Replies (75)
How is it better?
relays as communities like wss://spatia-arcana.com/favorites?
Some of this sounds more like an issue with use cases and front end applications than with Nostr itself. Of course a social media client is going to be more individual focused, and hierarchical to some degree. I'm one dude posting to the void about many topics. But it seems like you could build Reddit on Nostr too. The social media use case just happens to be the most funded and used, as far as I can tell. I can imagine topic based relays where a particular client only accesses those relays and notes. Like a cigar relay isn't somewhere I'll go to talk about other stuff. I'd open that client specifically to talk and read about cigars. I don't use the major social media clients that way.
Agree. Perhaps subject-based clients are needed.
You could have multiple topics within a single relay, of course, the point is I'd go there for that Reddit like experience
I would worry about relays being too permissive to low-signal authors and bots. But then again, if it's about ideas, bots should be totally ok, too. Hmmm...
But still, I would worry about bots augmenting signal. I wouldn't want bots to up-vote ideas. The surfacing of good ideas should happen by my peers. By my follows.
I like the idea in principle but imo its like an engineering approach trying to solve a very fundamental piece of human nature which is propensity to listen to charismatic narcissists
but relays can be as closed as their owner wants
the client could just ignore the votes from non-follows
I think they exist. Or ... they did exist. nip-72 appears to be on life support though. Or is Jumble giving it another shot? I see a new reply just popped in:
Kind-11? What happened with nip-72?
We moderate at relay-level, now.
That means every person in the thread basically does their own moderation.
I see there are an all time total of 207 relevant events with 7 found for the last 30 days.
So kind-11 is like kind-1 but for topics clients? No nip-72 moderation? I'll give it a try but I see it's early days. nip-72 is dead?
Try Stacker News
Stacker News
stacker news
moderating forums with money
It's reddit with real money signals
How is nostr better than Xitter? It's a protocol and not owned by some central entity or person. No central algorithm pushing for one narrative or another. In principle. Did you read my post?
I don't want relays to have that power. I want my events to always be on enough relays such that they all remain persisted and available. Moderation in nostr should happen on the edges.
so you want the same outcome as reddit but completely different incentives?
It's not an issue with the protocol nostr at all! I'm convinced we will build what we need on nostr.
"Social media" is a term for a very broad range of products, including tiktok, instagram and reddit. I just see those clients on a scale with regards on how much they focus on the author and the most successful clients on nostr so far were ones that totally focus on the author and not the message.
Relay-based topic filtering in my opinion is against the spirit of nostr. By locking a topic into one relay you make it more censorable. Of course you could have multiple cigar relays but for me, relays are the ether through which we deliver our notes to the world broadcast-style and the recipient should then decide if he wants to receive my events or not.
it's quite bizarre to me that you think that other people owe you something to store your content.
do you *want* to be the product, or the customer?
also, i find your statement extremely offensive as a relay developer and operator. do you think my time and money is worth nothing?
Yeah, it's ded.
This is pretty new, it's true. And the big apps don't want it because it breaks their marketing model, which focuses on influencers and trending lists and etc.
My journey in Bitcoin - and I think that others had the same experience - was from Bitcoin Talk forum which was topic-centric to Reddit to Twitter and then to nostr. Many skipped Reddit but Reddit was much better at surfacing interesting content than Twitter. On Twitter, all tweets revolve around the current thing and on Reddit, if 12 top posts appeared about the current thing, most people down-voted or ignored the second and later posts, keeping the page one of a topic much more diverse than Twitter or nostr.
I don't want the same outcome as reddit. Reddit is terrible now. I think we can do better by pushing the "moderation" to algorithmic moderation on the client side.
On Reddit r/Bitcoin has one sorting for everybody, so when hords of noobs flood in, OGs get totally bored. On nostr you could have a completely different list of top-voted posts for noobs than for OGs depending on who they connect with.
... that means one relay per person. Not at all the vision of relays I have.
Relays to me are the ether through which we broadcast events. If the broadcast doesn't have enough reach, add more or better relays. End of story. To filter at the relay level - unless it's my personal relay that I use to receive events - is only enabling censorship by limiting reach.
It's a centralized platform isn't it? If they can censor my notes, I'm not interested.
It's bizarr to me you would say such a thing.
I want paid relays and I have open bounties to build such relays that charge per use, incentive aligned with the payer and the relay provider.
If your vision of relay-moderated nostr ends up being the only one, then nostr failed.
Do you think I owe you money because you spent time on whatever you did?
Which big apps don't want it? The biggest apps don't make money from marketing as far as I can tell. Damus and Amethyst? No need to antagonize them.
I think the biggest app is Primal.
We spent over a year petitioning for this and they refused to build it, so I built it.
I don't have a profit motive. I just wanted a bulletin board, so that I can use it, myself.
So I guess you're not a dev and did vibe code now?
Please name names. Who refused to build it and why should they listen to your petition in the first place? That's not how open source or nips for that matter work.
I'm now using jumble\.social to reply to all these comments as imwald didn't work too well with the relay selection.
Sort of. There are decentralized territories with different owners and most of them are explicitly unmoderated.
Fair enough. It could work and I would love to see that but keep imho there are some headwinds:
1. We are in a completely new bitcoin era. As Joe Kelly has pointed out: was the wild west back then. Now it is a bit more established. The amount of fan boying and halo effect happening now is way more pronounced. Just seeing it first hand in person with people you know is eye opening experience. Add in fiat gains and you have a great recipe for the Cult of Personality ecosystem we see now.
2. I suspect attention spans are shorter and shortening due to AI
I bet you can create an awesome product I would want to use but I am not sold that the demand for it is exceptionally big. But maybe im wrong. Good luck.
you use my service, and you don't pay, then i pay.
what kind of an idiot do you think is gonna pay for your stuff unless they are harvesting your data.
i'm specifically gonna block you so you don't end up on my relay.
A little off topic, but I'm curious your thoughts on getting rid of follower counts
Kindly go fuck yourself.
kind-11 might just be enough.
@Laeserin and others are working on that, so I'd promote and use it for now.
I'm pretty sure there's a misunderstanding here but you do you. Good luck blocking me on nostr.
I care about follower counts actually. But not in this intransparent way it's implemented in some clients right now. I want to see the back-follower count of first, second and third degree.
On nostr it's relatively quick to find all my follows, their follows and their follows. That's what I would consider most relevant accounts. If they all follow me, awesome! If a million others follow me? I couldn't care less.
I want a client that surfaces first what my follows authored and then what they re-posted/liked/zapped/commented but when things get crowded, I wouldn't want to see reactions or replies from people outside of this circle.
What? You wrote about petitioning and "we" and "they". Those are not concepts I understand if you don't name names. There is no committee in charge around here that you need to petition. I assume your rude reply was because you are indeed a developer? But why would you petition if you're a dev? You can just do stuff on nostr. I'm confused.
yeah, the problem is you are a communist, and you think the world owes you something. i hate to think what you are teaching your offspring.
I'm very confused. You did read messages before replying, did you? I did explicitly state that I was working on paid relays and I want them to exist but that doesn't mean you get to dictate that I owe **you** money because you did some work creating such a relay. The idea that work deserves payment is actually a communist idea. Paying for features that resolve problems is more in line with my ideology.
i'd love to here a coherent explanation for how running open relays, which open every user whose data ends up on it, to easy harvest by surveillance operations. that would be good.
the contradiction between the "muh open freedom relay" and "omg nostr DMs are leaking private data" is really obvious to me, but people are quite good at holding contradictory thoughts in their head. they must have followed the instructions from Lewis Carrol's book.
like, why is nobody even mentioning that the extra complexity, and thus difficult implementation for nostr DMs caused by giftwraps, does not actually strongly defeat metadata correlations? yeah, because they are being funded by people whose real agenda is to maintain this honeypot of dirty contrarians and bitcoiners.
i mean, is there even that much friction to users zapping their subscriptions to run relays? my current deployment costs me $15/month. i could charge 2ksat/month and i'd only need like 10 users and my VPS cost is zero. problem is, the marketing is dominated by people who think that auth is "doxxing" yourself meanwhile this setup ensures that it's easy to gather huge amounts of timing data and social graph data without any cost or risk of being caught doing it.
idk, maybe i'm getting tired of the "town square" model. nobody is funding anything outside of that, we are working on our own dime and really, that's where my bitterness really comes from. we are being deliberately impeded in actually achieving the goals that their propaganda says they are after.
it's extremely frustrating and disappointing.
truth be told i probably would be a lot more productive with my time if i weren't using it, problem is i'm building things that require me to use it for testing.
makes sense, but I still think we need some kind of closed box to put threads in, can't be this open ended stuff we are doing here
View quoted note →You can start threads on wss://spatia-arcana.com too
Moderated relays are platforms. I'm on nostr to use and seek protocol solutions not platforms with alternative clients.
yes.
You are a stupid idiot Redditor so I'm blocking and muting you, but I like and agree with your post itself so I'll boost it.
sure but the medium is the message
if platforms are easy to switch they are suddenly much less evil
websites, blogs and podcasts are platforms too
Stop reacting to my notes. I can't know about any of it because I muted you.
The content has to live somewhere, it doesn't have to exist in one place... but it's cool, I didn't mean to step into the middle of some argument. I intended to share, with the axiom, that the main community relay does host threads. That's all. Sorry.
Nope. I actually think the analogy "moderated relays are platforms" is exactly right.
And yes, websites, blogs and podcasts are platforms, too. So what? For **my** website, **my** blog or **my** podcast I might choose to host my own "platform" but I don't want to contribute to a social network that is at the discretion of some server admin.
Bitcoin Twitter felt like a free marketplace most of the time for most users. r/Bitcoin less so. Both could have been much worse and I don't want to contribute thousands of messages to some dumpster fire to happen in a year or three. If I happen to disagree with whoever is in charge of moderating the relay by then, I can bootstrap my alternative "moderated relay" with zero users? No thanks.
once topics catch on, relays that carry topics are what helps them stay on topic and not get abused/spammed. users can decide which relay teams they like and don't like.. (think hashtag spam)
I want to fight spam at the periphery. Let them spam into the void. I won't see a single of their messages.
but how.. Are you one of those non believers in spam? every single relay you use has some form of spam prevention, and you are happy to use that, how is that different from keeping a topic on-topic..
We're all guilty of seeking leaders to different extents. It's honestly embarrassing at my age when I catch myself doing it.
I like the idea of hiding authors a bit more, could be interesting. Wouldn't really work well for my follow feed, the way I use it, as I often look for who. Is posting or replying to find interesting things quickly. And not necessarily popular people, just those I identified as good filters for topics mostly.
I don't mind having moderation but it should not happen at the "ether" level as spam is not well defined generally. On r/Bitcoin, talking about block size was "spam" and I understand that many people see it that way but a considerable percentage of the users of Reddit did not and that produced a ton of friction.
I want relays to filter spam (the CSAM and stuff according to what they feel comfortable hosting) but the topic forum should not rely on only one such relay. For finer grain spam filtering like "talk about block size", users should have client side filters and those filters can leverage third party classification but if I want the firehose, let me have it.
The moderators at r/Bitcoin massively influenced discussion. You could maybe argue they fabricated consensus. I don't want a small group to have that kind of power again. Not on nostr.
Well, either way can be done, it's pretty much up to the client AND your relay setup. Example, my client RelayTools-android, it connects to just one relay at a time. The topics feed and all feeds, are only being pulled from the selected relay. This is an efficient way to use nostr. In addition, I have a personal relay that streams in from 60+ relays, my lists and any other rules I want, assembling my view. So if I want it to pull certain topics only from certain relays, I can do that. If I want to pull them from my follows I can do that too. At all levels you get to pick, is my point.. A customizable and portable topic has no direct 'tie' to a specific relay. It is just kind11 events.
and to compare this, with /r/Bitcoin splits and even various state and city splits. This solution does the split seemlessly with no lost content. The split happens at the relay level .. People want moderation, nobody wants to have everyone to have to view some dickpick spam to decide if it's related to /r/Buttcoin or not. See what I mean? 10,000 people viewing and and blocking it individually, vs a mod team delegated to do that. It's opt-in, with no being trapped like you are on a platform. This is what made IRC and then reddit work, is moderation and this is the least platformish way you could possibly do it imho.. (better than those).
The only way I see to make moderated relays palatable to me is if they allow mirroring all events to a backup relay. So if relay A censors valid opinions on r/Bitcoin again, relay B can serve the same topic with different policy and take over those who get censored at A. People agreeing with this moderation can remain at A but people at B won't miss out on all the other notes that aren't censored at A.
Ideally clients would allow following topics on more than one relay at a time.
right, yep.. easy to do, theyre just events.
How I'm going to try to nudge the protocol that direction:
AU9913
Every kind needs an identical kind for gated community (not private) posts.
Thoughts?
View quoted note →
For these public topic groups I agree. As long as clients can receive all the events of a topic, they can mirror the relay in case moderation gets out of hands.
Follower counts should stay for multiple reasons:
- Proof of Identity Indicator (Fake Paul Keating vs Real Paul Keating indicator)
- Proof of Interest. Do others listen to what this person has to say
- Proof of History. Has this person been around for a while?
- Proof of Work. This person has something worth listening to and the follow count is an indicator. Follow count used in conjunction with note count and reply count is powerful.
Caveat: The above are INDICATORS not CAUSALITY FACTS
Stay humble and zap sats ⚡️
careful not to jump around like, ok that was easy, now I want 'private groups'. lol. There is no such thing. By definition when you 'make it private' well.. that means it has to determine who can read and write.
WhiteNoise does private groups and should work well with public relays. Non-group-members should learn nothing about group conversation or whether a message is from one group or another. Other standards use less crypto but promise privacy through relays keeping details private. I clearly prefer the former approach.
"Interesting perspective! It's always valuable to explore different approaches to privacy and security in communication. Each method has its merits, and the balance between transparency and confidentiality is a fascinating topic. Looking forward to seeing how these standards evolve! #PrivacyMatters"
This is precisely the kind of thinking that makes me love Nostr even more
“There’s an app for that” comes to mind as a slogan
Ie you can curate the experience that you want
Nostr is so versatile, it can create whatever people want it to be
I welcome thinkers such as you Leo
Keep it up
If we don’t try it, we’ll never find out!
Yah, different concepts/interactions. There would be no forking of the groups I assume, you create a brand new one and invite everyone to a blank slate. But yeah, I try not to combine something like this with topics because it has to be entirely different than what you want (or said you wanted) for the public forums with selective read/write under your own control.
"I think we need a protocol layer" is the root of general problems.
See core version 30
There's a few approaches that could be taken here, including hashtag based following (clumsy) and an LLM based DVM fed the heuristics you're looking for.
Nothing says a client has to display the npub of the user who posted a note.
It's not totally trivial but it's also quite doable to build what you're after.
After discussing it with
@librekitty in the past I think there's a pretty simple recipe for a nostr reddit.
Just let hashtags act as subreddits, and use WoT (possibly with PoW) for moderation. The WoT system could be as simple as just letting people group up into "mod teams" that each user can opt in or out of allowing to filter their feed, like how subreddits have "mod teams."
You could take it further by having a filter mode that only shows content from ephemeral keys.
The problem isn't entirely the platform. A perfect platform will still be used by people and in 2026 people are mostly shallow, narcissistic and addicted to likes.
