Replying to Avatar fiatjaf

this is what happens in the future if the "outbox-is-broken-let's-use-smart-proxy-relays" people win:

- people start relying on "caching services" to fetch their notes. now every client must run their own caching service to remain competitive.

- as the network grows, syncing from all relays becomes more and more prohibitively and databases grow to the infinite.

- less and less caching services exist, but a "local best scenario" would be if we had like 4 different clients/caching-services to read from, but then if one of them banned alex jones that would mean 25% of users lose access to alex jones. there is nothing alex jones can do to change that.

- users could switch from app A to app B that hasn't banned alex jones, but app B had already banned donald trump, so that move is questionable and uncertain. anyway, it's too much friction for a user who doesn't know how to find this caching-service setting buried deep in their settings (because UX specialists said that's the best place to put it).

- eventually it makes no sense to switch anymore and as one of the caching services gains more market share they merge with the others, saving costs and regulatory burden (these caching servers are so big they need to do spam moderation, find and delete pornography and scam bots, comply with government takedowns, defend themselves against lawsuits, it's a huge cost), so it's much better to just have a single caching-service.

- everybody still publishes to their own relay, so nostr becomes exactly like bluesky and the central service can censor anyone. eventually people give up the stupidity of using intermediary relays and just publish directly to that central service.

- that central service now can serve you ads and blue checks, shadowban everybody who doesn't pay, modify your feed with amazing AI techniques to keep you engaged and prevent you from seeing anything they don't want you to see but keep you nourished with memes.

I think once we define what we target, the controversies will be much less. Are we targeting broadband or mobile data? I think a lot of people won't like it when they see big mobile data usage, result of the design choice of no incoming cache. Nostr is primarily for censorship resistance. Censored countries are generally poor. Poor countries won't have enough mobile data.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Censored countries are generally poor? We're talking about the United States of America.

But your message is weird. You think we should target poor people with cheap phones and bad internet that are suffering censorship but you also assume the outbox model uses a lot of data (when in fact you have probably never used an outbox-powered client?) and then your (implied) proposed solution is to centralize everything and reintroduce censorship? What is the point then?

Let me know if I understood you incorrectly or what are your real disagreements with my note above.

badoom TISH

i think availability of proxy tools and services are good for poorer countries and it is not a big deal as a threat to centralization. poorer ones need to hear more about the freedom ideas is what i meant.. there are levels of censorship and USA is still doing a lot better than the rest of the world. a proxy would allow a lot more people to hear the ideas generated on nostr without ruining their data and battery.

i don't propose centralization, how do you come up with that?.

regarding censorship i may do some cleaning of my relays to remove ugly content. however i am not against free speech (of ideas). ugly content is what i think is ugly, like the worst nsfw you can imagine, meaningless spam, ... i am free to specialize in moderation and every op should specialize imo. and thats a good thing.

i think you have too much worries. you made this thing and now worried that it will fail. however i can assure you i am not a bad actor in this. you are looking at wrong places for enemy. i have been providing some relays for months. a lot of relay ops do much more than me (time wise). you should thank us. i am hurt by some of your exchanges.

i get you... proxying is a big deal, and avoiding sending messages repeatedly is a benefit...

logistically, what i see happening is where you have local caches and these let you fetch events efficiently, and when you send requests to them, they do the legwork and catch the data and then anyone else in your area using the cache also can see it without any further traffic and with one fell swoop

it's gonna take time to nut out the details of how to do these things but for sure my research on my local caching suggests so far that you can also cache the media, the media could be compressed further, if need be, where such compression is not damaging to the value of the data (eg, shrinking image sizes)

Sorry, I don't think you're an enemy, I'm very grateful for your services. I was just answering in an aggressive tone, as I often do, but shouldn't.