Nostr Web Client

Users sign up for email hosting. They generally know if they are using gmail or fastmail or proton mail. And they generally pay for it. In a healthy nostr ecosystem it would be the same. Users would know which relay service(s) they signed up for. So the question then is: how much do they know about other relays?

If someone says "come join my chatroom on relay X" then they will know about relay X. It wasn't so hard.

If their client says "this nasty message came from relay Y, would you like to block relay Y?" then they can decide. It wasn't so hard.

Of course few people are going to study all the relays and make judgements about them all outside of specific reasons to.

I'm of the opinion that for outbox model, and for some applications on top of it, users don't need to be concerned about which relays are involved. I like hiding that detail. The relays can just magically work. But when you care about censorship or moderation or bad behavior, generally at that point you'll want to find out if you should cut off an account or perhaps an entire relay. The context (kind-1/1111? relay chat? global?) matters a lot.

elsat 5mo ago

Thanks, this is helpful.

To be clear in the email example protonmail, gmail are “apps” in the eyes of the email customers.

Relay would be something like set up your POP3, or SMTP servers. These technicalities are what gmail handles on your behalf, so gmail is running the outbox equivalent for its customers.

I love the idea upon outbox things can just be found and just work (has any dev measured this statement yet?). Agree directionally this is correct.

Individual censorship decisions for an entire relay is a good point for having to think about a relay - maybe this a future solution to a future problem? Is it a today problem?

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Discussion

fiatjaf 5mo ago

Everybody knows Gmail isn't just an "app" otherwise they wouldn't presume to be able to talk to people that have non-Gmail addresses from their Gmail app.

People are only as dumb as the product UX insists that they be.

elsat 5mo ago

A better example would be discord where you part of starcraft server, banned from blueskye server, part of foss App XYZ server etc

the axiom 5mo ago

isnt discord just an app

elsat 5mo ago

Yes.

Probably a confused point from me.

The whole design premise is that discord is centered on server (analgous to relay lists today on mostr apps nostr) selection.

Yahoo mail is an app that sends and receives on the email protocol, where yahoo users dont have to think about the existence of their or their counterparties email servers. This is analogous to the outbox it just works model.