Nostr Web Client

From April:

Substack was important during the pandemic because Twitter, Facebook et al. went all-in on censorship, while Substack remained tolerant of dissident speech. But, being centrally controlled, Substack is a half-measure. Yes, you can take the emails with you, but it’s still a social media company trying to keep you ensconced in its ecosystem to the point where you’re loath to leave. Moreover, most readers follow multiple Substacks replete with their payment information, so it’s not a trivial ask to get them to sign up and put credit card info into yet another platform.

The full measure is nostr, which is a protocol rather than a platform. I wrote about it on my site today:

4/27/23: Made a long Twitter thread on Twitter about the problems with Twitter. Ironic I'm linking back to it here, but I don't have anything against Twitter per see, except that it's a dystopian social credit-score hellscape run by the Antichrist himself. Seriously, though I still like Twitter (and Musk himself because he wouldn't be the Antichrist if you didn't like him!), but it's unwise to build your house on a weak foundation. That Twitter can ding me because other people (with whom I don't even interact) decide they don't like my posts, or because someone, who serially spread misinformation for years, unilaterally decided what I posted was "misinformation" makes it unstable. You can be arbitrarily rugged at any time and for no good reason.

To that end, I'm posting more here and also on nostr, which is a protocol, not a platform. The difference is no one controls it the way no one controls SMTP - - there is no one who can buy email itself and prevent you from sending any. Someone can own Gmail or Protonmail, but not email, and similarly someone can own Twitter or Facebook but not nostr. That means no social credit score, no censorship and a marketplace of ideas.

The problem for me is no one follows me there, so I'm posting into the void, but if I had even 50 followers, it would be worth it, and that's my aim for now. It's also IMO the future, and it's a good idea to get in early. I wish I had gotten into Twitter early, and I wish I hadn't waited until 2015 to start a podcast, but it's still early for nostr.

https://chrisliss.substack.com/p/nostr

Russ Miller 2y ago

FWIW internet email worked fine for decades when all that were using it were well-behaved academics. But once commercial interests saw an angle, a lot of layers of protection were added. Domain verification (DKIM and SPF), inbound SPAM filters (that scan messages for unwanted content) and even blacklists (https://kb.smtp.com/article/997-the-3-most-common-email-blacklists).

The internet very quickly went from open protocols to various kinds of editorial choices. Without them the vast majority of I’ll of information is very difficult to use.

The savior here is many people at many points in the chain making editorial decisions as openly as possible, not pretending we function (at scale) without them.

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Discussion

Russ Miller 2y ago

*vast amount of

Chris Liss 2y ago

Spam filters for email are necessary and yet you don’t need gmail to use the protocol nor receive email from someone using gmail.

Russ Miller 2y ago

There are a lot of ways to use the protocol amongst a limited, known, well-behaved group. As soon as you talk about it as an internet-scale service, controls are needed. Options and transparency are what makes it free not some magic of the protocol. People set up servers that get locked out of general delivery all the time.

Chris Liss 2y ago

No shit. But spam filters are one thing, censorship quite another.

In fact, central banking/fiat currency types argue the same thing: if anyone could just spend their money however they liked, it’ll be used for terrorists! So we need to KYC you and know everything you do.

In an open protocol, things like spam filters will be built naturally as a response to spam. The problem with centralized platforms is this normal, necessary filtering gives way to something worse.