tldr in caps at the bottom. Everyone has this list of demands that can never all be true as far as 'groups' are concerned. The most sensible straightforward, ensured to just work now, and in the future, thing is NIP29. But in the long list is demands, NIP29 does not comply because it is tied to a specific relay, and it is not encrypted. Now is that a problem? Not really, you can migrate to another relay if there are any issues with the relay you happen to use. Relays are also one of the easiest type of server to run, so its the lowest threshold thing we can offer the world in terms of infrastructure requirements. If you want privacy, use a relay you trust for some reason, which is probably the least of your worries anyway because you also need to trust every participant not to leak stuff. Its already better than everything else we use, be that telegram, or discord or whatever in terms of being able to use whatever server/relay you want, use whatever software/client you want and those clients can interface with whatever group, regardless of what relay they happen to run at. All of it better than what is already out there in the world. But again, this impossible list of demands... So people much rather just chase their own tail going in circles and circles, coming up with "new" things, in a domain of known trade-offs. that are bound to break at some point, or at best end up working shitty; but you won't notice that directly because any silly system works at small scale in a low complexity environment. By the time things do break down, or start to stutter, people won't understand why, because it is obscured with all these bells and whissles. And to fix or patch them, you are bound to move closer to what would ultimately look like NIP29 anyway. Underneath it all is actually a fundamental misunderstanding concerning Nostr...or lack of complete understanding rather. This lack of comprehension is exemplified by the 'Nostr is the identity layer' crowd; they understand they key/signature part of Nostr, they ignore the Relay part of Nostr. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to diss anyone here, it took me a long time before i got it myself: The point of Nostr was never to get rid of servers; the point of Nostr is to be free again to leverage them for what they are good for. "Platforms" conflated purposes, also taking responsibility for identity and by extension the social graph, resulting in the capture of the user. In that model, users and the network-effect-value they bring is locked in and tied to a particular server. And because those users are stuck, the server can force feed them any algo it wants. The whole point of the keys is that users themselves are able to generate them, subsequently sign their publications making them tamper-proof, which in turn reduces the trust-relationship and purpose of servers into simply relaying those publications, giving control back to users as to what they get to see. The point of Nostr was to shift our relationship to servers, using this 'trick'. But that also means a shift in the relationship between servers and their users. It free's servers, just as much as it did the users, no longer being beholdend to juggle the impossible combination of interests. All of this opens up an entirely new landscape, and the implications create a spectrum that runs with that twofold liberation of both the user and the server on either end. On the one end the server/relay is general and non-specific; and on the other the server/relay is particular and specific. Outbox-model on one extreme, NIP-29 on the other; and all the flexibility in between. We are all figuring this out as we go, especially because most of it was/is stuck inside of the head of some mumbling guy with a silly accent that just assumed all the implications would be obvious to everyone from the get-go. But mostly because its all new, and we are all a bunch of uncoordinateable cats tinkering in decentralized chaos. These posts always escalate to the point where they were probably better done as a long-form post with some care to remove the typo's and things...but i got to go, so it is what it is. The take-away: USE RELAYS FOR WHAT THEY ARE GOOD FOR WHICH IS CURATION AND ORDERING; USE RELAY FEEDS, USE NIP29, USE NIP63, ETC. Nostr. View quoted note →