Subnostr

I’m just now reading some of your other posts, eg where you say:

“My entire argument is that I'd like a clearer description of the thing that was implemented, so that I know if my own implementation counts as the same thing or a new thing.”

This is a reasonable and understandable thing to want. But it’s worth asking: who decides — especially if there’s a controversy? Who’s in charge? Fiatjaf, I suppose. But is that how we want it to be? Someone who makes decisions that we are all obliged to follow?

So this is where I’d point out some of the tradeoffs between a centralized vs a decentralized set of communication tools. Decentralized tools must necessarily be highly tolerant of ambiguity. We see this in human language. They must be flexible bc there’s no one in charge to enforce specs, definitions, etc on everyone else in case of controversy.

Why can a misplaced comma “break” an entire app? Bc centralized languages are not designed to tolerate deviation from The Rules. Human language, on the other hand, is designed to be robust: conversation doesn’t come to a screeching halt just bc conversants disagree on some minor (or even major) detail regarding definitions, grammatical rules, etc.

We need to learn how to make digital tools truly decentralized: flexible, robust, and tolerant of ambiguity, just like the spoken word. Nostr is the closest I’ve seen but we’re still VERY far from it.

hodlbod 2y ago

I think this is exactly what is interesting about nostr. Hashes and signatures buy you a LOT. In theory, all you have to do is validate them, and you know you're dealing with good data. In practice though, there's an entire meta layer on top of the data itself defining the schema. Even if this schema is well-defined, every possible malformation has to be interpreted. In many cases malformed events can just be ignored, but there has to be some ability to tolerate a slightly different version of events. In a negative light, this leads to undefined or broken behavior, but in another sense it leads to emergent behavior — i.e. the ability to use existing structures in new ways.

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