Nostr Web Client

and my point is that if you base your design decisions on trustlessness with a relay based protocol you are gonna have a bad time.

i lean heavily towards the idea of finding ways to get more people being the middle man in their conversations. if 10% of nostr users are running a relay that's a lot better than being stuck with the problems of a trustless p2p architeture

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 5mo ago

distil the problem down to see what i'm talking about

why is p2p better? no middleman. why is it worse? it requires concurrent connection

why is relay better? asynchrony and getting around routing problems caused by the limitations of the IPv4 and NAT issue. and the clear and obvious constant obstruction against p2p connections that is deliberately being done to keep these clouds as middlemen in everything. for the benefit of the gigacorps and their spook friends.

relay is the solution that you have to make. rendezvous, specifically, that's why it's pretty much a fixture in every p2p system, and the usual achilles heel. consider tor and the directory servers. IPFS and the need for rendezvous service for nodes that have full inbound routing, for those that don't.

what is that they are adding to the p2p to make it work? a relay doing rendezvous.

NWC protocol hides the messages inside encrypted content anyway, and if you take the same approach for any rendezvous use case you see, the more busy this protocol is, the more silly it would be to keep a back-queue of events and send them when? the client is not going to *expect* to have ephemeral events that are older than like 2 seconds. this is gonna cause broken problems in the clients using relays as rendezvous as well.

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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 5mo ago

if it's ephemeral, it should not be cached. at all. if there is nobody to receive it, it goes to /dev/null

use a regular, replaceable or parameterized replaceable if you want it to be cached. put an expiration on it, or update it frequently, as in replaceable.

don't mix up the use cases by making the middle man do cache duty when there is a cache method existing already in the protocol. if your application is using ephemerals but you expect to need this, you should consider switching the events to replaceable or addressable events, and putting expiration timestamp tags on them. otherwise what happens when your realtime collab app gets confused when it drops the subscription and then gets 10 seconds of past events loaded into it.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 5mo ago

again, you see, the problem is that there is this illusion about privacy that is in conflict with reliability, at the base of this engineering decision, to break the guarantees of an aspect of a protocol.

you want to use ephemerals because you don't trust the relay

but you need the events to be persistent for a short time so clients can catch up

see the contradiction there? either trust the relay, or go p2p. if you go p2p you see that it's no different to the ephemeral event over the relay, and when you think about it, the whole internet is an ephemeral event transport.

Gzuuus 5mo ago

Yes, I understand. To be honest, there haven't been any problems with strfry having a 5 minute TTL for ephemeral events. strfry is the major relay implementation running on Nostr, accounting for around 27% according to nostr.watch, where the major relays that everyone uses implement it. There have been numerous experiments with ephemeral events for real-time stuff, and I've never heard of anyone having any issues with the temporary retention of ephemeral events. Definitely, for sync communication, it doesn't make sense to keep ephemeral events for any length of time. However, the rationale here I think is to improve the reliability of flaky ws connections. It's not like your use case will suffer from busy relays keeping a TTL for ephemeral events since filters remove all the noise from busy relays. In any case, I'm totally fine with no TTL at all; it wasn't the discussion, to be honest.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 5mo ago

i doubt it would cause problems for most of the current uses of it but i for one wouldn't mind if NWC performed better.