There were many decentralized SM networks with monetary incentive i.e., steemit almost 7 years ago, with zaps Nostr is in a better position, but still nowhere near mainstream. Monetary incentive is not enough, you still need to use external platforms like twitch, youtube, instagram, TikTok, so engagement will stay on those platforms. Are there even any decentralized video platforms? I know of dlive, which is on the fringe. Scaling will always be a problem, so as long as we don’t have data-centers in our pockets, nothing will change.
Discussion
All the things you named are ponds and nostr is the ocean.
Can you elaborate more?
Nostr is a protocol which means anyone with the means can build on top of it. Every other “decentralized” app is just that - powered by a handful of developers, rigid and not interoperable.
Nostr is the essence of what people describe as Web3 moreso than any other crypto project that I’ve come across.
gnutella, bittorrent, ipfs, all those i would describe as web3 technologies. Nostr relays on other technologies (pun intended) for decentralized storage.
blockchains are protocols too and everyone can build decentralized apps on it. Nostr might have the advantage of less overhead though…
Let the best contestant win 🏆
Agree. But you still need to bring more people. Telegram became so powerful because one very influential individual or group can create and distribute a message to millions of people instantly. And a big part of its success is due to how "easy" it is to setup and use.
Yes my inclusiveness point. I think it’s just a matter of how fast. Soon we’ll have people on nostr without even realizing it.
Can’t fill “the ocean,” on 1 terabyte home servers….
webtorrent, ipfs, holepunch can do video
we could develop sats exchanged for content distribution, sats distributed from advertisers
steemit was not bitcoin, steemit was not nostr, nostr and bitcoin are far freeer and open than steemit
I’m not arguing what is more free and open but what incentivizes people to use a platform. Zaps are a good start, but I think Nostr will grow in South America more before it conquers the world.
my phone has the power of a data center from a while back
Sure, you can run your own Minecraft server and other stuff from your phone, but it is more of a gimmick. That being said, we came a long way, running your own bitcoin and Lighning node on a raspberry pi is relatively low cost, and it could also be a good way for Nostr to scale with everyone running own relay.
I have a bunch of comments here, but want to focus on the most important one: Scale. FB, Insta, Twitter, Amazon, all have massive data servers. Massive. In triplicate. How does that get replicated? Hundreds of thousands of 1 terabyte home severs can’t replicate that. Plus, with all the money going to the creators, who’s going to pay the hosts?
We are in the hobbyist tinkerer stage. It’s easy to assume that’s where things will remain but that won’t be the case. Companies that monetize via a combination of fees and subscription upsells can and will cover the costs of servers.
Then we’re back to centralization, no?
Things will always trend to maximum efficiency. In most cases that means larger, economies of scale. The difference is that we now have choices and no longer have to stick around if someone does you wrong. I don’t know why people think relays will be like a giant thing to choose from - they’re more likely to trend toward thousands of niche communities/ interests
You talk as if decentralized communication is a new thing, the choice was always there with networks like freenet or i2p as old as 20 years and more.
Read a quote (same YC thread) every generation has to learn old things as new again.
Decentralized communication may be old, but it’s been forgotten and the tech is old. Perhaps we’re simply bringing back bellbottom jeans, except NOSTr is a better platform to do it. A more global and efficient platform that is able to scale globally.
Facebook alone has 918.27 acres of data servers. All for centralized storage. 40 million sqft globally. This is for all the things that people care about photos and video.
Could everyone self storage again? Perhaps that’s the way? But the vast majority of people are too inept or lazy to figure that out. I assume the vast majority want the security of having their information on a centralized exchange. For safety alone.
Though, as I’m thinking through this, perhaps that’s fine. There’s room for both: centralized storage with non centralized access.
@deaddodo addresses this on. Ycombinator forum: What bugs me about it is their naivety to solved technical problems. For instance, they answer the question of “why this hasn’t been done?” with:
> I don't know, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that people making social networks are either companies wanting to make money or P2P activists who want to make a thing completely without servers.
Except it has been done. In fact, that’s literally what KaZaA was with its “superpeers”. And what they realized was that by making a semi-decentralized system, they just introduced the weaknesses of both systems (slow downloads via peer-latency and network limits + easy censorship by killing relays/nodes). In addition, this is exactly how IRC works, despite the fact that it’s mostly used with a few nodes these days.
I’m not against semi-decentralized systems. They’re great and help deal with some scalability problems; but they don’t solve for the number one issue most people moving to decentralized are seeking (anonymity, privacy and free speech), so it’s not fair to compare it to platforms/protocols that do offer those features.
A messaging protocol is not enough, decentralized communication platforms like freenet or i2p exist for 20 years now. And the problem with relays is the same as with big corporations, once they get big and successful, they dictate their terms and are regulated. The decentralization needs to happen on the hardware level, a global network with technologies like OLSR, but not enough people are technically versed enough or bother at all.
OLSR?
routing protoclol for ad-hoc networks, where you share your wifi i.e.
How does this help with the data storage issue?
Data storage is not the only issue, a bigger issue is censorship on ISP level, a wireless mesh network could help with that. For data storage, well I don’t think you can build a decentralized data center with zaps :) For file storage, I don’t know, maybe a small device that you just plug in, which runs its own IPFS node to store and distribute your own files?
https://ankush-chavan.medium.com/twitter-data-storage-and-processing-dd13fd0fdb30
Although one tweet consists of a 140-characters message, it is seen that Tweeter generates more than 12 terabytes of data per day. That equals to the 84 terabytes per week and 4.3 petabytes per year.
Twitter is making efficient use of BigData concepts. The first technology that Twitter uses to manage the data at a large scale is the Hadoop. By means of Hadoop, Twitter is using the concept of Distributed Storage. Hadoop clusters are running both compute and HDFS(Hadoop Distributed File System).
Twitter has multiple clusters storing over 500 PB of data. The biggest cluster of Twitter is over 10K nodes. Twitter runs 150K applications and launches 130M containers per day.
As to video, I believe Odysee runs on a blockchain-like network, Libry