Nostr Web Client

“big, scalable systems” should not be conflated with “centralized platforms” as well.

For example with relays, there are many reasons people might want a scalable and high-performance option.

Aggregators will exist to do search because local search is almost useless for anything that is out-of-network. There will be projects that want to store huge libraries. Certain relay providers will become large as they have expertise that many others don’t.

Scalable and reliable systems if designed right also bring many benefits even if you run at smaller scales, by being more efficient, and taking less time to maintain.

And sometimes you don’t benefit from everything. If you are building a personal notes app, decentralization or all the other Nostr benefits do not matter and come at a significant cost since you’re the only user seeing it and can self-host it.

In that case you want *data portability*

ChipTuner 4mo ago 💬 2

Agreed, and I think a better way of discussing it, is the integrity contract. When I purchase from a hosted service I assume there is generally a contract that my data isn't going to disappear because the service had an oopsie.

I would like to offer the integrity of servicing customers that expect similear guaruntees.

Nostr as a whole, as a network, can and does function from plebs and a 10 y/o laptop and a generic brand SSD. That's great, but not the integrity contract I personally want to sell.

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Discussion

semisol 4mo ago

You can’t collapse anything into just a few dimensions.

For example, paid relays. Free relays can host your content, sure, bit

You can run a relay on a single server and it’ll work, until you reach limits. You can create thousands of small relays and “split” between them but then each one could go down, you have a lot of connection overhead, and so on…

Content portability is another thing too, it doesn’t matter if your content is hosted centralized if you can move it anywhere else without much impact.

Saying Nostr can just work with what is actually inefficient architectures is no different than IP over avian carrier.

ChipTuner 4mo ago

These are just the principals that projects operate on as well imo. When I make a self hosted app "with no warranty" It removes my responsibility away from making a breaking change that corrupts the users db and cost them money.

I'm not suggesting I want to take responsibility, when I'm not getting paid, but with my software, Id like to offer the contract of "i take into consideration that my software will be deployed for the purpose of making someone money, and making changes that harm that, id like to avoid"