Nostr Web Client

Blossom is soo stupid.... It externalizes the "freedom" to users while concentrating the risk on operators. As operator of a blossom server you are responsible for everything uploaded to your server - CSAM, copyrighted content, revenge porn, terrorist material, and any other illegal content in your jurisdiction. You are forced to actively monitor what you're hosting otherwise you can easily get in trouble - facing criminal investigations, lawsuits, server seizures, and financial ruin. One bad upload can destroy your life.

It's basically like running a Tor hidden service on the clearnet - all the liability of hosting anonymous content, none of the protection.

Relays have a very similar problem, but at least the content is somewhat obfuscated through WebSocket - you need a Nostr client to easily browse what's there. With Blossom, you just need a URL and everyone on the planet with a browser can open it, including law enforcement. It's trivially easy for authorities to find illegal content on your server. You're basically painting a target on yourself.

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Discussion

tree 木 2d ago

I think Blossom is another example of how Nostr people really cannot think about scale. This can work in a small community with a small number of uploads, but when you scale this up to millions of users, you need massive moderation teams to protect yourself. It's a very naive way to design infrastructure in the current world of regulations and censorship.

Sebastix 2d ago

So we need millions of small blossom servers.

You are obsessed with scale. Why?

SPA (Super Phat Arrow) 2d ago

I would like these notes from tree about how shit Nostr is more if he suggested something better.

tree 木 2d ago

There are two options:

1) either accept centralization and that it will not be censorship-resistant and have a few large centralized providers

or 2) go the P2P route (IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave, etc.) and try to be fully censorship-resistant

Nostr seems to not want to go either route, pretending to be "censorship-resistant" but not really

Sebastix 2d ago

So a third distributed route is not possible from your perspective?

il_lost_ 2d ago

blossom is a redundant cdn

Constant 2d ago

But hey, the fact the reference in your event is not necessarily specific to a server and can be rehosted after the fact and won't die by default, is 'sooo stupid', apparently. 🤷‍♂️

tree 木 2d ago

We've been saying "everyone will run their own node/server" for 30 years. It never happens.

Sebastix 2d ago

30 years!? How old are you?

But I agree with you on this one, that will not happen (soon).

𝐒𝐧@𝐱 2d ago

Any suggestions?

brito 2d ago

That is accurate, yet there are protections to those merely acting as platform providers.

This doesn't mean that "everything goes", it just means that you need to include some level of measures for people to report dangerous media and nowadays include some kind of AI to spot unwanted types of media on the server.

These aren't unreasonable measures and mostly apply when your server becomes large enough to matter.

il_lost_ 2d ago

you can search if the blobs are in any events 1984 kind, buds09