why relays?
why not moderated communities? or a better version of that NIP?
Discussion
Federated Nostr hubs?
Sir, We're not a single topic forums. We're the entire show.
I'm happy with starting outbas the entire show and letting users navigate to their communities. Reddit has "the entire show" with their popular subreddit. You can have a freeforall relay thats fine don't let this conversation discourage that. But nostr does not need to be "just" the entire show. The capabilities already exist but are an after thought.
Happy with starting *out as* 🙃
consider the cases in levels of complexity:
0) minimal base case for nostr is 1 person sending their notes to 1 relay.
1) 20 people white listed to a relay. Their feed it literally one relay and the people connected to it.
2) 2 communities with similar values sharing posts from relays
3) (nostr how everyone uses it) individuals with tens of relays to broadcast to and anyone at the intersections see posts.
The subreddit nip, whatever it is operates at level 3. That's fine but i think we should focus on 1 and 2.
Private groups can work with level 1 without cryptography. Anything more open is a gradient from level 2 to 3.
If you just select a relay to post to for a given condition, thats not even a nip - the functionality already comes baked in with how nostr works right now. Clients just make relay selection an afterthought.
Cc nostr:nprofile1qqsr9cvzwc652r4m83d86ykplrnm9dg5gwdvzzn8ameanlvut35wy3gprpmhxue69uhhwetvvdhk6efwdehhxarj9emkjmn9qyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvqyg8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2yhtlun & nostr:nprofile1qqsw3znfr6vdnxrujezjrhlkqqjlvpcqx79ys7gcph9mkjjsy7zsgygpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsz8thwden5te0dehhxarj9ekh2arfdeuhwctvd3jhgtnrdakj7qgkwaehxw309ajkgetw9ehx7um5wghxcctwvshspg7dju please explain why you left the fediverse.
But why focus on 1 or 2? What benefits does it have?
The entire point of relays is that they are replaceable: unless you can self host a relay (hard) you can’t really trust any.
We need to focus more on making it accessible to the average user to create a community without being beholden to a relay host that can terminate their relay and in a more affordable way than paying a lot for a relay
i think that relays using other relays as layer 2 event stores is the way to go for this, and it meshes well with users with subscriptions and peers on a post-paid system if they pull more than they send
making the assumption that relays are fungible is just not a valid assumption in the current state of the network, also, nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj76rfwd6zumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qyvhwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnwdaehw6r9wfjjucm0d5hsz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjme0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcqypftfgrkhjammsap4marwdvpdnm5nya3hrdjq2cpezputzl8ltvt6lmlag9 : there is no NIP for data replication, and that would break one of the most important NON-specifications of the protocol
> relays are replacable
which is one of the reasons that they're not getting any attention or funding even though they are the backbone of nostr. Relays allow to be blacklist based, whitelist based or any mix of that. This is only arguing for relays that bias themselves to being more white listed, allowing them to decide on their own rules of engagement. Nothing is being taken away.
Nostr acts as diffusion of information. I am all for that and am here because of that feature. Broadcast to any reachable relay to get your information out. Outbox is great, but i argue that this is the maximal situation and we can encourage more small world infrastructure (small world networks being lots of connections in hubs i,e the damus relay, while sparser connectivity in non hubs like private group relays).
NIP01 has been touted more or less as being the only requirement for "nostr", and this is just sticking to that ethos.
we can reel things back, have pockets of high activity in wide open relays where everything goes and pockets of activity with focused discussion. all this is towards advocating for more of a loose sense of community and conversational security. As it stands, there is no expectation of that. Reports exist but there is no incentive for acting on it. Closed off communities actually encourage both users and relay operators to keep the space clean.
Something like this will actually make search and organization easier - because your searching and retreiving from a smaller, topic specifc set of relays from the set you have selected (like a car enthusiast set of relays)
If everything is wide open, I understand how and why there is pushback on expecting a curated feed. What i'm advocating is an ability to fine tune the knobs of openness from the relay side and the ability to specifically send your data somewhere on the user side.
Let the data flow and diffuse out to all areas through free-for-all no moderation relays, but also let pockets of organization and structure come from the areas that have walls up (white lists). We all get in through global somehow, and your follows list is just a smaller global, same thing with these segregated communities - the global is the 200 or so people connected to 5 relays that share similar values and topics, and your follow is an even narrower version of that community - but now global is actually palatable.
then the other point - if you think of only nostr as the prebiotic soup and everything is wide open I get why there is pushback for on NIPs on nostr of course you can't get concensus with nips on 200 relays where anyone can comment or fork. I get "just use mastadon or twitter if you want moderation". It doesn't need to be that way 100% of the time though.
you can have your nostrnipsrepo.com client that only points to one relay that you and a few others have write access to. Let that be the defacto place for the rules for anyone wanting to look at the spec. Those messages, while not writable to that relay are still broadcastable to other relays which can be commented on and edited in any way possible - just not by those who care about only the "official" specs. A dev can also watch for changes on the relay and broadcast to their own relay, where conversations specific to that dev's project and nips implementations can take place.
Rant over, thanks for listening.
I agree relays don't have to be replaceable for all use cases -- but for the default "public square" model in which you just want your messages to reach people that follow you they should be replaceable.
3 is wrong and it's not how everybody uses it. The outbox model (whatever it is exactly) is the correct way, you don't need a list of relays and see posts at intersections.