Nostr Web Client

the majority of non-competent distributed systems and game theory talkers who get all the airtime on this protocol don't actually understand either game theory or distributed systems.

here's some hard fax:

fully anonymized, private direct messages can only be coordinated over an anonymising proxy, with ephemeral messages, and thus have a huge problem with asynchrony and there is basically ZERO consistency to the data on the network.

every security and privacy (a form of security policy) system has tradeoffs. the great holy grail of these uneducated, uncreative folk who say nostr can't do secure private messaging, is a type of privacy protection that is essentially a form of deliberate amnesia with a zero time window.

the biggest disagreement i have with this idiotic view of what must be in place for nostr to implement this, is this:

nostr's middleman, rendezvous architecture is designed for asynchronous messaging. but it can also do synchronous messaging through rendezvous, and solves the NAT routing problem that persists for anyone wishing to do p2p protocols from their home connection.

nostr solves that problem.

now go back to all these supposedly "private" protocols.

NAME ONE THAT DOESN"T INVOLVE THEM CACHING YOUR MESSAGES ON THEIR SERVERS!

not one of them. simplex, signal, matrix, telegram, whatsapp. all of them basically have relays in them.

so, what was that you were saying?

are you saying i can trust Signal Inc. more than i can trust my friend in germany?

JOE2o 1mo ago 💬 1

I've no doubt that cryptographically-signed JSON events on websocket relays can form the basis for many neat things.

As for Nostr, we have a long list of nostr protocol DM implementations (and nostr-inspired other protocol DM implementations). We can add to that long list, but for what?

Nostr doesn't have a mechanism to sort this all out. There's no Supreme Court. There's no Jedi Council. It's XKCD 927 all the way down.

1. All solutions to the DM problem require widespread cooperation

2. Widespread cooperation at this stage is effectively impossible

You see the meaninglessness here? If there is nobody to clean the wall then the moment you allow people to start throwing spaghetti at it it's over.

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Discussion

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1mo ago 💬 1

i don't think so.

i can store privileged messages on my relay already right now and nobody authed to a pubkey that doesn't appear in my privileged message p tags can read it.

i also have automatically configured relay whitelists that grant write access to anyone i might want to have an ongoing DM with.

the only thing holding this up from working is a client that lets you configure it correctly to push events there correctly according to what i have configured. the rules for defining that, are not complex, and currently, almost no nostr clients implement this part of the protocol correctly. everyone loves their chosen single kind 1 client, with half arsed DM support, or irritating high friction like coracle, which works, but nags you without option to disable the nag that you are using nip-04, which btw, is not actually in practical terms any less secure, but is also a lot faster because everyone has AES acceleration even mobile users, a cipher stream algorithm that is standing up perfectly well to attacks everywhere on the internet over TLS.

because of this downer negative pessimistic attitude, promoting the ignoring of this critical feature of a social network is the norm, and nobody has actually spent enough time to fix it. that is all.

so it's a self fulfilling prophecy when you parrot these dictums about nostr "not being made" for something.

perhaps we should talk about the fact that humans are "not made" for any specific thing either, yet can do many many more things than your little short circuit evaluation gives you.

JOE2o 1mo ago 💬 1

I don't think it's a downer attitude or a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's just the physics of human nature and governance (or lack thereof).

If you're designing a building you're not being a downer if you take into account gravity, you're not being pessimistic if you inform someone that their proposed balcony design just can't be built.

You won't get this new standard widely adopted. It sounds really well thought out and could be the basis for a personal or other fork. But you won't get a critical mass of clients and relay operators on board. Nobody will at this stage, for any such proposed standard, no matter how well thought out. We've simply reached a stage where (a) all we have is lobbying and (b) no lobbying effort will ever be enough.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1mo ago 💬 1

"it can't be done" is a red flag for an inventor, which you are not.

all i'm hearing from you is "this other bunch of people said this and i'm too stupid to think any more about it because they save me from the pain". pathetic.

JOE2o 1mo ago

Here's what I'm assuming is the end-game you're picturing.

-All clients converge on this one DM standard over time

-Other standards effectively get weeded out, not to be seen again

-When someone on nostr says "send me a DM" it's always gets sent this one way, and this one way always works.

Or are you picturing there always being competing and non-interoperable DM standards? A sort of ice cream buffet, choose what you like?