Nostr Web Client

theres a fine line between relays having a personality/filtering/curating content and poorly attempting to make events exclusive to them.

the idea of restricted access to events on nostr is a joke, thats just not compatible with the protocol. those NIPs are useless.

there are and there should be a variety of relays, because of the need for incentives but also because some stuff just cannot be done client-side.

now something i wish people looked more into is user or local communities owned relays - which are closer to the user - that's an opportunity to get done whatever is too heavy to do on clients there, making sure users have full control over it.

even the outbox model would scale better that way, having clients fetch events from a home relay.

JOE2o 3w ago

but how is anyone without a phd supposed to understand all this? you don't want to be giving just two options: (1) accept the centralising defaults or (2) make a random choice as a result of being forced to make a choice but having no idea what that choice is about.

You need a third option, which is forced but very easy to understand choices (so informed choices), or a fourth option, which is non-centralising defaults.

Right now everything seems like (1) or (2).

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Discussion

richard 3w ago 💬 2

non-centralizing defaults come with outbox to begin with. however the user discovered nostr already gives a point of entry into the ecosystem, that could be following someone or connecting to a relay.

and for obvious reasons, your third option is objectively the best, users need to have a basic idea of what goes on behind the UI so that they can make conscious choices.

i agree with you that it gets really confusing, and thus the reason why this space needs more UX designers which are good at dealing with decentralized tools.

JOE2o 3w ago

I think outbox defaults can only be properly non-centralising if they are not penalising. person A can't be given a pickier set of relays than person B, such that person A just can't do or experience certain things they want to, whereas person B is fine for those same tasks or experiences. just based on luck of the draw.

unless you have some uniformity in the base set then even for outbox you need to force a choice.

richard 3w ago

they wouldn't even be given any choice at first, outbox should handle it all for them. the client would look for the relay list of the npub they're trying to follow, in a predefined set (including nip65 specialized relays), which should be as large as possible.

once the relay list is retrieved, thats a bunch of relays to explore, and in those relays, they might find hundreds of relay hints in events. thats how the magic happens, unless they're exploring nip70 dedicated relays.

now if their point of entry is a relay, it's either:

- amazing, a regular relay that relays events as it should

- terrible, that relay is nip70 only, all the events are exclusive to it, no other relay hint can be found