Nostr Web Client

Nostr cannot do it but nostr apps can.

If Primal say you need 1000 nostr followers to enable this or that, then that is requirement they can put out.

Right, and nostr.band could do it too (though their numbers would be different to Primal's). Chrome itself could do it if the Chrome team wanted. But this isn't a success of Nostr, in the same way Gmail gmail giving you 10GB of storage isn't a success of SMTP.

You compare that to atproto, where the the equivalent of Primal's caching service is built in to the core protocol itself, and the difference becomes clearer.

Or you look at bittorrent and how tit-for-tat incentives are core protocol, whereas for nostr relay monetisation is something strapped-on and not core protocol.

Makes a difference what's in the protocol itself.

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Discussion

semisol 5mo ago 💬 1

Your “core protocol” distinction is a bogus argument: can it be done, or can it not?

If you look at it that way barely anything on Nostr is core protocol.

Garbage nsec 5mo ago 💬 1

> If you look at it that way barely anything on Nostr is core protocol.

Exactly, yes! Nostr is an incredibly light protocol, so when we say what "nostr" can do we have to be careful. Most things attributed to Nostr are not in fact attributable to Nostr at all.

So no, my example cannot be done using "Nostr". It can be done in the same way a chrome extension can translate a webpage, as in that is not something we can attribute to the webpage itself.

Does this mean Nostr is barely anything? No. It's still something. Nostr is websockets and not QUIC, Nostr is k1 curve and not ed curve, and so on. There's a long enough list. But the attribution "nostr" gets for non-Nostr things is pretty wild.

semisol 5mo ago 💬 2

Just like when we say “Linux” we don’t refer to just the kernel but all the distros and tooling about it, when we say “Nostr” we don’t refer to only to the protocol.

Garbage nsec 5mo ago

Sure, but to a point, past which it's silliness. I often here “Nostr can do X” when the truth is that a certain party can do X in a bubble that they themselves created with off the shelf technologies and that bubble has some sort of connection to signed json events (often less than necessary), and nobody else is doing this thing anywhere outside of this bubble...

You could flip the script and say Nostr is not a social networking protocol at all but rather a hackathon protocol, and then maybe you have a semantic back door to sneak all that stuff in. But if it's to be a networking protocol then some reasonable propagation threshold needs to be met otherwise ...

Like remember when we had Olas v1 and everyone said "Nostr has Instagram now". And then someone does a Kanban thing and it's "Nostr has Trello now". It becomes absurd, you have to admit.

trev 5mo ago

EHHHHEEEMM...it's actually GNU/Linux 🥲