Same with twitter. You don't know what you don't know.
But all it takes is an article with one npub and you can follow all their followers in a second and enter a new universe of conversation.
Discussion
You’re still limited to what people/relays/organizations you trust are willing to let you know about.
The internet was supposed to connect *everyone*.
I can see a future where after reinventing RSS people will realize they want to be able to find more than their tiny little social circles, so they will reinvent web directories, then web crawlers, PageRank, etc
Eventually we’ll have the whole web again! With exactly the same problems!
That’s how the world works. If you want to be connected to everyone, you drown in spam.
There is no way around building and curating your own network.
Such is life. No shortcuts. Only better and better tools to find the right people.
Exactly, no actual shortcuts in anything from my experience, just tools to make the process more fluent. Still, I see the shortcut idea constantly redressed and pushed aggressively, it feels absurd to me.
The rest already exists though, and can serve as a funnel to here. We don't need to reinvent it because it's not going anywhere. The question is: can Nostr provide something that wasn't available elsewhere or improve on the other options? I think it does.
I get that you have a hypothetical ideal that nostr doesn't meet, but for now this is a win.
Nostr doesn’t offer anything that wasn’t available before.
Does it offer the same things in a better way? Possibly. We’ll see.
To celebrate victory against the evil forces of censorship and brag about how Nostr will change the world — as most of the community seems to do — is just silly though.
I'm grateful to hear your perspective, and not in a condescending way. It sounds like you have a lot more experience than me.
BUT switch bitcoin for nostr in the above note and it looks like something I've read before.
Bitcoin was nothing like that when it was as early as Nostr is now.
The very people proposing it were skeptical of it, willing to hear about all possible limitations etc — and it was a breakthrough obvious to anyone who did any research around the idea of digital cash. Nostr obviously has no big breakthrough in it — there’s not even any attempt to make arguments in that direction— only about how it changes everything, assuming it solves the problem of censorship.
It reminds me not of Bitcoin, but of the way newborn altcoins are shilled with wild assertions and zero research to back it.
I was referring to the fact that no single part was new, but rather a new combination of older things.
So you're saying this combination exists elsewhere/ has existed before in a similar form and will become more centralised because it just can't scale (to include everyone in the world being easily discoverable by one another on the same relay) without massive resources.
I don't think that's what it's supposed to be though. I think we're fine with niche relays.
Bitcoin’s genesis occurred in a very different time, and was nurtured and developed by individuals who had a deep understanding of the tech involved.
Imagine if bitcoin was discovered now. Would it take the same path? Who knows?
I’m thankful for devs like yourself, who take a contrarian view, and take the to educate and inform people like myself, who have a deep desire to see change but lack the deep technical knowledge to truly assess if this time is different.
In my view the novelty of Nostr is the concept of relays. All they do is forward content there is no guarantee to store it. I’m not aware of any similar architecture previously? Mostly because people assumed that you would also need to archive the content.
In terms of censorship, with Twitter it is difficult to create an alternate. So you have platforms like Gab and Getter which reinvent the wheel from scratch.
There is a market for censorship resistance. With Nostr if people get wind that a relay is censoring, they can use the same client and open source relay software to gather around their own relays. It already happened with Gab, etc. and will be far easier with Nostr.
Yes relays can always censor, but we might be able to have detection mechanisms. For example if a group ran private relays, they could compare the private relay feed with the public one. If there is a difference they can raise the alarm and gather around a new relay.
I think this is far better than the existing social networks.
I think the euphoria over nostr speaks more to the utter need and desire for people to connect in an authentic way free from manipulation. There’s hope that this can be it, but I can see why you are saying, whoa let’s think about this. It’s nice to hear counter arguments. Often times we get our hopes up, and ignore the lessons of the past, and fail to account for things that could go wrong along the way.
I think you are just overly negative. Nostr solves all the problems with classical social media.
You are IMO strawmaning here, holding it to an impossible standard that I never heard anybody else hold it to.