Nostr Web Client

Ok, start building the federation so we can actually discuss two real things and I can actually attack your system instead of saying that someone might attack it.

Anthony Accioly 6mo ago 💬 5

Lol, I didn’t even get a notification for the original reply, so if you hadn’t responded, I wouldn’t have even seen it. I think this whole thing has been discussed to death. Not worth rehashing again. I don’t think Nostr is going to die if Jack and the whole crypto VC funding machine + "grants" ecosystem disappear (well, not completely anyway). I'm not underestimating how much those folks are doing. It wouldn’t be easy, but Nostr folks would find a way.

DHT is great. IPFS has its problems, and I still want to experiment with it anyway. Pubky has some great ideas, and I hope they succeed. Built on mainline or not, its architecture isn’t trivial. Neither is Nostr (although WebSockets + signed JSON events is pretty hackable tech).

I think we need to put things in perspective. Right now, the whole decentralised social media movement (including protocols like AT and ActivityPub, which dwarf Nostr in terms of users) is barely a blip on most people’s radar. More than that, most people don’t see value in anything we’re doing. So, if I can convince anyone to give any decentralised social media tech a fair shot, tegardless of its strengths or shortcomings, I'm happy about it.

We can all have our geeky opinions about what works and what doesn’t, but if you ask me (with the exception of sending folks to Bluesky, where they’ll keep being a product), the priority now is to onboard new users… anywhere, really.

Seriously, there are some folks here on Nostr that I honestly can’t stand (not you by the way). They keep bitching about software I mantain on for free, are extremely toxic towards Nostr devs and are mostly working on grandiose stuff that barely anyone uses. You know what I do about it? I keep building up their stuff to others and even donate money to them whenever I can 🤣. We can all agree to disagree on a lot of things and still help each other build free/decentralised social media.

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Discussion

semisol 6mo ago 💬 1

The VC funding machine existing may be a bigger threat to Nostr than it not existing.

Pubky seems to use an approach of “homeservers” just like Matrix, the Fediverse, I think ATproto as well…

Keeping a copy of NIP-65 for all users only costs $20/mo at most. There are hundreds of free relays right now funded by absolutely no one. I’m storing all of them at nostr.land for free and I’m not noticing an impact on the cost.

Either way, we can always use DHT if it really becomes such a need.

And the claim that IPv4 or IPv6 is centralized is absurd. There are multiple local registries and not just ICANN, and there have been no cases where someone’s IP block was forcefully taken from them.

Nuh 6mo ago

Guys, for the love of anything holy, I know I can host every DNS records in the universe and it won't cost much.

That is not the point, the point is if I am one of only handful of hardcoded servers serving the records of the entire Internet;

1. It will cost a LOT more than disk space lol.

2. Once I am sick of this and close my server, now what???

#2 is the big one, it is why ICANN has bad reputation... the fact that there is only 13 servers makes them vulnerable to regulations.

If people could nimbly agree on other root servers they would have done it, but it is socially impossible, these are hardcoded in billions of devices and impossible to update in a graceful way.

So when someone suggests the same architecture for Nostr they need to own the fact that they are reinventing ICANN but with signed records, still censorable.

The only solution to this is what Bitcoin does to miners and what the DHT does to routers... make a dynamic open permissionless set of servers.

If you try to do that with Nostr relays. You invent a DHT... simple as that.

Nuh 6mo ago

"Nostr Finding a way" is useless in this context, we are comparing this ad hoc ideas to the DHT, where reselience doesn't come at the cost of breaking apps. In the case of the federation or purple patches or whatever... you have to hardcover this shit, and if the things you hardcoded go offline then now everyone needs to COORDINATE on what is the new purple pages relay.

This shit is not socially scalable, imagine if a URL only works of both the servet and I agree on the DNS server... it is retarded.

Nuh 6mo ago

I don't care much about nostr I am discussing a technical aspect... if one compares a hardcoded set of identity relays, and call that equivilant to DHTs, I am going to call them out because that is just retarded... we already have a federation called ICANN and it is way more trust worthy than purple pages or whatever set of relays everyone agrees on.

It doesnt work, it doesn't socially scale and it is just as vulnerable to censorship as ICANN... so no it is not equivilant to DHTs.

Nuh 6mo ago

I suspect that you are actually missing the note I am responding to, which is a part of the beauty of Nostr i guess 😅

Jim Craddock 6mo ago

My story will change the value.

They would have stopped it.

When someone writes 350 pages in a couple weeks on things they shouldn't understand, it gets flagged. Guaranteed.

But it's on ipfs and noted on Nostr.

[Checkmate boys]