Nostr Web Client

Chatter on nostr today would indicate a potential balkanization of nostr relays and related services, due to the hassle of complying with or fear of the penalties from failing to comply with the UK's Orwellian Online Safety Act.

If this happens, nostr, in part, breaks for UK users. Not the protocol or the fundamentals, but many experiences will. And the rest of us lose by losing UK users.

Two opportunities present themselves which I hope we capitalize on:

1. For nostr builders to double down on and stress test the decentralization of relays and ancillary services, like media hosting (e.g. blossom). And for more nostr users to dig in, do the work, and self-host.

2. For UK users to circumvent, refuse to comply, and find ways to either opt out or get out. Godspeed.

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Discussion

Seth 5mo ago

Adapt or die

elsat 5mo ago

This has and will continue to take place.

Same as websites, apps, servers getting DDoSd.

Nostr is not fragile, as there is not one central chokepoint (unlike x).

Nostr may be anti-fragile as solutions might appear in response to the restriction de joure.

Kayne 5mo ago

UK with a less Orwellian version of the same laws that Australia forced through.

It's the entire west.

Even USA will do the same, USA was the first to put forward the new digital id.

The entire west is removing their own citizens rights and freedoms to appease Israel.

The Zionist pedophiles who control our governments are the ones behind this.

Ľḭṿḙśƫṟãɖãṁṹṧ💫#RunCoreV30 5mo ago

Yup 💯

It’s coming to the USA with flags waving, patriotic song singing, with chants of a free country

Beerborn 5mo ago

What should ideally happen: UK nostriches start spinning relays and tell the gov to gfy.

What will happen: UK nostriches don't want to be having years of legal fights with their gov, so they'll use a vpn/tor and tell the gov to gfy.

Ed Hubstead 5mo ago

Could you try and explain this to me in more technical detail? I thought the whole point of NOSTR was that it was completely censorship proof. How can people using NOSTR be attacked by the UK legal system? I don't understand it. Could you try to explain this to me very clearly? This is definitely something I want to help with.

Slimer 5mo ago

It's not censorship proof. It's more censorship resistant than a single centralised service.

A relay operator is storing notes for people to access. I assume they will need to comply with UK law if people from the UK are using their service or risk jail/ fines.

Ed Hubstead 5mo ago

So I guess there's nothing to stop someone from running nodes in countries that can't be affected by UK law enforcement.

Slimer 5mo ago

If a relay operator probably running for free or at a loss wants to take on the British State, fair play 😂

Shawn 5mo ago

Thanks for the explanation. You've pointed out the key bits.

And nostr:nprofile1qqs9c79vczgdj4wgqax2fttyxz2jtrawzz0vh6a3w6z6tmvuevgca5gpzus8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2aqppamhxue69uhkztnwdaejumr0dsdjez37, cheers for taking the time to record your thoughts. Yours is an important perspective.

The crux of this thing, IMO, is that "we" (nostr) are facing stress tests of how censorship-resistant the tech really is. The cretons passing these laws and using threat of global reach to enforce vs individuals hosting relays/nodes on the network—how fair a fight is it? I think it comes down to how trivially could an individual be located and identified as running a service, which comes down to how robust the anonymity provided by those services is.

Does this mean running over VPN, Tor, something else? I'm not qualified to make those determinations, as most won't be. But it's time to find out.

Orange🍊Man👤 5mo ago

They are attempting to divide us...

Leo Wandersleb 5mo ago

And that's why I was always against relays doing much stuff especially around keeping stuff secret. Keep relays dumb and replaceable. Let anybody (who pays for the traffic) pull a copy.

Private groups that communicate only via a specific relay are not censorship resistant if the relay pulls the plug because of some lunatics in London.

nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6

fiatjaf 5mo ago

NIP-29 is designed to allow groups to move to other relays. That is the entire point of it. There are no options besides that that aren't horribly inefficient.

Leo Wandersleb 5mo ago

We will see how that goes. Are clients aware of such migrations? Do they by default store all the events to re-publish later?

fiatjaf 5mo ago

I don't know, it's hard to build features if no one is using them, but it's important that the protocol behind it works and such things are possible.

fiatjaf 5mo ago

Isn't requiring payment for queries a very "smart" (i.e. complex) functionality of relays already?

In fact it's so smart that no relays offer it. Some relays do offer restricted queries guarded by AUTH, which may be equivalent, but if you accept that then you're already bought into 90% of all the decommoditized relay viewpoints.

Leo Wandersleb 5mo ago

Paying a relay is the most basic requirement for it to become incentive aligned other than controlling who can use it "for free". My vision is that people will offer relays that charge per use. These relays would have to measure use and as storing an event begs the question, for how long it will be stored, it's obviously not trivial to put a number to each use of a relay but I suspect that the long term most viable relays will be those that offer the lowest price for the highest value and my hope is that it will be a commodity and not just a bunch of premium relays nobody understands how to compare.

fiatjaf 5mo ago

But your vision supports different relays having different ways of discriminating users? Or do all relays should just work by charging readers? Do they also charge for publishing? Can they have different prices, different currencies? Do they charge per public key by having some credits in an account or do they require each connection to pay for its own usage?

Either you have to answer all of these or you have to allow for relays to have different policies.

Also if I want people to read what I write why should I use a relay that will charge them? Maybe I want them to read for free, now what?

And if relays can't discriminate between who can write and what they can write how do they prevent being spammed? By charging higher prices? Then if someone with a lot of money is spamming a lot that means everybody has to pay more?

Leo Wandersleb 5mo ago

I "allow" for other policies but I don't want to support them. I want to support the commoditization of nostr relays and relays that cannot easily be cloned are a concern to me. If people use relay X because people use relay X, there is a problem. We have to get away from this kind of server-centric network effect. "Just use relay X and people will see your posts" would be very bad for nostr.

To your other questions, the exact design of actual pay per use is very under-explored but I would pay "my" relay to serve my notes to my followers and relay operators would probably design some fair-use rules that wouldn't prevent people from reading recent posts but in a future where all are used to automatically paying mSats as they browse the web, they probably wouldn't mind paying the equivalent of $0.002 to load their timeline from such relays.

I don't see how spam would be related. For me, nostr is censorship resistant, so ideally it allows all to broadcast whatever, so the recipient already has to filter and the relay is only charging for the infrastructure, not for sorting out what's spam and what not. Currently, curation is mixed with relays but it should be split to reduce centralization risks.

fiatjaf 5mo ago

I see. I kinda agree with you on a big part, but I still think full commoditization is both impossible and undesirable.

The reply spam stuff is just one example where relays are required to do something.

Imagine Nostr isn't this messy half-assed relay-based thing, but instead it's a perfect p2p system where everybody is always online and easily reachable. There are no relays. I imagine this is close to a system you would like to have, ideally.

In that system spam is free and everybody has to run powerful and imperfect antispam systems that filter a neverending stream of spam.

Now in the current world in which people run Nostr on their phones that becomes even more unfeasible. It gets worse when you realize that relays have to be chosen to be read from, and, worse, relays have limits -- so if you ask for the last 500 events you might get 500 spam events, and even if you filter all of them locally you still only got those, and you've missed all the important events you actually wanted to read.

Does that make sense? Do you see my point?

Leo Wandersleb 5mo ago

First of all, spam wouldn't be free. I would sponsor my follows and those I reply to to get my messages but not random spammers to get messages to me. Who would pay for the spam? You say the spammer might just have more money but he'd not have to pay merely slightly more than legitimate users as most clients would filter it out and it wouldn't be the purpose of paying for 500 events to just eclipse me. Great, now they eclipsed me but I still didn't read their spam. And I paid to get those 500 events? No, I did not as they were not by my follows, so my budget is still fine and I request the next 500 or ideally the next 500 from people I actually care about and only after that, what others pay to get to me.

Leo Wandersleb 5mo ago

That said, I'm not as worried about the filtering relays as I was earlier. I'm just worried about concentration and losing the control at the periphery again. With relays sharing all events I see no way of lock-ins.

fiatjaf 5mo ago

Why wouldn't spam be free?

Assuming the world is a perfect "broadcast-for-all" then the spammer could host their own relay and pay himself to spam, i.e. it would be free.

But of course in practice that would be meaningless since you wouldn't be reading from that relay, no one would, because relays are different, they are not commodities.You agree with me on this, right?

fiatjaf 5mo ago

It's easy to not download spam from people you don't follow in your feed. But how do you deal with people mentioning you, replying to your notes, or replying to notes from people you follow or just happened to click?

Leo Wandersleb 5mo ago

There is much to explore in detail but to answer your questions: If they mention me, client could check if they have followers in that thread or if my follows follow them. This should be cheap to do relay wise as the client could load the follows list with each profile it sees. More involved checks would be replies in the last hour, age of the account etc. but I would like to get these posts not hidden but marked as potential spam at a certain threshold and hidden at another. This way, new accounts still get a chance to get discovered but I'm very conservative when reading notes from people with zero followers I know. Bots will just drown us with engaging content and no relay can protect you from that.

Râu Cao ⚡ 5mo ago

Everyone's already jumping on VPNs for porn. A lot of UK users will just be on VPNs full-time soon. The Internet routes around censorship, always has.