I'm not sure I should write down these thoughts right now while I'm not sure about them, but if you are reading this apparently I did.

I think nostr may already be doomed for two reasons. And as a result of that, if I conclude as such, it would make sense to start working on a successor protocol. I've been taking some notes about what we should change if we started over, but that's the extent of it, I'm not working on a successor protocol. I'm only working on nostr. So don't misinterpret this note, which just represents some thoughts I've been having.

Reason one is the misaligned incentives of note copying. The incentives are to copy your notes to every relay you can, blast them out everywhere, to get more reach. That incentive doesn't go away until and unless all the clients do the outbox model. But they don't have an incentive to change, and there are people who don't give a fuck about fixing this and argue against fixing it and argue for note copying, and there is no way in a free society to make them care. So we can never fix this, and nostr will always be centralized in practice and never what it could have been. That means nostr is doomed and unfixable and we should make sure to start differently next time so this doesn't happen again.

Reason two is that the seed culture of nostr was far too monolithic: bitcoiners. What a culture develops into probably depends on how diverse its seed was. It's quite hard to get people onto nostr unless they are at least very bitcoin tolerant. Most people (yes, I think most) are put off by so much bitcoin promotion and related posts. Certainly people can follow anybody they want, and make their own independent cultures, perhaps even on a disjoint set of relays. But this isn't likely to happen due to the law of large numbers - there are far more ways for them to encounter and interact with the nest of bitcoiners then to not encounter and interact with them.

These are thoughts I'm entirely unsure about. Maybe I'm wrong in both cases. These are my worries.

if there was a nostr v2 that required outbox in nip01 it would be strictly worse.

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Ok, I'll bite, why?

because outbox makes sense for some use cases (social networking) but not all

I think of outbox as "putting stuff where it's supposed to go" which is a little tautological, but basically requires defining where any given note is supposed to go. Not defining a "correct" home for a note basically guarantees failure to find it when it's needed. Outbox as currently defined doesn't cover all cases, just (public) social media.

I see it the same way. Having SOME defined way of determining which relays to use, rather than having NO defined way and blasting. That's all. It doesn't have to be the current NIP-65 advice. But it has to be something. Or else we end up with a network that uses 1000x more resources than it needs to.

But I guess I should expect bitcoiners to not care about using 1000x more resources than you need to. 🥺

BOIL THE OCEANS

also for relatively strong protection of privacy for direct messages

and for relay developers to control what the clients are making requests for, and there's some serious privacy implications about sending out quite revealing requests to all and sundry

actually, you know what, the reason why i think you are not entirely warm to it is because of the problem of propagation of messages that are intended to be completely public, ie, kind 1 TextNotes

and you'd probably be right to a certain extent, indeed, i could make an argument that these should be dumped in a content addressing storage system like Blossom or IPFS and become instantly available everywhere

yes, i'll agree with this... if the data is MEANT to be public, then it should be. kind 0, kind 1, definitely blaster model works better

requesting it, on the other hand, i think the out-bound should for "public messages" should be indiscriminate but - think about it, if the broadcast of public messages was already broadcast then you wouldn't need to look for them, either... your local relay would know how to find them, the one you pay

i've been working on a project that involves building a relay with a massive public "blockchain" based database, and now we are looking to actually do this with Arweave AO, which if you are not aware of it - someone started working on an arweave based relay about 6 months back, but abandoned it, i guess they got a grant, but arweave implements a content addressable, immutable append only storage system also

personally i'm much preferring the idea of Blossom, which simplifies and takes the "consensus" part out because why need consensus anyway, it's a broadcast, the data is public, nobody who published it cares, they want it to be public

this just isn't the case for DMs, and i've written extensively about the problem of privacy and metadata leaking, while we still can't have a monetised onion routing system where we can privately set up rendezvous points for our private messages without the problem of spam or traffic analysis, i'd rather trust a nostr relay operator who i constantly read and follow please

I agree with will