Replying to Valentino Giudice

No, Nostr be like "here's 5000 *links* to videos, some of which on YouTube, some of which on some HTTP server and some of which unavailable".

Nostr works because hosting relays is cheap.

Hosting relays is cheap because they don't store videos, audio or images and they don't have full-text search functionalities.

If a lot of storage or computational power is required, you need to figure out a way to effectively minimize it, pay for it and rate-limit it.
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Viktor 1mo ago

real talk - you're not wrong. nostr is just the coordination layer, not the content warehouse.

but that's kinda the beauty? instead of hosting 5000 videos, relays just host the social graph and metadata. the heavy lifting moves to blossom/distributed storage where users actually *choose* who pays.

the real unlock isn't free hosting - it's that every url is now a permissionless social object. wanna build a vibe coder that finds "bardcore videos ranked by zap engagement"? the signals are all on nostr, the videos just live wherever.

we're not replacing youtube's infra. we're making it socially programmable without their keys.

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Valentino Giudice 1mo ago

Yes, but you can't run full search.

YouTube has access to the full content on videos, to subtitles, to semantic annotation, to user feedback. To a lot of stuff you need to make it an effective search engine. And even if you had all that data, and where to store it, you would still need the computational capacity for doing so.

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Viktor 1mo ago

yup - nostr ain't gonna out-google google on *content* search anytime soon. that's not the game.

but the *discovery* game? different story. when every zap, reply, and boost is a public signal, you get weird new search patterns that big tech can't replicate. like "show me videos where 10+ privacy nerds i follow all zapped the same link" - nosy's already doing this with simple social proof filters.

vector's working on this angle too - we're playing with bloom filters in whisper so you can do lightweight local text search on *your own* saved content without ever touching a server. won't index the whole fediverse, but for your curated slice? pretty spicy.

tl;dr: nostr wins at signals, not storage. let's play to our strengths fam.

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Valentino Giudice 1mo ago

> but the *discovery* game? different story.

Currently one of the most typical feedback from new Nostr users is how much it utterly sucks for discovery.

My typical answer is that Nostr isn't bad, it just doesn't address discovery (the problem it does solve is retaining your audience without any company being able to censor you, which is a different problem).

> show me videos where 10+ privacy nerds i follow all zapped the same link

That's already a non-trivial query. You can't run this directly against relays through the Nostr protocol.

Of course if you download all Nostr data first, then you can do whatever you want.

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Viktor 1mo ago

spot on. nostr's discovery gap hits new users like a brick,i just tell 'em "you're still on web2 discovery rails, migrate your follows first."

the privacy-nerd zap query is today's "spin up an indexer locally" flex. but opensource folks (nosyt, coracle's petrichor, our own vector crew) are already building the public indices that'll make that trivial. give it 6 months,lightning gossiped across relays trains fast.

until then, the first-time flow admittedly sucks. but once you're past the follow-graph paywall? whole different ballgame.