Nostr Web Client

I am 100% sure if I did Fiatjaf will fight it because it is complex, like he did with Nip26

I get your point, but just ignoring all the technical limitations (for example relays don't understand what are orphaned nodes to GC it), and even ignoring the overhead of linear size of signatures.

Ignoring all that, whatever I build using nostr events will be opaque and useless to Nostr unless they use my very code, so the excitement won't translate, rather the values of the community will reject the complexity and fight it.

The remaining upside of Nostr is basically free relays with no friction to sign in (albeit unreliable storage), but the moment someone else offer better cloud storage, you are left only with the tech debt of the choices Nostr did.

Case in point, Nosdav has ZERO reasons to support Nostr event shape, or even secp since it doesn't really run in Nostr infra, you are just trying to get Nostr devs interested this way, but I am not sure it is a bet that will pay off.

SimpleX did its thing, and still got biggest Nostr supporters attention.

Maybe you are right, and maybe there is not much money or financial gain in this space anyways, so might as well do what you want to use yourself, and don't worry if it will get devs attention.

Nuh 2y ago

I am very well aware of the appeal, but:

1- I don't have to make Nostr architecture my base just to use free pub/sub. I can just take advantage of it when I need, especially that friction and costs are zero.

2- if all I need is 1-1 relay, then there is also the competition from SimleX, which is definitely more private, so Nostr now is best only for many to many broadcasting.

3- there is only so much I can do with ephemeral data, and I want persistent and more importantly e2ee, nostr is not made for that, and that can't be done without increasing Nostr complexity, ok but whatever data store will hold my data persistently, it can also double as ephemeral open pub sub if ever needed. Especially with pkarr when I KNOW where my contacts store their data and can send them messages there, or fetch their latest public notes.

Nostr relays may very well end up being the RSS of this ecosystem, the aggregators and feed generators that people subscribe to to get a precompiled view, which I feel Fiatjaf is trying to cement as the way to use Nostr and I full agree with that, but it can't be the infrastructure for what I want, not without ruinng its simplicity, case in point, you could have built NosDav over relays, but it would be a bad idea.

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Discussion

Melvin Carvalho 2y ago

When we built solid, it was a way to extend the existing web with more features. Basically the web is not a finished project and Tim Berners-Lee always had in mind more things, more decentralization. It's just hard to build and takes time, especially at scale. Also very people supported Tim. For a long time it was just Tim, me and Eric doing daily calls to keep the original Web project going.

We added pub/sub to http via an http header. So every resource could have its own pub/sub. In that way something like nostr was destined to become part of the web. It still can be. We always wanted signatures but didnt find a good way. Some things were too general, some things were too specific, and people argued over that for decades. Fiatjaf just came along and made something that worked.

Nosdav is putting that back together and bringing nostr into the web stack. Solid is going to a WG and in 2-3 years will be a W3C REC, I hope it will all converge.

E2EE is something different. Simplex is more like a relay model but dont forget it's a company with VCs such as villageglobal and that provides a single point of failure. The protocol will catch on if it's simple, right now it's a company doing some good open source work. Dont forget that e2ee might get banned in the UK and signal may leave.

If your only use case is e2ee you might want to build something new, but there's a lot of solutions in that space, and the best technical answer doesnt always win.

You could build some e2ee solution and let nostr users log in. Let's face it, nostr is right now the only social solution where the users own the network, isnt it?

Nuh 2y ago

No it isn't, any user blocked from the most 10-20 popular relays is done for. Because Nostr refuse to use "complex" solution like Pkarr, and just declare that discovery is not an issue.

I don't know why do I need Nostr if I can do all the discovery with Pkarr, why does it matter that there are more people using Nostr? If Nostr clients refuse to do what I care about? Interoperability is such a red herring.

You will see eventually that Nostr won't help you get a single more dev interested in what they weren't already interest in.

You just joined Nostr and called that a win, it is a win for what Nostr aims to do, but not for the goals of Solid for sure, you still need to do the same work and face the same apathy.

Nuh 2y ago

Remember, Pkarr already can abstract over Nostr keys, and if you go to my Twitter bio you will see that I have an nprofile there.

Building a stable storage with e2ee and replicaton efficiency, is what I care about, it can't be cleanly done over Nostr and Nostr doesn't want to support that anyways.

So why not, especially when stable storage -in my mind- is the only way to deal with key management, so that your identity is not a single private key you paste everywhere or held by a server, so basically npub doesn't even offer me stable identities either, especially not one I can use with Bittorrent/Pkarr.

I feel like you are over estimating the network effect and interop utility here.