I am not being glib here, Primal is the number 1 argument against Nostr I come across. I don’t really have a response against the argument either, other than hoping that Primal changes or it eventually becomes a marginal client. But at this moment, all we have is promises while it probably is the most popular client out there.
For those not aware, Primal does not use relays on the input side, although it does on the output side. This means that it connects to a caching server, not a relay, and you will only see what is on there. If someone references an event that is not on that server, even though relay hints are included, tough luck; the only redeeming factor is that those outside of this primal box will see your complaint you can’t see the event.
These quirks resulting from Primal being Notes and other stuff transmitted by cashing-server, instead of relays are annoying, but the most worrying part is the fact that its a real manifestation of the biggest fragility Nostr has as a protocol: Clients ignoring the spec and the design philosophy of openness and interoperability while being in a dominant popular position. I can make arguments all day about the theoretical merits of Nostr, but they are easily undermined by pointing to Primal. What am I supposed to say in response? More theoretical notions like people being able to change software, even though we know that is just not going to happen?
I understand people will retain their profile, social graph, posts etc. if they move to another client, but as it stands those just become excuses for Primal to be a bad actor; how about just fixing your shit, so I don’t have to manually broadcast my stuff so people in the Primal-box can see it, but above all I can argue for Nostr without having to concede that the censorship resistant theory is not living up to practice. nostr:nevent1qqspy7pxqwk66dm46yxwetee0m2lrz5zeh2ldcwycrt6fuegyrllqlctrjx2f
Replies (48)
very good analysis - good 2 know for all those seek 2 learn
one thing primal do best - make it easy for all NON TECH user to join nostr real quick with learning anything about relays or techshit
one of reason why tiktok is famous among youngster - mostly old n techies are in nostr today
overall I support 100% miljan's approach must give him CREDIT - once user become expert need to move on other clients
another annoying aspect of primal is ONLY boosting same 20 npubs only forever. it is okay if they sponsoring him.
analysis n arguments must have points
After three years of Amethyst I switched to Primal a month ago or two. All your contra arguments are my pro arguments now and I say...
#caching is very very important semi-centralized service for dummies
he published white paper n very good reason to do it
This post is enough for me to dump nostr:nprofile1qqs9xtvrphl7p8qnua0gk9zusft33lqjkqqr7cwkr6g8wusu0lle8jcpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgqg4waehxw309aehgct8d9hxwtnev9382tndv5makew3
Maybe time I took my stuff back to Damus. Other solid options? #asknostr
nostr:nevent1qqszdzsezcykayhlqyklnx0vk7zpdsvxy3y4l55r8w65sdh99dfljzcpzemhxue69uhkvet9v3ejumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgultdht
All correct, and yet Primal does make NOSTR more usable.
I use Primal and other clients, don't notice a big loss when switching between them. All messages, people being followed and so on remain there.
There are lessons to be learned. People will opt by the most convenient and workable route very often.
good 2 know - some i knew - but ONBOARDING DUMBS IDIOTS from tiktok / x / others - primal is best
Whilst your concerns are valid, to say it’s not a Nostr client I think’s unfair.
You could make the argument the other way with Blastr relays.
The caching server is clearly an area that could come under fire with pressures for censorship etc but it does improve the performance and feel of navigating Nostr.
Do you think having multiple caching servers to choose from could combat any concerns?
Note, I’m not for or against any method by the way (I use Amethyst, and Primal daily) I just think these are healthy conversations.
I always hear you can run your own caching server, but that does not make sense either
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
I try primal occasionally and can never switch from Amethyst. I don't understand how a client with a caching server is so much slower to one without. Accessing the comments to a note has a noticeable lag, and I often notice comments on Amethyst that just aren't there on primal.
Yes that's odd when you think about it. But I don't think about it any more and I just accept it. Nostr is slow. I'm also not in a rush when I sit down and scroll through the 50 new posts that came in over the last 24 hours.
Primal is also constantly losing its connection, whatever that means. Just now again. But, whatever. After all these years of overthinking and trying to make devs understand, I deliberately underthink now.
If it sucks, it sucks and I just won't use their thing anymore.
So much here is coded in the wind. All this vibe code nonsense only makes me wonder whether people have nothing to do with their lives. But, then again, just like Satoshi's most famous album: Nevermind.
hahaha, to be fair, i have that issue with yakihonne and amethyst as well.
I dumped Primal for Yakihonne today. Doesn't get any better or faster, speed will always be limited by the network itself
Maybe I'm just lucky to have fast Internet then. But the slowness remains with primal, comments take a few seconds to load, with a loading animation. Yakihonne is much better, a brief flash of a loading animation, less than a second. On Amethyst they are just there already when I click on a note, immediately ready for me to interact with.
Things like this matter. As load times increase, so does the bounce rate. Even a lag of 3 seconds will cause a lot of users to leave. It's why web developers spend so much time optimizing for it. It's why I cringe even I see people recommend primal for onboarding users, as it is a bad example of what Nostr can be.
Yes, this is my primal experience 😂
That's really my main gripe, is the lag. It is where I'll go when something isn't rendering on Damus though. And I did notice superior performance on bad internet while traveling abroad a while ago.
YakiHonne much better.
I can't say the same, though they each do have their own quirks.
It was much faster for me before v2 or whatever that big upgrade was called.
I also find images hosted on primal load more slowly than images hosted elsewhere FWIW. Maybe I have bad routes to their servers? All I know is it's slow.
I would love to leave Primal and continue on Damus only… BUT I need the Trending 24hr/48hr/1week timelines, in order to catchup after not Nostring for a while. Any suggestions how to add that to Damus? My own caching relay on Umbrel or something?
I've always used, since the beginning (2021) when I first got on the Nostr network, a bunch of different clients and many have evolved. So its a constant game of changing clients to find what works and fits best for daily use. R&D by its own nature is rough; and we are still in the R&D phase for everything.
I find myself using primal less and less unless there is some feature that other clients don't support. Having a team and capital to do the work that other projects can't afford was once a big advantage to eat market share, but it maybe soon that AI will even the playing field.
I think that's going to be it, AI tools could potentially level the playing field that we might not need the same amount of capital investment to do the same amount of labor, however it will also be a strategic game in how efficiently one deploys both machine and human resources and time.
yeah same, that's why i've been switching between satellite and jumble lately.
its free vs paid user, probly
This is irrelevant. Anyone can build what they want and what users experience as valuable. Freedom>?everything else?
Hard disagree here. Nostr has a 1 big fat weakness, and that is a piece of software becomming dominant/popular and starting to bend the protocol to its will, as happened with so so many supposedly 'open' systems in past.
Its only after there is a broad functioning ecosystem that this risk starts to get lower because the odds 1 party becomming dominant vs the rest of the ecosystem become too low.
As it stands, this risk is still real, and as it happens, we have a client which shows red flags when it comes to this. A popular client with a marketing budget, taking the undermining shortcuts for a quick UX win. Per NIP-01, the base definition of the protocol, Primal simply is not a Nostr client.
And like i said in my post, that makes my work all the more difficult because i have absolutely 0 responce in a debate with someone if they are well informed enough to lay Primal at my feet. What am i supposed to say? Nostr is vulnerable to a big popular bad actor, and Primal is a big popular bad actor...
i can weezle around the edges, that primal could be worse and is not 100% bad, or even mostly not bad; and that they say they have the best intentions, and that i know guys that know them and they tell me they are nice guys with good intentions. But at the end of the day i will have to say: yes, you are correct, this is a problem. So i will:
This is a problem.
my biggest issue isn't even that they could sway protocol dev (they don't even do protocol dev). its that if a large number of people join and the app goes down, then people will think nostr is unreliable and then it will have a permanently bad reputation.
There are various issues, i was just stating the one that impacts me the most, as someone who goes out in public to discuss Nostr.
Nostr is way too small to even use the word reputation. Pick any megachurch in the US and more people will attend services at that one single megachurch than are on all of nostr.
Bluesky is a pretty small network and it's 100 times bigger than Nostr.
Nostr is just teeny tiny, all this back and forth you'd think there were real userbase stakes here, but there aren't.
It already has a bas reputation. Hundreds of thousands have tried nostr. >99% ceased usage. The proof in the pudding would be comparing Primal's retention rates to the whole ecosystem
if the solution is "just build a centralized app again" then this misses the entire point of nostr and we should just go back to centralized apps.
The primary goal of our upcoming #wotathon is to establish an ecosystem of Service Providers for personalized trust metrics, as described in the article below. As a user, I don’t want to see one Trust Score for Alice on Primal, another one on Amethyst, and another one on each new client I visit. I want to see the same personalized metrics on EVERY client I visit. Which means the clients will not be the ones calculating them (for the most part).
What will Primal do once nostr moves in this direction? My hope, and my expectation, is that Primal will either incorporate personalized trust metrics calculated outside of Primal, or will make their own internal service provider which makes personalized metrics available everywhere, internally but also *outside* Primal. In other words, they’d make their own competitor to other Service Providers. They already keep track of lots of data so building a standalone Primal Personalized Trust Metric Service should be doable — just gotta decide what metrics to calculate.
One of the effects of Service Providers is going to be to take power out of the hands of clients. It is valid to be concerned that Primal is on the road to becoming just another Twitter, but the rise of Personalized Trust Service Providers may be how we prevent this from happening.
nostr:naddr1qqc8xetjwe5kxefdwpex7anfv3jhyuedvehhyttsv4e8xmmwv9kxj7n9vskhgun4wd6z6mt9w3exjcmnqyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcprpmhxue69uhkv6tvw3jhytnwdaehgu3wwa5kuef0qgsw2feday2t6vqh2hzrnwywd9v6g0yayejgx8cf83g7n3ue594pqtcrqsqqqa28dx3qra
Well I respect that you care about this so much. But I don't see how your rants help. Reach out and help them implement outbox.
More even larger actors will come around and do way worse things, with far more power to outway the ecosystem 'safezone'
I agree, but with open source software anyone can use it how they see fit right, thats why we're here. So that leaves doing better yourself, helping out, forking, finding a solution together, etc
It can be worse than what Primal is doing, there probably will be a worse actor than Primal. Yes. For the record i don't doubt the intentions of the people behind Primal, but that is only worth so much.
I don't see why it would not warrant a rant though
It's just that I've listened to people rant about their cashing server for 2 years now and it changed little. Also I'm a proponent of competition within a market and the protocol's interoperability makes for a beautifully unique system of competition and cooperation.
Also operation kidst is more important
Doesn’t mean we should roll over and accept it. Call bad actors out if there are doing things that are damaging. Competition is good. This isn’t just about competition. It’s damaging to the protocol as a whole.
yeah, strategy is everything. this is an arms race. we are building a reusable set of tools and systems that allow us to replace centralized ones and beat them on efficiency and cost. the LLMs will gradually become part of that. little mini-pc boxes are arriving this winter with 128gb that can run full reasoning/visual models. IMO the current projected power apocalypse would be fixed just by decentralizing AI server location. skynet also needs that centralized pattern but it's only a matter of time now before common domestic hardware levels the playing field between us and the big corporates as well. eventually scaling techniques will become better and we will just stack these things on our desk and have our own pocket einstein over ContextVM.
also, we WILL get outside of the DNS box too. just needs a functional distributed data replication protocol for a name registry that uses nostr events, and we are then sovereign down to the IP level.
they will take a bit longer to develop because of funding but once tools have been made, they are out there being used. no tool spreads faster than software.
For if you missed it:
nostr:naddr1qquhqctr94kkzm3dw35x2tthv43z6tfdw35x2ttydakkz6tw94hxzmt994jx2umfvahz6umsv93k2tfsxshnzvf0xgcrydgzyzamthdqu92k09ulq4p5q77uyqeadu9mkv8hy5f2nqw0mvhsncn5wqcyqqq823cxtshxd
We have actually had that happen, repeatedly. Whether it was them being too slow to moderate malicious spam on their relay, the website going down, the relay going down...
Always resulted in a mass-exodus of people who couldn't figure out how to adjust by moving to other clients and relays.
The users with the most staying power seems to be my "generation", which arrived after the initial building phase and before Primal, so that we tried out different clients and figured out what relays and NIPs are, and stuff. It was a steep learning curve, but we're much more resilient.
It felt like learning how e-mail or SMS or telephones worked, before everyone used WhatsApp. The Primal onboarders are clueless and helpless, like the WhatsApp onboarders. If Primal goes down, they think Nostr is down. If WhatsApp goes down, they think all mobile communication is dead.
It was really palpable. Everything would be hopping, for days or weeks, then suddenly the thread counts would drop like a rock and it'd get eerily silent.
Where is everybody?
Primal's down.
Oh.
I think there is this assumption that 'good UX' and 'good onboarding' actually means preventing new users from learning anything, for that only implies confusion and friction.
This notion IS true, but only for the idiot masses. And however much we want it to be the case, those will not get onto Nostr anytime soon. There are many many many many maaaaaany millions of non idiots that are more than capable and willing to do the basic learning. Those people are far more likely to get onto Nostr. I like to look at the population numbers of the Roman republic to conclude you don't need that many people to be meaningfull.
Subsequently, once all of those people are on Nostr, and the idiots come, those idiots can ask their nephew for help when things go wrong.
I.e. get the nephews first. "Mass addoption" is putting the cart before the horse.
Yeah, I think we're the Linux of social media.
Can I just say, as a fully qualified idiot, we can do it!
People always give us idiots a hard time but I pressed all the buttons and here I am.
😂
I have a hard time believing you are a sub100IQ / left of the bellcurve individual.
To be clear, my words are a bit flippant, but the intentions behind them are not mean spririted. I care for those people, i have no intent of excluding them or that we should not facilitate them. Frankly they are on my mind a lot of the time when considering the supposed wisdom of cryptographic keypair based systems.
