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.
Went to send you a zap, but says not setup… get on it sir!
Great note. Thanks. I like learning from people clued into the technical side
It’s not something that come naturally to me
As a commercial person… how did those older protocols make money?
Ie, is there a historical business model, or models, that we could mimic?
this.
A protocol isn't there, to make money.
That's like asking "how does internet make money?". It doesn't. Businesses built ON the internet can though 😉
Bingo. So what will work on Nostr?
> is there a historical business model, or models, that we could mimic?
Good question! Usenet and IRC were often hosted by ISPs, which users paid for indirectly with their internet subscriptions. People also paid for access to Usenet. DejaNews was a popular archive/provider service before it was bought by Google. On IRC people pay for service providers to keep them constantly connected (bouncers) and provide vanity DNS names. Also, people pay to run bots like Eggdrop to manage/moderate their channels.
For email and HTTP there are the obvious hosting and other service providers, but I suppose the biggest value they support is the things built on top of them, which is maybe fitting for a general-purpose protocol.
Most value seems clearly created due to building atop Nostr. Which itself I think is very cool. A superior digital property right is a better foundation for capital creation
I like those services you mention eg ISP
