Nostr Web Client

jleger2023

FREEDOM OR CONTROL - YOUR SUPPORT SHOWS YOUR CHOICE

I saw a long thread discussing another spam attack on Nostr last night. That's not going to stop for free relays. Spammers will always use free services with large audiences to spam. Stopping them is a game of whack-a-mole that even the big Social Media companies have failed to win despite their deep pockets and teams of engineers.

The solution is value-for-value: pay for what you use and find valuable. If Nostr benefits you in some way, be willing to pay for the tools you use that provide it to you (relays, clients, etc). If you can't pay but you can build or support it in some other way, that's great, too.

I had a person (jokingly I assume) say they were sad I didn't ⚡ them. The first thing that jumped into my mind when I read the note was "What benefit are you providing?" I had never seen any other post from them before.

If you want to live in a free world, you need to ask that question often, both of yourself and of others: what benefit are you providing? Because any time you're getting something "free", it's not free. Somebody is paying for it. If that person isn't you, then someone else is setting the agenda for what you consume. Is that what you want?

For many, the idea of freedom is like the idea of owning a boat. They daydream about how great it would be to have a boat, take it out on the water, fish, swim and enjoy it all. But they never buy a boat. Why? Because boats cost money and take work to maintain. All that pleasure has a price. Either you're willing to pay it, or you're not.

Freedom is no different. I hear a lot of talk about freedom today, and that's good. Freedom of speech is a big one. But what are you doing to support those that are building the tools that give you that freedom? Are you content to daydream about that freedom and how nice it would be while never taking any action, or are you willing to put some skin in the game to turn that dream into a reality both for yourself and others you care about?

We've been conditioned to get things for "free", but it's a lie and a trick that's resulted in us selling ourselves and our choices to the highest bidder. For me, Nostr is the path to freedom, but Nostr is not free. It costs money to run the relays, servers and services, and it costs time (which results in lost earning power) to code clients that provide the experience you want and create great content on an ad-free platform.

So if you believe in freedom, and I know you do (that's why you're here) then support the builders that are providing value to you. Show that freedom is not just a daydream. Governments and nefarious actors have long taken advantage of the masses just daydreaming about freedom. Let's wake the world up from that dream and make it a reality. This is our shot. Let's not miss the target.

My deepest thanks to all of those that are supporting the builders already. You are true heroes. 🙏

⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago 💬 2

I will have to stick my neck out and disagree.

Paid relays aren't the solution. We need to keep working on this.

We need proof of work relays. We need an option to pay with sats to post (like on your phone, to avoid battery drain).

'Paid' relays don't fix spam, it just creates a little garden with high fences, for you and a few friends.

'Paid' relays should be optional. They should provide optional features like skipping the sats to post or work, or priority on bandwidth, NIPS05, backups, etc.

If we paywall this shit, it'll never defeat the mainstream systems of control, leaving millions behind. We must do better than pretty gardens with high fences. We want everyone to be free.

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Discussion

Seeker Erebus 2y ago 💬 1

It's kinda obvious, but, paying to post on a relay, is paying the relay, making the relay, a paid relay.

⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago 💬 1

The important bit is that it's optional. We need to accept proof of work as verification that you're not spamming. We want to build an accessible system, not fences.

Seeker Erebus 2y ago

I somewhat agree. Truly public relays, in the fashion that exists now, cannot survive. They'll get buried under spam, porn, and csam and be destroyed by it all.

Public relays that only provide write access for those that prove work however could be viable for those who just want to be on nostr, and will accept shitty service. You could pull that off by connecting your pubkey to a UTXO via on-chain address signature, or a recognition signature by a trusted party. It would stop the spam, but it wouldn't fund the relays, and they have costs. A charity relay that funds itself as a goodwill gesture is one thing, but demanding that of a relay is as immoral as demanding people zap you.

The only way paid relays become a walled garden is if there aren't enough of them. Public relays provide garbage service. The moment I went fully to paid, performance and reliability went way up. Most people will pay for good service that they value. If there are only a couple dozen paid relays, then all the good service is centralized. If there are thousands with good rates, then most people can connect to 20+ without a dip in quality, and the chances that people end up with nearly identical relay lists approaches zero.

jleger2023 2y ago 💬 2

Paying to post is another form of paid relay. I'm in favor of that model, too. Whichever one works best for people is fine by me, but the people using the relays have to be the ones paying for the relays or we're right back at the current social media model that's the root of so many problems and injustices.

⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago 💬 2

There's just too much downside to the gardens with fences of 'paid' relays, is all I'm saying. Pay to post is the same if there's no option to post for free, like once every hour (reactions not included, maybe).

Proof of Work solves this and lets you verify its not spam without any of that.

Let's not be greedy for a monetization system. We need it to be engineered for freedom first. I don't have any doubt, people will voluntarily run software they believe in and that provides the world with a public good, without needing to be paid.

Solving spam without building fences is what we should focus on, not pushing people to pay for access to the gardens.

jleger2023 2y ago 💬 1

And who pays the bills for the people running the servers and writing the code? If you find value in something, be willing to pay for it. It doesn't have to be expensive, but everyone needs to do their part. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I personally am not content to sit back and let other people pay for the things I use so I can get it "free", because I know it's not really free. Putting somebody else in control in that way results in what we already have: a warped social landscape where narratives are driven by the people that bought and paid for it. *We* need to be the ones that have bought and paid for it because that lets *us* set the narrative -- our own narrative.

That's my opinion. I'm open to other ideas and how we can make things accessible and better for all, but ultimately the people using the service need to be the one paying for it or we're back to a top-down model that wrecks the common person.

₿i͎t͎c͎o͎i͎n͎ ✶ 2y ago 💬 3

Sounds like a free rider problem.

It has to be a cheap enough solution that the majority of the population can join but it has to cost enough that it is a barrier so smammer can't afford to spam..

All while, you have to make it simple enough for the masses.

That's where the relay problem comes into play. It's too confusing for the masses. I don't understand what half of these relay buttons do on Amethyst. I've seen the question asked multiple times but never seen it answered.

I've signed up for a paid relay but not sure of the full benifits of that are.

jleger2023 2y ago

I agree. We have a lot of work to do to make everything simple and easy for the average user so it's not confusing. If people want the benefits they need to put a little effort into learning how things work (just like they had to do with their cell phones and the Internet), but the devs should do our absolute best to make that learning curve as small as possible.

Roaming 2y ago 💬 1

What if clients start to be small relays themselfs? Is this technically possible? This way everybody using it contributes. Something like what ipfs does with files.

jleger2023 2y ago

That's certainly possible for a peer to peer network as opposed to the current federated relay network. I'm in favor of that for clients that replace apps like WhatsApp. But devices like phones don't have the CPU or bandwidth to handle what relays are doing for the general social network. P2p also has poor performance in comparison, so pulling down large feeds like people do now would be a bad user experience. But again, I'm all in favor of a Nostr-driven WhatsApp replacement!

⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

Proof of Work was originally meant to solve this problem, not the Byzantine Generals problem of transaction finality across decentralized participants.

It was a spam prevention proposal. Require someone prove they're a normal user with limited activity by doing a quite large amount of work that wouldn't bother a normal person making 1 post per minute or so. The problem is that this seems to be a phone first ecosystem and work is hard on a phone's battery.

⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago 💬 1

100% agree - but voluntarism is a part of the value4value ideology, I believe.

Pay after you get the value, not in anticipation of it. If we require payment up front, before a good UX is witnessed, that's not value4value. That's just subscribing to a service that may provide value, you don't know until you try it.

Trust that people want to support all of this, they've just never had a means to do so. Subscriptions don't win, as seen in the current web. Subscriptions provide you with access to a limited garden of suspect value.

Let's just admit spam is one problem and support/funding the actual costs are another.

jleger2023 2y ago

I agree that volunteering is a good thing for things you believe in, and I agree that letting people try-before-they-buy also works well in many situations. Clients could certainly let people give it a try before asking for payment. Relays, however, probably not -- spammers will just sign up and spam during the free period, then we're back to whack-a-mole problems.

I also agree that spam and funding are two different problems, but there's a vin diagram there with a lot of intersection between the two. I don't believe one will be solved without the other.

captain ☦️ 2y ago

How do you think proof of work solves this in a way that a paywall does not?