Nostr Web Client

nostr has no global source of truth, and that is a good thing

Out of interest, I follow the progress of a lot of other projects similar to nostr, and a couple links surfaced today:

BlueSky has a big "firehose" connection that streams all updates (new posts, reactions, etc) to subscribers. Unsurprisingly, this is difficult to process except on beefy servers with lots of bandwidth. So, one proposed solution is to strip out all that pesky cryptography (signatures, merkle tree data, etc): https://jazco.dev/2024/09/24/jetstream/

And over on Farcaster, keeping their hubs in sync is too difficult, so they want to make all posts globally sequenced, like a blockchain. The details are still being worked out, but I think it's safe to assume there will be a privileged global sequencer who decides on this ordering (and possibly which posts are included at all): https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol/discussions/193

In my opinion, both of these issues are symptoms of an underlying errant philosophy. These projects both want there to be a global source of truth: A single place you can go to guarantee you're seeing all the posts on a thread, from a particular user, etc. On BlueSky that is https://bluesky.app and on Farcaster that is https://warpcast.com .

Advocates of each of these projects of course would dispute this, pointing out that you could always self-host, or somehow avoid depending on their semi-official infrastructure, but the truth is that if you're not on bluesky.app or warpcast.com, you don't exist, and nobody cares that you don't exist.

nostr has eschewed the concept of global source of truth. You can't necessarily be sure you are seeing everything. Conversations may sometimes get fragmented, posts may disappear, and there may be the occasional bout of confusion and chaos. There is no official or semi-official nostr website, app, or relay, and this is a good thing. It means we are actually building a decentralised protocol, not just acting out decentralisation theatre, or pretending we'll get there eventually and that the ends justify the means.

Back when computers were primitive and professional data-centres didn't exist, it was impossible to build mega-apps like Twitter. Protocols had to be decentralised by default -- there was simply no other way. We can learn a lot by looking back to protocols of yesteryear, like Usenet and IRC, and still-popular protocols like email and HTTP. None of these assume global sources of truth, and they are stronger and better for it, as is nostr.

Viktor Vsk 1y ago 💬 2

> Advocates of each of these projects of course would dispute this, pointing out that you could always self-host, or somehow avoid depending on their semi-official infrastructure, but the truth is that if you're not on bluesky.app or warpcast.com, you don't exist, and nobody cares that you don't exist.

Aren’t nostr adepts of mythical outbox who consider anything server side to be an evil centralization from “them” saying the same things? “No one guarantees relays keep your posts but you can always selfhost and no one will care about you and this is a good thing because Nostr is a pure signal and we don’t need stupid normies here!”

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Discussion

fiatjaf 1y ago 💬 1

It's the exact opposite. You can host your own relay, or use your neighbor's, and (outbox) Nostr clients will still care about you.

https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/#/outbox

Viktor Vsk 1y ago

This website is censoring my phone :(

Silberengel 1y ago 💬 1

The mistake is in thinking everyone _should_ care about everything and therefore everyone _must_ see everything. Outbox/Inbox ensures that you can see and interact with what is important to you, and ignore the rest.

Smaller relays gives people the ability to have access to a wide range of npubs, but focus on their own cluster and store their own data, by creating a system of hops.

I can move events from the Citrine relay on my phone to fiatjaf's personal relay, just by including an @ to his npub, in the note. It's like a mailing address. That's why we refer to the system as "mailboxes".

I don't need to know what else is on his relay. I would just need to see his response, sent to my address.

Viktor Vsk 1y ago 💬 2

So you expect everyone runs their own relay, just like everyone runs email servers today right?

Remember there is no centralization around gmail today — you can always selfhost since smtp is an open protocol. And if someone wont receive your emails well thats not a problem right?

Silberengel 1y ago 💬 1

Everyone doesn't need to run a relay, but everyone could. Running a relay is already incredibly easy to do, and costs nothing, and that'll just get better.

It's not decentralized, if you need to traverse "approved" hubs to get from point A to point B. That's not only a protocol question, that's an implementation question.

We are emphasizing a complex, sprawling network of privately-run nodes, preferably communicating offline or over Tor, to avoid the centralized fate of email.

Every relay operator is free to let me use his relay or not. This is a nonviolent protocol. We do not need consensus in event content or originators. We just need lots and lots of different paths, and to ensure that anyone can build their own path.

Viktor Vsk 1y ago 💬 1

Running relay is cheap and will only become cheaper and corporations are straight stupid paying millions of dollars monthly for infrastructure?

Or rather this “cheap outbox relay approach” ignores social media aspects and focuses on “private groups” scenarios which is more like my personal webpage no one knows about rather twitter alternative?

Silberengel 1y ago 💬 1

It addresses both scenarios because you can write directly to the big ones.

You can explicitly choose the relay you want to write to, in some particular instance, while your outboxes tell others where a copy of your notes can _usually_ be found.

So, I am writing to a big relay, right now, but a copy is stored in my personal relay.

Viktor Vsk 1y ago 💬 1

The only reason why you can write to big ones right now is because no one uses nostr right now. There is no even theoretical incentive for public relays to operate if nostr really becomes something

And no one wants to address this issue. Instead people tend to over engineer 64K relays that are extremely efficient and can serve 256 out of a coffee machine

Silberengel 1y ago

There is no direct incentive, for public relays, that's true. Incentives don't need to be direct. We run one for documents because we have developed a publishing/reader app. Facilitating the usage of the app is the incentive.

And we will have very large private relays, because of micropayments.

Silberengel 1y ago 💬 1

I also think you are underestimating the importance of the timing of introduction. When e-mail began to be popularized, in the mid-1980s, hardly anyone had a computer. So the few of us using it had it to ourselves and it was common to host an e-mail server because only computer geeks were on it (my dad is a network engineer).

Then it got really busy in the 2000s, but running your own server was a big technical hurdle, to most people, so they were happy to outsource the work to Google and etc. and that allowed for network consolidation, by creating email bottlenecks, where they would filter spam and etc.

Now, anyone can create their own, personal intelligent spam filter and run a relay on their smartphone or laptop, just by downloading an app. That's a game-changer.

Viktor Vsk 1y ago 💬 1

I still believe if everyone who is able to create their own personal intelligent spam filter does it (I stopped for example because don’t see any value in it right now) — all those people will be able to discuss are bitcoin, nostr, meat, anarcho capitalism, libertarianism and maybe some other cryptocurrencies, but unsure here. However, I define “twitter alternative” completely differently

Hope to be very wrong and your optimism to play out well 👍

Silberengel 1y ago 💬 1

Let's put it this way:

Nostr is the only one of these "decentralized, open protocols" that is truly decentralized and open. Even the protocol spec itself, is completely open. I see no value in half-assing a communications revolution, so I can't even be bothered with the others. If this isn't successful, then damn it all. 😂

I guess that's a sort of optimism, yes. This is the only one crazy enough to actually work.

Viktor Vsk 1y ago 💬 1

Nostr is a subset of http

Silberengel 1y ago

Relays are, yes.