Nostr Web Client

And that's still too much "asking permission", to me. We're working on increasingly obscure and niche OtherStuff implementations and I don't see why I have to give someone who has nothing to do with our project veto-rights over biomedical vector analysis or CAN bus communications or refrigerant logistics, etc.

We're the experts. That's why we're building the implementation. 🤷‍♀️

And it starts lower down. Why do I need to discuss a publishing spec with people who aren't experienced with publishing or internal auditing? If they were experienced in publishing or internal auditing, they would be writing the spec.

What does their approval even mean? Are they checking for typos?

hodlbod 1y ago

Do you want more administrative overhead or less?

If you want someone to "watch" pages that can be done on the NIPs repo (again, wiki software is better, but not essentially different). But this is a massive increase in overhead. The NIPs repo contributors aren't there to debate ideas (although that happens too), just to vet whether a NIP has the requisite number of implementations, and merge corrections. This is a pretty lightweight role, but still quite taxing.

If you want a permissionless wiki, then use the one that currently exists at wikifreedia. No one is stopping you. In fact, fiatjaf drafted https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1214, and to my knowledge I'm the only one so far who has published a NUD there. But this presents the opposite problem of potentially too little curation. I'm all for trying it, because forks are cool, but I'm not convinced it will be easier to navigate or more useful than the NIPs repo.

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Discussion

james r 1y ago

there are quite a few people ignoring the NIPs repo and making standards elsewhere and it's impossible to find them

hodlbod 1y ago

I've noticed that too. This is not hard to solve, if the person writing the NIP wants it to be found. They can do a NUD, or they can submit a PR to the NIPs repo to link to an external NIP, which is also something that exists. But if people don't want to make sure people know about their own standards, there's not much anyone can do.

liminal 🦠 1y ago

You basically announce what you are doing. If others like it, then they will also use, even help refine it. Point me to the exact places in the spec to help me find information i need to know - an address. Or a comment someone said on nostr relating to the situation.

Sure, things could be super mixed up, but you could weight opinions or endorsements to find the best way to find your answers. There are ways to filter out noise, or they will be found because of need.

I wrote two specs on Nostr Knowledge Bases (NKB). How can we navigate nostr's information, on any event. I'm not a web developer, so I have 2 NKBIPs out there (wikifreedia), asking for fast feedback and quick iteration.

If people really like an idea, but if its not actively being worked on, other's can still see and work with it. There may be changes, but wouldn't that be good? The original author can still be in the conversation.

hodlbod 1y ago

Yeah, you basically need an index. That's the github nips repo README. Of course, it's incomplete because people don't submit PRs to it, but it's there. Wikifreedia's #nud tag or something else could also serve as an index. We just have a tragedy of the commons because these things (or some thing thing) aren't being used.

hodlbod 1y ago

TIL about NKBIPs. Are these conceptually the same as NUDs?

liminal 🦠 1y ago

i wrote it up as a draft spec originally on github - just to have it out there. I'm not asking any change to the protocol, but ideas on how events can be organized and retreived. Its been on github since December, but its gotten way more visibility and feedback here.

hodlbod 1y ago

Cool, I missed it on github then. The spec on wikifreedia seems much more generic than NUDs, almost a competing spec to the wiki one. So maybe it's not as applicable as I thought?

liminal 🦠 1y ago

Generic is the point, i wouldn't say it competes however. A wiki has a spec for their articles. This spec is attempting to distil ideas individually so they can be worked with an grouped together. It comes with a 30041 which is very related to wikis 30023, but 30041 are just fragmented notes - and wouldn't be typically be shown by themselves. 30041 basically is an indication that it belongs to something broader - you can decompose a existing blog or paper, or you can just publish a modular article with the explicit concept that the ideas can be separated.

You'd show them as a modular article, or note collection, via 30040 which can be a collection of any event type. I wouldn't expect any client other than what we are making to display the individual fragments.

Laeserin 1y ago

that stands for Nostr Knowledge Base Implementation Possibility because it's a spec describing how to form a knowledge base.

a spec for a specific use case, not a new type of spec

hodlbod 1y ago

Ok, so NUDs are a new idea then? What do you dislike about them? They seem to solve most of your complaints, in that they're:

- Permissionless

- Published in a wiki format

- Forkable and can be voted on

- Nostr-native

liminal 🦠 1y ago

I personally don't have a problem with the specific idea. An NKBIP can perfectly have a NUD tag if someone wants to add it, i just don't think it adds more meaning than NKBIP.

Not an argument against a NUD, just that if things are already going to be so different, a global naming convention wouldn't make sense, and that NKBIP announces the purpose within its name.

Laeserin 1y ago

There's value in posting a spec in a real wiki event.

fiatjaf 1y ago

Standards are necessarily centralized, you can't have each person use their own standard.

Laeserin 1y ago

1) Most standards don't need to be found by most devs because they don't use them. Nobody uses all of the NIPs, either, after all, and that effect is about to go parabolic. I think everyone just needs to sort of give up on spec management.

2) It's not impossible to find them. There is a list in the wiki for events or you can simply use elasticsearch on nos.today. Or just #asknostr. Make a DVM spec discovery tool.

3) You can see the events popping up on relays and just search for the ones that seems stick around for a while and add them to the list yourself. This is dynamic discovery and someone already built it.

https://undocumented.nostrkinds.info/

4) I don't need an event to announce the event that I'm publishing on relays and writing about in the wiki and in articles and discussing in communities. That's the same event being announced like 50 times and would encourage people to reserve NUD numbers that they don't end up using, or having NUD numbers assigned to unpopular events, like we have with the NIPS. This creates an ID "honeypot".

5) We don't need the "NUD". We have our own prefix. It's obvious that it is a Nostr spec, if it deals with Nostr and is a spec.

6) Implementations should lead. Marketing is proof of work. The best implementation will get the most attention and their spec will float to the top of the wiki or dominate the timeline for the people interested in that topic, and become the de facto standard.

7) We publish our specs on the wiki or other long-form articles, give the event a searcheable identifier, and then we implement it and talk about it all on Nostr. That gives everyone enough opportunity to find it, who is genuinely interested.

https://wikifreedia.xyz/nip-event-register/npub1m4ny6hjqzepn4rxknuq94c2gpqzr29ufkkw7ttcxyak7v43n6vvsajc2jl

hodlbod 1y ago

> We don't need the "NUD". We have our own prefix.

Apparently, but this is the first time I've heard about NKBIPs. The least you could have done is mention it on the github repository.

We're directionally aligned here, I just really don't understand the hostility toward the existing forum for talking about nostr.

Laeserin 1y ago

Why should we go back there?

We are trying to move all of our interactions to Nostr, not away from it. We are putting our code and our documentation where our ♥️ is.

hodlbod 1y ago

If you decide you want to change a venue in real life, you don't just show up at the new one and expect everyone to be there.

Laeserin 1y ago

Y'all built the venue. I assumed that you would all be arriving, eventually.

hodlbod 1y ago

Would you and/or nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qg3waehxw309ahx7um5wgh8w6twv5hszxmhwden5te0wfjkccte9ehx7um5wfcxcetzwvhxxmmd9uq35amnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3ww35x2umpd4jkxct59e5k7tcprdmhxue69uhhg6r9vehhyetnwshxummnw3erztnrdakj7qguwaehxw309a6xsetrd96xzer9dshxummnw3erztnrdakj7qgkwaehxw309a3x2an09ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5hszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7qpqm3xdppkd0njmrqe2ma8a6ys39zvgp5k8u22mev8xsnqp4nh80srqtqc5tv like to come on the TGFN podcast to talk about it?

liminal 🦠 1y ago

This topic, i don't know if I'd be too comfortable talking about 😅

hodlbod 1y ago

Yeah, it's ehspicy. I was looking at your profile to find out more about you, but didn't really find anything. Do you have a project you work on I could read about?

liminal 🦠 1y ago

nostr:nprofile1qqsd6ejdteqpvse63ntf7qz6u9yqspp4z7ymt8094urzwm0x2ceaxxgprdmhxue69uhhg6r9vehhyetnwshxummnw3erztnrdakj7qguwaehxw309a6xsetrd96xzer9dshxummnw3erztnrdakj7qg3waehxw309ahx7um5wgh8w6twv5hshhq5j3 kickstarted things with this article:

https://highlighter.com/laeserin/1719204947236

Which was picked up by nostr:nprofile1qqsx8zd7vjg70d5na8ek3m8g3lx3ghc8cp5d9sdm4epy0wd4aape6vspz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqzyrhwden5te0dehhxarj9emkjmn9qyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvycz39a and he added some cool extrapolations 😁

https://fountain.fm/episode/5D7Ds8tpivptu5OPy0lQ

https://fountain.fm/episode/RtokKi1qHtjPNHGY7yuK

And an article on Zettelkasten, a personal knowledge management system that we're brainstorming how to scale up for collaborative uses.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1

Laeserin 1y ago

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/nuds/71.md

I've never heard of NUDs. NIP-71 is actually video data, not NUDs. 🤷‍♀️

Laeserin 1y ago

And I'm on Nostr, not GitHub. Talk about stuff here.

This is a protocol designed for communicating and the feed is full of software developers.

Laeserin 1y ago

I'll publish a NUD, but I doubt anyone will look at it.

hodlbod 1y ago

YIL (yesterday I learned) about NKBIPs. Are these the same as NUDs? Apparently they've been around since February, but I had never heard of them.

liminal 🦠 1y ago

At that point, I'd also argue that naming should be descriptive. If you're not asking for change to the protocol, I don't see a need to stick to a convention.

Laeserin 1y ago

Only event kinds need some particular format. Specs are just documentation. Search for "kind 019883" and find the documentation that contains it.

hodlbod 1y ago

This is part of the point of NUDs. They don't need to be on github, and they don't need numbers. The collision on number is part of the reason NUDs were proposed. Of course, they were proposed on github, because that's where people have historically requested feedback for additions to the protocol. If you don't want to participate in that conversation you don't have to, but don't complain that people aren't doing exactly what you're asking for if you're choosing not to read about it.

Laeserin 1y ago

I'm not asking them to do anything. That's my point. They're the ones upset that major spec writers are starting to ignore the repo and document on the wiki, instead.

We like the wiki better. 🤷‍♀️

I have no idea why anyone finds this hard to believe.

Nostr > GitHub

Tim Bouma 1y ago

I’m confused. Where do I look for the definitive NIPs?

Laeserin 1y ago

There is no such thing as a definitive NIP.

liminal 🦠 1y ago

As nostr becomes fragmented and lineages diverge, the definitive NIP repository will be the developer circle you are a part of. There is nothing wrong with that. Be interoperable with your friends or just use your own relays.

liminal 🦠 1y ago

This is all by design in a decentralized, permissionless infrastructure. The github nips repo works for a circle of developers, of which many take influence, and would like to contribute but doing so on a permissioned platform is getting annoying.

There is nothing wrong using it as the defacto repository or a model for "The Nostr" local to everyone that wants to take influence. The problem is that nostr is too good and using any other system is starting to get painful (damn you developers! ✊).

Just let the ideas compete with other specs. Make a whitelist relay where you and others curate and incubate the ideas. Others could fork on their own relays, but no one needs to listen - unless it actually makes sense for the client.

Ultimately, its a public announcement of "i'm using this spec" and you don't need to leave nostr to be part of the "official" conversation.

hodlbod 1y ago

I basically agree, but I don't think people are spending the necessary time on making sure consensus works. Fragmentation is ok, but the target is maximum interoperability, not maximum fragmentation. Everyone making up their own specs is an unbalanced approach, just as running everything through one permissioned source is unbalanced. Of the two, I personally prefer the github model, because it's proven to work, while the bizarre bazar is untested. But I'm willing to participate in experimentation with a middle ground.

Tim Bouma 1y ago

GitHub is a reasonable single point or anarchy.

Laeserin 1y ago

The events produced are their own interoperability check.

hodlbod 1y ago

You could say the same of all software. Just because slack doesn't talk to discord doesn't make them members of the same protocol. Interoperability doesn't happen by accident.

hodlbod 1y ago

Maybe you're arguing that standards can be inferred by published events. Sort of. I think that was always the goal for NIPs. But that's like saying documentation isn't necessary, just go read the source code.

Laeserin 1y ago

Static documentation isn't necessary, it's true, but it's useful marketing material or a basis for discussion.

Nostr has a built-in incentive for people to use other people's events, so that they can capture part of the same audience.

An open protocol is a novel idea whose time has come. We're just embracing it.

Tim Bouma 1y ago

Working code is the ultimate standard in the end.

Laeserin 1y ago

The target is not maximum interoperability. It's maximum usefulness for the end user. Interoperability is one important factor in this, but not the only one.

Tim Bouma 1y ago

Okey doke. If we want this to go global, we’re going to need some type of governance. We had a similar discussion at #SEC02 when someone started to design a protocol that was ‘better than #nostr’ but not compatible.

Tim Bouma 1y ago

Maybe NIP-01 ……..