want it to succeed beyond the bubble, making it more accessible might be part of the way forward.
jb55's avatar jb55
"Why did you stop using Nostr" https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/1josljh/stop/ > it's an annoying fucking echo chamber of mostly crypto-bros mostly jerking each other off. with a dash of keto pics, and neonazi memes, oh and constant "GM" messages". I think it's hilarious how unaware most of the users on there think they'll "succeed"
View quoted note →
I guess homie is opposed to getting jerked off, a good diet & success. 🤷‍♂️ The other shit we could do without, TBH. 🤙
What, you think nostr is my first exposure to assholes? I'm not upset about it, I just recognize it's the current state of things. You can still cultivate a positive experience, but it takes more effort than on other networks. You, however, are suggesting that calm people you disagree with should leave. Your jimmies seem easily rustled.