Nostr Web Client

Very interesting debate.

Thinking about this: We will never build something the scale of Twitter with the relay structure that we have right now. Twitter generates 12 Terabytes of data per day. There is no way that relay operators will store all of this for all of time for free. This is natural. A decentralised system will always be more expensive and wasteful than a centralised system.

I am actually PAYING MONEY for a SaaS that deletes my tweets after a week (although I have no doubt that the NSA stores it all for eternity anyways).

It seems, we need to rethink what "social media" is supposed to do: It is supposed to be a network to spread information quickly around the globe. Something like a digital neural network.

It is maybe NOT supposed to be long term memory as well. Maybe if we want to create a lasting legacy of content, we need to find other systems. A self hosted personal blog would be the obvious way - if we can circumvent the need for the centralized and censorable DNS system (Tor etc), that would be good enough for censorship resistant long form content.

So I think, if Nostr relays by default only store events of the last 30 days, that would be good enough - AND EVEN THAT would still be infeasible for all but the largest and well funded relays if we would reach Twitter scale.

nostr:note17yeafapcf6l46w59h09y4z50km8gcvatvfkazsth3zxer53uvm2se0gx0a

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Greg 1y ago

Agree with this, and eventually we would like nostr to grow to a Twitter size someday. Storing notes indefinitely is infeasible, and even with a 30-day deletion policy it seems difficult.

Though, is social media the only thing we’re aiming to build here? For example, Turkey blocking access to Wikipedia to its citizens in 2017 because it was a “danger to the public”. A Wikipedia hosted on Nostr cannot be blocked by the govt, because there is no resolvable DNS address that stores all of its content.

But for a Nostr-based Wikipedia to exist, it needs to have persistent data storage.

The technical limitations are clearly an issue, and it seems that for now at least (until technology can reliably store more information on a consumer device), social media is what we are limited to if the # of users skyrockets.