Nostr Web Client

Everything from ActivityPub to Nostr to ATproto to Pubky is built on entities and events.

They share 90% of the concepts. The rough details will remain the same.

The specific choices are what make or break protocols and what make Nostr inherently more flexible and developer friendly

semisol 5mo ago 💬 2

Synonym has tried to build their own “Bitcoin web” in the past. An unnecessarily complicated and bloated ecosystem.

Their most recent pivot is Pubky as they try to grasp onto what remains of the market that hasn’t been captured by Nostr.

All they do is reinventing the wheel for corporate capture.

ActivityPub solved a problem in what they thought was the best way. And to be fair it was good for its time.

Now ATproto is trying to leverage a similar design but with more marketing bullshit and a new platform to capture people.

Pubky is no different. Nostr solved a problem and they are looking for the newest marketing hypeshit to push, so they can capture users.

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Discussion

τέχνη 5mo ago 💬 1

Your cool idea here is “we can build pubky on Nostr”. And I would be excited by that bc it’s like Nostr for normal people.

So obviously there is value in Pubky. Because we wouldn’t have been spurred to have these discussions without it.

semisol 5mo ago 💬 2

You can build anything on Nostr.

τέχνη 5mo ago

I agree, but when you say that, how much of “Nostr” is just basically client-server architecture + keys? If we call that nostr, then yeah it’s the bedrock

Garbage nsec 5mo ago 💬 2

You cannot. If you need an app that displays accurate follower counts for whatever reason, you cannot build that app on Nostr. Elsewhere you could.

semisol 5mo ago 💬 2

You can’t build it elsewhere either. You need to somehow find all users’ servers that might be following you.

semisol 5mo ago

Unless your relay collects that information for you :)

Garbage nsec 5mo ago

Sue you can. Sometimes that "somehow" is possible, given the laws of physics, what constitutes a reasonable infrastructure spend, what the chances of coordinating or limiting the parties involved are.

And sometimes it is not.

Also on nostr there are many things that are possible theoretically but impossible sociologically. Take NIP-04 depreciation. In theory once everyone agreed it was unsafe (which happened years ago) it could have disappeared overnight, for the safety of all. But sociologically that's an impossible outcome, and so it's still with us now.

Gets a bit old hearing nostr can do this, or nostr can do that, when the things being suggested are sociologically impossible. And no, adding the "if we just get everyone to agree" caveat doesn't get us out of this.

Russell 5mo ago 💬 1

Even Youtube cannot show an accurate follower counts. Some people follow on unofficial Youtube client like Grayjay.

Garbage nsec 5mo ago 💬 1

Yes, and some people just bookmark pages without subscribing. Or rely on the algo. But in all such instances those aren't YouTube subscribers. So if YouTube says you need 1,000 subscribers to enable monetisation, then that is requirement they can put out. If nostr says you need 1000 nostr followers to enable this or that, there is just no way, and there is no anything else you can point to instead.

Russell 5mo ago 💬 1

Nostr cannot do it but nostr apps can.

If Primal say you need 1000 nostr followers to enable this or that, then that is requirement they can put out.

Garbage nsec 5mo ago 💬 1

Right, and nostr.band could do it too (though their numbers would be different to Primal's). Chrome itself could do it if the Chrome team wanted. But this isn't a success of Nostr, in the same way Gmail gmail giving you 10GB of storage isn't a success of SMTP.

You compare that to atproto, where the the equivalent of Primal's caching service is built in to the core protocol itself, and the difference becomes clearer.

Or you look at bittorrent and how tit-for-tat incentives are core protocol, whereas for nostr relay monetisation is something strapped-on and not core protocol.

Makes a difference what's in the protocol itself.

semisol 5mo ago 💬 1

Your “core protocol” distinction is a bogus argument: can it be done, or can it not?

If you look at it that way barely anything on Nostr is core protocol.

Garbage nsec 5mo ago 💬 1

> If you look at it that way barely anything on Nostr is core protocol.

Exactly, yes! Nostr is an incredibly light protocol, so when we say what "nostr" can do we have to be careful. Most things attributed to Nostr are not in fact attributable to Nostr at all.

So no, my example cannot be done using "Nostr". It can be done in the same way a chrome extension can translate a webpage, as in that is not something we can attribute to the webpage itself.

Does this mean Nostr is barely anything? No. It's still something. Nostr is websockets and not QUIC, Nostr is k1 curve and not ed curve, and so on. There's a long enough list. But the attribution "nostr" gets for non-Nostr things is pretty wild.

semisol 5mo ago 💬 2

Just like when we say “Linux” we don’t refer to just the kernel but all the distros and tooling about it, when we say “Nostr” we don’t refer to only to the protocol.

Garbage nsec 5mo ago

Sure, but to a point, past which it's silliness. I often here “Nostr can do X” when the truth is that a certain party can do X in a bubble that they themselves created with off the shelf technologies and that bubble has some sort of connection to signed json events (often less than necessary), and nobody else is doing this thing anywhere outside of this bubble...

You could flip the script and say Nostr is not a social networking protocol at all but rather a hackathon protocol, and then maybe you have a semantic back door to sneak all that stuff in. But if it's to be a networking protocol then some reasonable propagation threshold needs to be met otherwise ...

Like remember when we had Olas v1 and everyone said "Nostr has Instagram now". And then someone does a Kanban thing and it's "Nostr has Trello now". It becomes absurd, you have to admit.

trev 5mo ago

EHHHHEEEMM...it's actually GNU/Linux 🥲

Garbage nsec 5mo ago

Nostr is infinitesimally tiny in the grand scheme of things. It's fun and I like a lot about it, but a healthy-sized and growing user base it is not.

I have no issue with some particularly entity leading something as long as it's open. I mean the world wide web itself was just a browser out of Cern. They didn't release the code and royalties till 1993. Then Mosaic and the rest came along and the decided to give up the name for general use.

MCP came out of anthropic, MCP is a good thing. Android came out of Google and now we've got Graphene OS.

Stuff can happen like that. Often does.