Nostr Web Client

This is irrelevant. Anyone can build what they want and what users experience as valuable. Freedom>?everything else?

Hard disagree here. Nostr has a 1 big fat weakness, and that is a piece of software becomming dominant/popular and starting to bend the protocol to its will, as happened with so so many supposedly 'open' systems in past.

Its only after there is a broad functioning ecosystem that this risk starts to get lower because the odds 1 party becomming dominant vs the rest of the ecosystem become too low.

As it stands, this risk is still real, and as it happens, we have a client which shows red flags when it comes to this. A popular client with a marketing budget, taking the undermining shortcuts for a quick UX win. Per NIP-01, the base definition of the protocol, Primal simply is not a Nostr client.

And like i said in my post, that makes my work all the more difficult because i have absolutely 0 responce in a debate with someone if they are well informed enough to lay Primal at my feet. What am i supposed to say? Nostr is vulnerable to a big popular bad actor, and Primal is a big popular bad actor...

i can weezle around the edges, that primal could be worse and is not 100% bad, or even mostly not bad; and that they say they have the best intentions, and that i know guys that know them and they tell me they are nice guys with good intentions. But at the end of the day i will have to say: yes, you are correct, this is a problem. So i will:

This is a problem.

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Discussion

jb55 2mo ago

my biggest issue isn't even that they could sway protocol dev (they don't even do protocol dev). its that if a large number of people join and the app goes down, then people will think nostr is unreliable and then it will have a permanently bad reputation.

Constant 2mo ago

There are various issues, i was just stating the one that impacts me the most, as someone who goes out in public to discuss Nostr.

Garbage nsec 2mo ago

Nostr is way too small to even use the word reputation. Pick any megachurch in the US and more people will attend services at that one single megachurch than are on all of nostr.

Bluesky is a pretty small network and it's 100 times bigger than Nostr.

Nostr is just teeny tiny, all this back and forth you'd think there were real userbase stakes here, but there aren't.

Jeroen ✅ 2mo ago

It already has a bas reputation. Hundreds of thousands have tried nostr. >99% ceased usage. The proof in the pudding would be comparing Primal's retention rates to the whole ecosystem

jb55 2mo ago

if the solution is "just build a centralized app again" then this misses the entire point of nostr and we should just go back to centralized apps.

Jeroen ✅ 2mo ago

I agree, but with open source software anyone can use it how they see fit right, thats why we're here. So that leaves doing better yourself, helping out, forking, finding a solution together, etc

Laeserin 2mo ago

We have actually had that happen, repeatedly. Whether it was them being too slow to moderate malicious spam on their relay, the website going down, the relay going down...

Always resulted in a mass-exodus of people who couldn't figure out how to adjust by moving to other clients and relays.

The users with the most staying power seems to be my "generation", which arrived after the initial building phase and before Primal, so that we tried out different clients and figured out what relays and NIPs are, and stuff. It was a steep learning curve, but we're much more resilient.

It felt like learning how e-mail or SMS or telephones worked, before everyone used WhatsApp. The Primal onboarders are clueless and helpless, like the WhatsApp onboarders. If Primal goes down, they think Nostr is down. If WhatsApp goes down, they think all mobile communication is dead.

Laeserin 2mo ago

It was really palpable. Everything would be hopping, for days or weeks, then suddenly the thread counts would drop like a rock and it'd get eerily silent.

Where is everybody?

Primal's down.

Oh.

Constant 2mo ago

I think there is this assumption that 'good UX' and 'good onboarding' actually means preventing new users from learning anything, for that only implies confusion and friction.

This notion IS true, but only for the idiot masses. And however much we want it to be the case, those will not get onto Nostr anytime soon. There are many many many many maaaaaany millions of non idiots that are more than capable and willing to do the basic learning. Those people are far more likely to get onto Nostr. I like to look at the population numbers of the Roman republic to conclude you don't need that many people to be meaningfull.

Subsequently, once all of those people are on Nostr, and the idiots come, those idiots can ask their nephew for help when things go wrong.

I.e. get the nephews first. "Mass addoption" is putting the cart before the horse.

Laeserin 2mo ago

Yeah, I think we're the Linux of social media.

inpc 2mo ago

Can I just say, as a fully qualified idiot, we can do it!

People always give us idiots a hard time but I pressed all the buttons and here I am.

Laeserin 2mo ago

😂

Constant 2mo ago

I have a hard time believing you are a sub100IQ / left of the bellcurve individual.

To be clear, my words are a bit flippant, but the intentions behind them are not mean spririted. I care for those people, i have no intent of excluding them or that we should not facilitate them. Frankly they are on my mind a lot of the time when considering the supposed wisdom of cryptographic keypair based systems.

david 2mo ago

The primary goal of our upcoming #wotathon is to establish an ecosystem of Service Providers for personalized trust metrics, as described in the article below. As a user, I don’t want to see one Trust Score for Alice on Primal, another one on Amethyst, and another one on each new client I visit. I want to see the same personalized metrics on EVERY client I visit. Which means the clients will not be the ones calculating them (for the most part).

What will Primal do once nostr moves in this direction? My hope, and my expectation, is that Primal will either incorporate personalized trust metrics calculated outside of Primal, or will make their own internal service provider which makes personalized metrics available everywhere, internally but also *outside* Primal. In other words, they’d make their own competitor to other Service Providers. They already keep track of lots of data so building a standalone Primal Personalized Trust Metric Service should be doable — just gotta decide what metrics to calculate.

One of the effects of Service Providers is going to be to take power out of the hands of clients. It is valid to be concerned that Primal is on the road to becoming just another Twitter, but the rise of Personalized Trust Service Providers may be how we prevent this from happening.

nostr:naddr1qqc8xetjwe5kxefdwpex7anfv3jhyuedvehhyttsv4e8xmmwv9kxj7n9vskhgun4wd6z6mt9w3exjcmnqyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcprpmhxue69uhkv6tvw3jhytnwdaehgu3wwa5kuef0qgsw2feday2t6vqh2hzrnwywd9v6g0yayejgx8cf83g7n3ue594pqtcrqsqqqa28dx3qra

Jeroen ✅ 2mo ago

Well I respect that you care about this so much. But I don't see how your rants help. Reach out and help them implement outbox.

More even larger actors will come around and do way worse things, with far more power to outway the ecosystem 'safezone'

Constant 2mo ago

It can be worse than what Primal is doing, there probably will be a worse actor than Primal. Yes. For the record i don't doubt the intentions of the people behind Primal, but that is only worth so much.

I don't see why it would not warrant a rant though

Jeroen ✅ 2mo ago

It's just that I've listened to people rant about their cashing server for 2 years now and it changed little. Also I'm a proponent of competition within a market and the protocol's interoperability makes for a beautifully unique system of competition and cooperation.

Also operation kidst is more important

unknown 2mo ago

Doesn’t mean we should roll over and accept it. Call bad actors out if there are doing things that are damaging. Competition is good. This isn’t just about competition. It’s damaging to the protocol as a whole.