Replies (37)
I think a funding crisis shouldn’t hit Nostr as hard as it would, say Bluesky or Matrix.
Worst case scenario we can pivot Nostr into a p2p system, we sign our notes after all.
But I presume the doomsday scenario can be avoided by assigning sats to the services we use, ecash stamps, paid search providers and so on.
Althea Mesh has this pay per forward system, perhaps it could make sense here too.
If that was the case why does it cost millions now?
If I had to guess, user acquisition takes a fat portion of that pie, and R&D is most certainly biased towards whatever business plan they have, which may or may not align with network resiliency.
For instance, relay subscription is a guaranteed revenue stream, contrary to tipping anonymous relay operators as if they were bitcoin miners.
well it sounds like priority should be shifted to making the network more self-sustainable without the interference of grants. There’s a number of ways to expand the protocol to do this.
Firstly, clients should implement onion support and have the first announced relays be locally-spawned Tor onions. For a great example of this in the field, look at Ricochet Refresh or Cwtch.im — it spawns a local hidden service to receive messages at. This would reduce requests to public relays, by allowing my followers to query relays running on my machine first, which generally stays online.
Secondly, media should be served off of a DHT, Bittorrent or IPFS with a social pinning model. My followers should be making my most recent images and videos more highly available, up to a reasonable quota. Requests to things like blossom et al should be failover only, if nobody is in a DHT.
Finally, DHT can also be used for relay discovery and pubsub. I should be able to announce my relays via DHT as well, and push notifications and my content as a side channel.
These measures not only would make the network cheaper to run, but would also enhance decentralization and make it far more censorship resistant. Win-win for everybody.
i like the idea of dht + gossip as a layer for nodes that are trying to find specific ids after the source relay is down. p2p for eventual consistency...
What are ways to incentivize a decentralized social network? Normally I would say tokenization but that wouldn't be acceptable to the maxis, so what are some alternatives?
View quoted note →Well for starters these are problems that affect every kind of early-stage social project... Mastodon is an important case study here.
Mastodon is much larger than we are (~500k DAU's from estimate I've seen), and is apparently supported just fine by a network of instances varying in size from 1-10000's, supported by a variety of means... Some personal volunteer effort, some with private foundations, some (I think) even with government support, etc.
And they did that *without* zaps.
How much do you spend running the Damus relay every month? Is it a burdensome expense? Does it really cost millions to run one of the largest network nodes?
Also a huge privacy concern is a total lack of message expiry. Combined with the lack of perfect forward secrecy, it’s an extreme hazard. There should be a standard default expiry time on DMs and then nodes don’t have to store them indefinitely.
its really not burdensome, its like $200 a month, could probably be cheaper
For the record I am not writing this to tell Nostr folks what should be done, I am perfectly fine with grants and perfectly fine with this being a phase in the internet history that won't last. I am only saying people who repeat slogans like "Nostr fixes this" need to have some appreciation to the real situation and don't throw stones at other networks just because they are blissfully ignorant of the infrastructure they are taking for granted
Given that most of the other projects won’t provide me even a hope of human rights or free expression, I am extremely happy if people throw stones and think they should do a lot more of it. I have complete contempt for most of the social media projects that have, for example, claimed decentralization but only offered federation. I think the stones should be aimed at the developer’s heads in a more literal manner in such cases.
Do you care to share the costs in bandwidth and storage? I am trying to design a decentralised PKI based on Rootstock as a proof of publication, and I want to estimate how much state can nodes tolerate before not even 200 people around the world can replicate it? (I have reason to believe 200 is a magical number in availability)
You are too emotional about this. Federation is an overloaded word that means too many things. Mastodon with decentralised Identity and self hosted servers would have been just fine. ActivityPub is really mostly fine, Email is fine, Matrix is fine. Really the worst part is identity and we will figure it out.
Reach however is not a human right, you don't have a right to be featured on Google first result page, not on Damus query responses etc... the only thing that is your right, is that your friends that are actively trying to interact with you don't find you shadow banned, and all of this is possible with most protocols.
The main issue with most protocols is the nuclear deplarforming threat, but that is only because the identity is not sovereign. We will fix that.
> Reach however is not a human right,
I’m entirely familiar with this kind of subversive libtard rhetoric.
Before the Internet this was not the case. In Marsh v. Alabama, it was ruled (in line with all previous precedent) that privately owned roadways and sidewalks had to allow religious pamphleters, even though it is private property. The court asserted that anywhere that is the forum for public discussion is de facto allowed for political and religious speech regardless of property rights. In the very early days of the Internet things changed, when people tried to assert First Amendment claims on Compuserve chats. Compuserve claimed they weren't the public square, that they were a private service. I think they were correct, in that Compuserve was a very marginal private space and couldn't possibly have been "the public square". But precedent over this tiny service were eventually laundered into much larger and more critical bits of social infrastructure.
In contrast to Compuserve, Twitter and Facebook are definitely the public square. You cannot petition for a redress of grievances or lobby for policy changes without using them. And the political left delights in suppressing their opponents on them but files lawsuits claiming their rights are infringed when they aren't given access to every inch -- such as when they sued Trump for blocking them on his Twitter account:
CBS News
Supreme Court tosses dispute over Trump blocking critics on Twitter
The former president was sued by seven Twitter users whose accounts he blocked after they criticized him and his policies.
When libs were barred from interacting even with a very small part of a platform, it is a critical First Amendment violation. When conservatives, racists, sexists, or whatever term you want to use are barred, well, it's a private company bigot.
If something is used by a large segment of society for common speech infrastructure, according to historical American jurisprudence and founding principles, it is, in fact, a human right. I don’t have a right to be on the first page of Google search, but I do have the right to be treated fairly like everyone else by the Google ranking algorithms.
True, and Nostr didn't do much better than ActivityPub except when it comes to sovereign identity. But evidently not enough people tolerate that UX. I don't blame them.
How do you plan to enforce your human right for putting your speech in front of my eyes? Calm down and think about this a little bit. Calling people libtards doesn't magically solve physical limitations.
You don’t have an obligation to look at my speech. You can block me. Blocking is the normal and sane response to someone who is communicating something you do not like. If they do it persistently, we have perfectly sane harassment laws that specifically say that repeated unwanted contact is a crime. You have the right to block me and never see anything I post again. That’s clearly not what we are discussing, and you are manipualtively disingenuous for claiming that I have a plan to force you to view my speech.
You do not have the right to stand in between me and society and provide critical infrastructure that is necessary for life and discriminate against your perceived or actual political enemies and make sure they can’t use it.
well that's great! Sounds like Nostr is in no danger of shutdown because billionaires aren’t going to give millions to keep relays online, in complete contrast to the FUD from censorious Mastodon/ActivityPub apologists. I’d guess that all of these multimillion dollar grants are either being wasted on bullshit or going towards development, but we can be assured that relay operation is not burdensome and the network is here to stay.
DHT is not a silver bullet.
Torrents get spam attacks, CJDNS routing tables have grown enough to require offloading the routing to dedicated nodes (this scaling problem inspired the creation of the Yggdrasil network, which our friend
@FIPS shares some similarities, namely the spanning tree routing algorithm), IPFS supposedly addresses the vulnerability issues but discoverability of “unpopular” content is slower than finding whatever most of the nodes are already hosting.
Bottom line is, resiliency is hard.
No man reach is when your data reaches me in the first place for me to block you. Yes sending me a direct message is fine. But reach means that your data appears in a feed or something. Feeds that have audiences are scarce, and you don't have a god given right to appear in one. It is up to the curator/aggregator/relay/mailing list operator to choose whether or not to include your post. This is a fundamental problem. It can't be solved
Regarding auto expiration of messages, I believe it should be optional (we probably should have a service that splits the costs of hosting a group between the members, whatever).
Message persistence is one of the reasons people choose Telegram over WhatsApp.
> you don't have a god given right to appear in one
If the feed is common infrastructure and not manually curated, then yes, I do. Everyone does. Everyone should be treated equally by the feed. If you say otherwise, it is in total contrast to historical American jurisprudence and I think you should be rounded up and expelled from the country for being a subversive anti-constitutional agent. Well, I actually think much worse should be done. But that’s the bare minimum of where we’re headed.
> but discoverability of “unpopular” content is slower
Sure, but a social pinning model and IPFS peer graph makes this irrelevant. We’re not talking about an ancient file. We’re talking about a message that I *just posted* that is being ostensibly served by my followers. Your first IPFS node to check could be one I offer via the same tor onion as my relay. And I’m sure to have it, it’s my file. An easy place to query for a hash that is not me, in this instance, would be my followers, who are, in this hypothetical, pinning my content. You don’t need to search the entire IFPS network.
Regardless, this is a side channel. It doesn’t have to be a silver bullet! It just has to make my content more available than it already is, and reduce immediate stress during peak hours upon public relays and media servers.
You don’t need millionaires! Relay operators will charge monthly/annual fees. Problem solved
Or everyone will be running relay on their phone
Would you say the same about Email servers if they had sovereign Identity (regardless of how is that identity sovereign)? Would you say the same about Nostr image hosting solutions? I know ActivityPub is not a perfect protocol, but just assume the identity wasn't tied to the server, would that be so bad?
This is a manipulatively framed question. Mastodon, today, claims to be decentralized. It explicitly says “decentralized social media platform.” In actuality, Mastodon is extremely centralized (domain names are a point of centralization, even if they didn’t intend to censor or manipulative the network social graph, the registrars and registries can do it for them) but furthermore Mastodon has explicitly used its points of centralization to harm free expression. They enforced defederation as a policy to destroy the network graph.
Mastodon and ActivityPub are chronic liars. They claim decentralization fraudulently while never having offered such. They specifically abuse the authority that they have garnered by controlling a centralized network to harm speech and human rights.
You are out of your mind man. People are free to do whatever they want including forming trusted private communities that discriminate against others that they don't like to associate with. Is there anything more stupid than talking like a libertarian while bitching about people's freedom of association?
Okay. I point out that Mastodon’s active, present-day claim of decentralization is untrue, clearly explain how it is not decentralized at all in a calm and factual manner, and instead of addressing the actual concern of chronic fraud and misrepresentation that plagues Mastodon, you accuse me of being mentally ill, and worse, a libertarian. Don’t worry bro, I’m lucid and entirely fascist.
We got rid of it, but I am adding it back... Claude did a much better job on setting it up that I did in the past...
That’s great. Tor transit provides perfect forward secrecy, which will make you the only full-featured Nostr client with perfect forward secrecy on DMs.
What's the case against signed (JSON) events?
Btw looks like your packager for Mac builds might be missing modules
"Why not cut people’s electric in the winter because they said “nigger”? It’s a private company that delivers the utility."
This is what democrats will do if we ever get a federal CBDC or a "Social Credit System." The utilities are state and sometimes city regulated, it's much more difficult to get laws passed in order to shut off heat in the winter for someone who said nigger. Although I could see local politicians like Newsom, Mamdani, and Brandon Johnson trying. Additionally, a lot of politicians are stock/bond holders of energy companies and want the company to maximize supply to its customers in order to maximize shareholder returns.
Which is why the morons trying to limit or otherwise restrict politicians from trading stocks are making a grave mistake by not thinking of the second and third order of consequences. If you think people like Nancy Pelosi are insufferable now, wait until they no longer have to worry about the profit motive of being a stockholder of a company like NRG or Eversource in their "quiver of arrows."
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/517277-pelosi-house-will-use-every-arrow-in-our-quiver-to-stop-supreme-court-nominee/I thought it was peculiar that none of the most popular relays have a registration workflow yet
