“Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee and CERN gave the world a gift. After some internal discussions, CERN stamped (quite literally) its approval on a document, relinquishing all intellectual property rights to the World Wide Web and entering it into the public domain.”
Same license #[0] stamped on nostr. 🙏
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/the-webs-most-important-decision/
🤙💜
Started a bit sooner than that. CERN was not interested, some people at CERN were. I know this because I have seen the email with the proposal sent to the person who released some seed funds for Tim.
I was there, too young and stupid to understand what was happening. In my defense, many were much older than me and as stupid as me.
what did the early seed funds for the web look like? was it meant for salaries, infrastructure, or something else?
I’d need to ask the man (trying to get him to join Nostr. He is curious) . I know it was around 10-15k. Office space for Tim, some salary and a NexT station is all I know.
The person who received the proposal had just been promoted to head his own team. Tim was sending the proposal around to a few heads and he took the bait.
wow, i’d love to hear more about that time. hopefully he’ll try nostr! 🤞
He does not like talking about the birth of the web much these days. He felt betrayed after Tim accidentally lost the archive (oops) rebuilt everything by himself to the best of his knowledge, left and then claimed nobody at CERN helped him. They still communicate, but once in a blue moon.
He’s more focused on his weird particle physics ideas and the censorship it has received in the past (arXiv at the request of CERN, supposedly). I think the interest for Nostr comes from there.
Web proposal was around 1989 I think…
I guess someone needs to write at least an article bout it.
🤙
It will interesting to see if #[1]'s decision will affect the world in a similar way...!?!
#[0]
i think without it being “public domain” most of us wouldn’t be very interested
Very true. That's the sine qua none, no doubt about that!
But whether the protocol is actually going to scale as much as predicted/hoped for, now that's much more uncertain, don't you think?
there’s always risk, but so far there’s no obvious impossibility and it’s generally true that “life finds a way”
are you more concerned about UX for mainstream users, technical scalability or something else?
There are several issues:
- Adding relays is everything but intuitive
- The size off relays is another factor. I recently read that the Damus relay meanwhile is app. 294 GB. It's nothing that can't be solved with payments, but it's still a challenge to get most people to realize why the freemium model isn't any good.
- GDPR is an European issue, but to people living in the EU it's important: there are lot's of rule that you'll have to comply with f.i. regarding the duration of data storage, KYC regulations etc. As soon as #nostr scales it could become difficult for users within the EU to run a relay.
- also with regard to bitcoin there are many open questions: how will sovereign nation states react when they come to realize that they can't control the money...
In the end, I really hope that nostr and bitcoin prevail, but it's still a long walk
there is definitely a lot required to get from here to “the promised land” of self-sovereign freedom in communications, but the hardest thing, imo, is to get some social consensus/activation energy that people want to keep showing up, keep creating, keep building on nostr and I think we’ve got that at the moment
+ no one has seriously explored new UXes on adding/selecting relays - it’s a big area of opportunity to explore/improve UX, but we’ve only seen minimal experimentation there so far, as it becomes more important people will self-organize to attempt solutions
+ I think most people would pay if they felt they were getting enough new value, but this is just beginning. Apps are primarily Twitter clones so far. We haven’t really seen massive new types of innovative application value getting created yet. Open source software and aligned incentives of contributing to something that no one controls is pretty substantial and has never been tried. I bet developers come up with really interesting services that people are excited to pay for. Relay operators will probably find a way to get paid for the cost/value they subsidize today
+ if EU is hostile toward relay operators maybe they will primarily operate outside the EU? EU citizens can choose to connect to whatever relays they prefer even if they’re not inside national borders - this highlights a pretty important ingredient we’ve never seen before - everything in the ecosystem is in competition with everything else to serve users’ preferences
+ nostr is not tied to bitcoin, though I think it’s the most logical choice for payments - your question is one that bitcoiners have been contemplating for a long time and there’s no real answer, but we’ll get more empirical data as more people opt-in to trying it
