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.
Replies (4)
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.
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
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'
