Nostr Web Client

I don't see most people here having an objection to pay for a service that delivers on its promises - but as you point out, Twitter is not free in speech as Elon promised it would be, nor is it free in the sense of freedom in owning your data.

Rather you are paying for priority in the algorithm and that's practically it, unless you consider a tick a status symbol which it isn't now anyone with $8 can get one.

Imo it's not comparable to paid relays for a few reasons. First you can enjoy the benefits of paid relays without paying a cent, you only need to pay to write to them. On Twitter you must pay the premium or you are effectively treated like a bot. More and more of Twitter is becoming Blue only.

Second, if I don't like the policies or prices of one paid relays I can pay for a different one. Or I can make my own and choose it's public, invite only, or paid. There's a free market due to the competition.

Additionally, soon we will have the same for algorithms. Clients can create algorithm markets. Each user can choose the algorithm they want (or none at all) without being penalised by a central authority.

The real beef isn't the cost. It's that Elon promised he'd make Twitter a free market of ideas and turn it into a decentralised protocol because it was too important to be centrally controlled. He also promised Twitter would integrate crypto payments and become a multimedia platform and integrate encrypted DMs and all sorts. He hasn't delivered on either.

I'd like to point out that Nostr does pretty much all of that aside from the multimedia already. And even there, you can see it's being worked on rapidly. Twitter is owned by one of the richest people in the world and so far all they've accomplished is $8 blue ticks. Look at what Nostr has accomplished in the same time with mostly a volunteer open source community.

At least the Twitter algorithm is open source though. So he did keep one promise.

eb83184c... 2y ago

I think these are mostly all valid points, but

1. Twitter isnt going to release half baked alpha software that let's you potentially zap your money into the abyss. I think Elon wants to make twitter into a super app, meaning having a payment service built in; we should make sure nostr dominates this field.

2. Paid verification is their way of controlling bots, if you only scroll twitter then you don't need an account at all, if you want to be treated like a real person with important ideas then you'll have to pay the toll, just like subbing to a paid relay. On both platforms, content creators are being charged, users don't really have an incentive to pay.

3. The UX provided by the central provider, twitter, is already better than any nostr relay; there's no shopping around or ditching one for the other, because there doesn't need to be.

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Discussion

jack 2y ago

17 years versus 2.

This is moving faster.

On 3: the gossip model/relay autopilot works very well.

Derek Ross 2y ago

I think people don't understand the time difference and amount of commitment involved when they do comparisons. Nostr is so incredibly new. Many clients are less than 3 months old. We have a lot of room for growth and the rate of that growth is incredible.

elidy 2y ago

#nostr is moving forward at nostrich speed

dr.fred 2y ago

2. is only about control. nothing else. bots are the same excuse as terrorists are for banning bitcoin. idiotic. only the message is important, the messenger is not. everyone has a right to privacy, if you like it or not.

on nostr i have never heard about anyone losing funds except for umbrel

Pablo Xannybar 2y ago

1. Twitter has literally been testing in prod ever since Elon set foot in the offices. Funnily enough, adding zaps would be one of the smoothest, least buggy things Twitter does because Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey are friends irl. Jack owns CashApp which has zaps built in. If Elon wanted this for Twitter he could simply ask Jack for help from Block.

2. I have never paid for a relay I didn't control and I am still able to interact with Nostr just fine. On Twitter, if you don't pay, your tweets are buried by the algorithm. It's apples and oranges. Additionally I am extending my offer: I own one paid relay (bitcoinforthe.lol) and one non-paid but invite only relay (nostr.xanny.family) and I'll give you free access to both if you want. I don't care about the money. I care about not seeing spam on Nostr.

2b. Content creators are not being charged on Nostr. In fact, you've given me an idea, I can make a relay exclusively for content creators. The creators can join free and get to broadcast their notes free. Users can read from it but not write to it. That gives you a "one stop shop" directory of content creators on your feed simply from adding a relay.

Nostr also already has: its own blogging service with a choice of self-hosted frontends (if you want to self-host them), integration with podcast apps that pay creators directly via zaps, it already has its own version of Twitter Spaces called Nests, you can use it to post art, and videos are coming along nicely.

The difference is this. Twitter is talking about taking a ~40% cut of revenues from creators. In all fairness, this is due in part to higher overhead: all those AWS bills pile up.

Nostr, being inherently decentralised, does not have this concern. As long as there's people running relays, Nostr profiles will load up. No need for invasive ads and creators keep all the money their fans send them.

How is that not better for creators? Because sometimes relay admins charge a few cents one-off so spammers go elsewhere?

Also, let's look at this objectively. As @npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m rightfully pointed out, Twitter has been around 17 years. The fact Nostr is catching up and, in many cases, beating Twitter to market with innovations is very impressive.

3. You seem to be conflating two different things here. Clients and relays are not the same thing. You can have 50 relays in one client, and if you switch between clients, it remembers your relays because they're linked to your "account" (keypair).

Whether the UX is better is subjective, but I'd argue Damus and Plebstr are superior to the Twitter app in almost every way.

eb83184c... 2y ago

Again, all fair points. The last couple days have been a continued downtrend for twitter, and it seems obvious that elons ego will get in the way of the platform being everything it could be. You know, when I look at fiatjafs timeline, I have serious disagreements with what he believes, but it doesn't matter because he doesn't CONTROL nostr in the same way.

I still think the lightning integration into twitter is a stretch, cashapp would be an option, but then we haven't decentralized or censorship hardened anything. Lightning, as far as I understand, in any of its implementations, is still very alpha/beta, promising, but not particularly trustworthy (emphasis worthy).

No question nostr is doing more for its users, and that the cost is far cheaper than that of twitter. Just to clarify, I am not saying nostr is any one app, I understand the difference between relays and clients, my point is that from any angle twitter is more fluid, aside from micro payments I suppose.

Nostr is catching up quickly, but I think people here tend to assume we are immune to problems like bots spamming; I think its more like this platform is still small and its userbase is difficult to deceive, once the first factor changes then the second follows naturally, and the problems will become apparent.

It is certainly the time to burn the bridge to the old world though. Whatever problems this platform has, and whatever good qualities twitter has; my soul is wounded by the lack of self reflection/intellectual honesty that ends up in the trending/news tabs.

I appreciate your offer, this account is temporary though, its nice to get on and like some memes, talk smack and vent until I'm ready for a proper nym.

Pablo Xannybar 2y ago

I've not even used Twitter since I started using Nostr full time. Pretty much abandoned it. Feel like just pinning a tweet telling my followers where to find me on here.

And yes exactly. Nostr is actually decentralised. It's a network of nodes without a leader. So the opinions of individuals just don't matter.

Lightning on Twitter would be centralised and probably KYC'd. I'm not arguing in favour of that at all, just realistically as a US based company it's logically what I expect them to have to do for anything crypto related did to regulations.

Here again the decentralised model of Nostr wins out!

Lightning is used for most Bitcoin transactions in El Salvador and is already built into mainstream apps like CashApp. Officially it's a beta but there's no reason Twitter couldn't just integrate it from Block. All they'd have to do is plug in an API.

I don't think anyone seriously thinks we're magically immune from issues like spambots. That's why proactive solutions like paid relays and rate limiting and blacklisting public keys already exist and new ideas are being worked on as we speak.

Nostr is still very early but you know what... I'd choose it over Twitter no question.

Pablo Xannybar 2y ago

Oh and when you make your main account hmu if you want free access to my relays. I can also offer free NIP-05 verification and Lightning addresses from Xanny.family and BitcoinForThe.Lol if you'd like!