Nostr Web Client

I would not engage via email or SimpleX because I believe that the main benefit lies in public conversation (n-to-m) not private conversation (1-to-1).

Nuh 1y ago

Just because the delivery mechanism is 1-to-1 doesn't mean it is impossible to be 1 to many.

But, if you are interested in reality whatsoever, you have to acknowledge that many-to-many is an intractable problem and anyone says otherwise wither dishonest or didn't care to think it through.

Nostr itself started with this realisation (watching p2p systems) and relays are intended to be a layer with fewer nodes so that data can converge before diverging.

You can call that sufficiently decentralised, but it is not any different from Bluesky claiming that there can be tens of relays. Nostr didn't yet show how is there going to be tens of relays offering that global view to everyone when "everyone" means 100s of millions.

so my point stands, global discoverability is impossible to make decentralised, the best you can do is give up on either decentralisation or global view.

If you give up on global view, then you are just talking about rooms, you call them relays, but they are just big rooms.

This is not a criticism of Nostr or Bluesky, it is just an attempt of breaking the deliberate tendency to ignore physics when talking about global discovery... people just decide that the impossible is possible and refuse to engage with reality ... not good.

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Discussion

Gigi 1y ago

Global is a lie and always has been a lie. There is no global. The builders I care about know this.

PABLOF7z 1y ago

💯 this illusion of a global view (an outright impossibility for anyone but god) is where the point of contention almost always comes from.

Global is a lie, always has been and always be.

322905e2... 1y ago

Ironically I can't see the post this is responding to

Constant 1y ago

>global discoverability is impossible to make decentralized, the best you can do is give up on either decentralization or global view.

If you give up on global view, then you are just talking about rooms, you call them relays, but they are just big rooms.

>> yes, correct. Lets first establish that 'not losing track of someone you already follow' is what the censorship resistance of Nostr refers to (i.e. outbox). Now as to the discoverability; practically speaking the 'big room' thing is fine. Being a person of potential interest for someone always depends on some context, and Nostr works fine in that regard. Either the person of potential interest is a proxy of your existing network, which allows discovery through the interaction your network has with that person. Or it is in relation to a certain 'domain'/subject which means they can be found in the 'big rooms' that relate to that domain/subject. Finally, if you know what you are looking for (you have an npub or an nprofile with broken relay suggestions lets say) 'asking around' on a bunch of relays will probably work in the vast majority of cases, be that in an automated manner or manual searching or a combination of the two.

Your 'tech' based assessment of the matter is fine, but you can also just say that 'discoverability' always implies someone else 'promoting' you. And we are not in the business of forcing people to do anything, which includes who they decide to promote/host. If you happen to be marginalized by others through exclusion, then that is a social/political reality you will have to deal with, tough luck, the way of the world. At least those who follow you can, and those that do find you can join your following.

fiatjaf 1y ago

The global view of Bluesky doesn't include content that is on Nostr or X or Tiktok or 4chan or an obscure public Telegram group.

Nostr is the idea that every one of these platforms could work independently as a relay or set of relays and a user could have a unified view of all of these relays that they know, organized in any way they want.

fiatjaf 1y ago

I never fully got the "discovery can only be centralized". Why do you think that? You think it's impossible for a website to be found on the internet today without Google? Maybe you mean something else, but I'd say there is a fair amount of other mechanisms on the internet today that allow websites to be discovered without Google and and I'm not even talking about other search engines.