Replying to Avatar Tim Bouma

I am still coming to term with #nostr having a radically different architecture that requires a radically different thinking mode on how you build apps.

The latest radical insight is that the network becomes the database. Any database record you generate can be a #nostr event that is signed, relayed, but most importantly encrypted by you (NIP44).

This approach breaks the back on commercial platform capture and lock-in.

To date, commercial platforms have always had the play of providing free services to get you into their closed databases with database records about you. Then over time, those records (not controlled by you) lead to, in the words of Cory Doctorow, “enshittification” of everything about the service and the relationship with you. Also, massive breaches are just an event waiting to happen.

With #nostr, the traditional model is flipped on its head. Instead of feeding a commercial service to generate database records about you, you can generate and sign events that can be stored on any relay, or in the network as a whole.

So just like your nostr npub is no longer beholden to a commercial provider, your nostr events (database records) need no longer to be beholden as well.

I am not discounting the existing commercial platforms. I’m just saying there is now a whole other approach. New commercial models will be discovered eventually, but right now the imperative is to experiment with this radically new approach.

Special thanks to nostr:npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft who got me thinking this way.

How do you guarantee that data persists? In a corporate model of social media i.e. YouTube, the revenue generated is enough to operate and maintain huge data centers with employees who work on data compression, database models, etc. Videos with little attention posted 15 years ago are still online because of this fact.

Nostr is operated and maintained by the contributors who provide relays, which store an arbitrary set of data so that users can fetch posts from their followed accounts. Though, where is a post from 15 years ago (nostr isn’t that old, but let’s imagine) stored? I’d see this as a huge flaw in a framework intended for freedom of speech, since a user might not be held accountable for a post that was lost with time. This would not happen with a platform like X. I am in support of nostr, but how are these problems being addressed?

If a solution were established for this issue, that would indirectly solve an issue of content recommendation. Algorithms can’t be established without a basis of the users prior history. If a user owned their historical data, then they would also be in a position of power to choose which algorithm they want to use for content recommendation, since clients on nostr are interoperable and data persists across platforms. This, in my opinion, would immediately put nostr clients ahead of any other media platform.

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Don't know. My inkling is that there will be an enterprise use case where counterparties need to interoperable and have common authoritative data but don't necessarily trust each other. To mitigate this risk they will set up their own relays.