What happens to our information when we change our names in the edit tab.. asking for a friend.

I always thought that private groups could just have their own little walled garden that doesn't interact at all with the rest of nostr. A single relay or a small group of relay dedicated to only that group.

Are you thinking that is too big of a lift to start up? Or is this problem just way more complex and technical than I can appreciate?

I know you have been working on this for a long time and are 10000 layers deeper than I'll ever be, but are there tradeoffs that seem too big but maybe aren't as bad as you think?

I can see the feeling of trying to bang a "square peg through a round hole" with this. I think it's a reflection of the general tension between social networking as a "public square," and the privacy-centered values of a lot of bitcoiners.

One thought I had is that this is reflective of the "blockchain without Bitcoin" arguments from ~10 years ago. Everyone thought "hey this Blockchain thing is great, but can we do that without all of this messy Austrian monetary stuff?" So people started trying to put all kinds of things on a "blockchain", property titles, shipping manifests, etc.

As it turns out, most of that stuff was just better on an SQL database. The key was that there was no actual need for decentralization, and the inherent slow-down associated with proof of work (even PoS).

I wonder if that's the case here. Private groups are something that only needs one server and one centralization authentication model.

Not everyone wants to share publicly. This is why most social platforms have private profiles and posts. This also mimics real life too.

Another thing: not that the House of Zuck is the best role model, but hasn't Facebook required actual, real-name identities to use the network since basically the beginning?

Perhaps if "private groups" means not even knowing that the user has an identity on the network, the best model is something closer to a "Fediverse"-style private instance?

I always thought about npub as something like an IP address. You can't hide it if you want to communicate. It's part of a network packet. Sure, you can use a different one, but then all old connections stop working.

You can wrap it into a frame and use some "mac address" for local delivery. Then some relay/client need to understand this protocol.

so it's basically what we already have without nostr. routers are relays. ips are gateways and mac address is your npub

if it makes any sense

It depends *where* you publish your profile.

Why does the little old lady have to publish her profile anywhere publicly for it tow work on a private hosting set-up?

Btw: anyone that types your phone number into WhatsApp can see your face too. They're just not having all that easily available on one open server. We shouldn't neither.

It depends on the tool you use.

With closed community networks, nostr acts only as a way to send data and as a standardized way to encode information.

Closed Community Networks allow you to be as private as possible, and allow that same old lady at your church to virtually join her parish's network and interact closely only with those people, and no one else.

Anyone who isn't in her church will not be able to see anything she shares because as far as they're concerned she doesn't even use nostr and doesn't have a public profile!

💪

I'm on year 4 of working against the same grain. This year I started building the client I wanted to build- and I realized just how difficult this seems to be. I think the most difficult part is how many clients have approached things in generally the same way. We see micro innovations a lot, but rarely macro innovations in app design.

To me, relaytools and flotilla represent macro innovations and fundamental change. They acknowledge how things can work different if we choose to work differently.

My drafts relay is totally private. No one can access it but me, and I have no need for profile metadata there as a result.

If I invite someone to share it with me- it would no longer be a "private" relay. Though if my one shared user doesn't leak my data, my relay is still inherently private between the two of us.

Privacy is not free. It is not assumed. It is something that requires initial effort and sustained efforts.

Where I find the biggest problem to be, is with NIP-07. We are all trapped in a framework of "one npub = one user".

The alternative is to custody keys within parent keys. I think this was avoided at the beginning because it seems extra confusing, and really offers a "centralized point of failure" for "multiple accounts" by the same user.

However what it does is ensure each profile across the network is separate. No one would ever possibly want that... Would they?

I would, actually. The same way I might create throwaway accounts on social media. The same way I have dozens of emails, both throwaway and permanent. The same way I use many social medias and not just one. The way I use a password manager in the real world and don't smash my nsec into a steel plate or an offline signer.

Nostr is trying to do too much with too little. The protocol works well but relays suck. Websockets suck. Blastr sucks.

We either address the elephants in the room or silently stand by while innovation is crippled.

I read this post many times since you created it and I watched the replies.. then I took a nap.. I tried to respond a few times and there are many points I'd like to make.

What I see is a need for segregation amongst the ecosystem. I have always seen this and continue to see it. Users WANT some level of segregation. We NEED communities in some fashion. My solution is to lock relays down and deal with the repercussions, because I don't think the Nostr we have is the Nostr we want.

But I am hopeful. I am here to experiment and find what works. People may not like my first attempt, and I might not like it either, but I think it's worth a shot.

I think we should be importing our profile metadata, PER USER REQUEST, to each new keypairs we spin up. This was we can custody profiles that both do and don't inherit profile metadata from our master key.

I would like to go into more detail but I don't want this comment to become a trainwreck of "what ifs".