Nostr is great, I love the pros to it, but as someone who knows nothing about Bitcoin/crypto it’s:
-annoying to see the majority of content being that
-hard to setup the zaps thing (I did it ik but I don’t understand it that much).
Also i think if Nostr grows:
-people need to TRULY understand that their private key needs to stay safe, as it’s new tech for most
-deleting posts/notes needs to somehow be implemented, it’s fundamental at this point
true deletes will never be possible because the concept doesn't really make sense here
Yeah ig. Surely it could be possible if you only follow 1 relay (one that supports it), but no one would do that lol
I recently joined just the other day and I think you make good points, except for the deletion part. I think the reason why people feel like deletion is necessary is from decades of using the other social media. Deletion on social media is almost like an indirect form of censorship.
Nostr right now is a verifiable public record. Being able to delete something from a public record alters that history and can remove accountability for what was written. It also allows people to selectively curate their online presence, which is a huge and super fucking annoying issue with every other platform. Doing that can be something that contributes to controlling a specific narrative.
By sticking with this system where if you posted it, it can be attributed to you via your key pair, then we maintain full accountability for all things written at all times and nobody can escape it, no matter how uncomfortable it might make them.
A better solution could possibly be allowing edits, and then the edits are chained together to where the edit history is fully maintained and viewable at all times. This is something I kinda want just because I hate making dumb typos 😄
Oh yeah that’s a good point I guess, because editing would be very useful for sure, yeah it’s mainly typos that I make and stuff. But once I think I accidentally shared my fill name here and I can delete it 😅
Is what it is. But yeah I totally agree with the edit button 👌
I think you make some good points. I have a few comments:
-Bitcoiners are kind of a seed for content here, but I agree with you that it's a lot. That's part of the reason I post random shit about Egypt and other random stuff over the past year and a half. A new social ecosystem requires some diehard people, but also needs certain roots for broader involvement.
-The inability to delete is a feature, not a bug. Once you sign a note, it's out in distributed relays. However, incentive-wise, I think high-accessible perpetual notes will rely on some form of economics or payment. Over the long term of time it will likely be unseen or outright deleted if a small account posts something they don't particularly endorse anymore.
-I think zaps will be an onboarding tool for bitcoin. Existing bitcoiners will be like "yeah I know what those are" but new coiners will be like, "wait what are these?" and it'll be a learning experience. It's a friction point, but potentially a good one. Also, some Lightning/Ecash wallets can be dollar-denominated.
-I think key management is probably the hardest long-term part. Even for power-users let alone newbies. Because with power-users we might understand it better, but also our stakes for fucking it up are higher.
point two!
yes, that's partly why i wrote a basic access-based garbage collection algorithm for relays so they can run on some fixed sized disk space limit and maintain that, while opportunistically retaining indexes before they take up the free space of the high water mark that triggers throwing out least recently accessed
- and yeah, keys... the concept of controlling your sovereign key secret is gonna take some serious marketing to get people to learn it
it's not hard, the whole crypto scene gets it but we need the normies too, so how do we induct them without financial incentives
ahhh, you see, that's the reason why people learned to use elliptic curve crypto keys in the first place
so there is a common interest between the security model of nostr and the necessity of associating the protocol with secret keys and payments
Great response
Yeah that’s a good response, I saw nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m say that Twitter was like this in the early days, but instead of crypto/bitcoin it was tech reporters in SF (IIRC).
Yeah, maybe there’s a way to set in stone that after a certain amount of time a post can be deleted? That’s built into mastodon, and I bet that could be a part of the protocol here… in that (for example), “Delete this note after 1 month”, then the relays know after that amount of time they should hide it.
I guess it’s a learning experience, but I mean people over on Mastodon & Bluesky are finding onboarding hard (which is why they’re finding it hard to get new users) just because it’s different, and they don’t have all these separate things like different wallets, etc.. I just think it’s gonna be pretty hard for the general public to move here and not fee overwhelmed, I don’t think you should have to go on YouTube to watch a tutorial on how to use this (imo). But I also think a GOOD client with a very good onboarding process could sort this out a bit..
Yeah it for sure is, I just keep my private key in a password manager 👍
The majority of content on here is Bitcoin-related because the builders of this protocol and the clients running on top of it are Bitcoiners.
However, don't forget that Bitcoiners are just regular people. They have other interests and hobbies, apart from #Bitcoin and will interact with other kinds of content, be it sports, travel, photography, food, etc.
Like nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a said, she posts stuff about other things than #Bitcoin and so do many other Bitcoiners. You just need to curate your feed and tell others about #Nostr.
I had my girlfriend join, because she's an artist and likes to take city photos, and she was surprised how quickly her posts received not just likes, but zaps.
People will get hooked, when they realise their content can be monetized without permission from anyone. Not saying people will replace their jobs, but it's better than what they get now on the cancerous social media platforms available.
Just my 2 sats...
