I was hoping to get good at arguing with nostr people about nostr things, maybe even learn why i am wrong about it, but so far all the challengers are acting more like children than men.
Discussion
i look forward to your pr.
Keep it up John, you’re doing great
The responses have shown me how hard the Nostr bubble is.
Instead of looking for ways to improve, or providing valid arguments to the contrary, most just offered vapid responses or insults.
I have plenty of constructive criticism for nostr.
This guy clearly isn't being constructive though, that's the difference.
That's what happens when you can't add anything of value to the conversation.
Everyone resorts to acting like children.
Join the fun sometime. 🤣🫂💜
The guy blowing himself on nostr pretends he knows what being a man is. Priceless!!
You're right about this. Buidling on #nostr is not the root issue. CONTENT IS.
Ownership. Its pretty simple in my opinion. My keys. Clients can do whatever.... I can also take my social identity and.... do whatever. Much like bitcoin #nostr is kinda like its own living, breathing, growing, learning... network. Why bother arguing, just build. Sky is the limit.
I'm genuinely curious to understand more about your issues with Nostr - especially the claim that it can be censored - but your posts on this haven't felt constructive, at least to me. The essence is "this place sucks and that's why you won't attract great people like me," which doesn't tend to lead to productive conversations.
You're eliciting those childish responses and then mocking them.
I can't deliver a knowledge base every time I want to discuss protocol design, so I make efforts to speak in understandable abstractions that touch the soft spots.
I have attempted to share feedback and designs with nostr for years. I have known fiatjaf since before nostr existed. Aside from talking to fiatjaf himself, that experience has been horrendous. Maybe you can forgive me if my candor is too abrasive or short.
Anyway, it's censorable because the relay model is no different than the website model in practice. At scale it requires permission, and nostr has no solution for discovery once permission is revoked.
Quite simple, but undermines the entire project.
We discovered a better way, and that makes it really difficult to tolerate nostr tribalism.
I could go on, about other design flaws, but that is at least one answer for you!
> Anyway, it's censorable because the relay model is no different than the website model in practice. At scale it requires permission, and nostr has no solution for discovery once permission is revoked.
this is factually wrong, I have just broadcast your event to over100 relays, including my own personal relay. Can you tell me how one would censor this very note, without coordination from all of those relays?
Well, look at how Primal and Damus differ as one example. You can 100% lose posts between them if you use both.
Or, ask yourself, if Nostr were the size of X, who could afford to run a relay?
RELAYS ARE ALWAYS PERMISSIONED, THEY ARE NOT PUBLIC COMMONS
> Well, look at how Primal and Damus differ as one example. You can 100% lose posts between them if you use both.
it depends entirely on the relay you are using and how you the client you are using implemented client-side filtering, that's not censorship...
> Or, ask yourself, if Nostr were the size of X, who could afford to run a relay?
The largest cost by far would be bandwidth, storage space is insignificant, because the likelyhood that any relay would have to store everything is essentially zero (and that's a good thing).
Thanks to nostr:nprofile1qy88wumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv9uq36amnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wvf5hgcm0d9hx2u3wwdhkx6tpdshsqgpy3kgaawurzqz25t7v5w4fl23e4mp55zcq6sacvj6kw06dyf70nutjs8cc, and in the future other p2p relay protocols, many of which I assume will be integrated directly into clients (which is something I am plannign for Eve), the bandwidth cost drops as well, to the point where only small, but periodic queries would have to be performed on relays.
Also, I happen to believe that the current way messages are sent and recevied between clients and relays is straight up garbage, but by simply introducing binary messsaging, and possibly compression, we can reduce the amount of data sent and received significantly.
> RELAYS ARE ALWAYS PERMISSIONED, THEY ARE NOT PUBLIC COMMONS
that's a non-refutable and entirely definition based argument that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. fine relays are permissioned by your definition, doesn't change my argument
> The largest cost by far would be bandwidth, storage space is insignificant, because the likelyhood that any relay would have to store everything is essentially zero (and that's a good thing).
The largest cost by far would not be bandwidth or storage but rather the cost to index these relays. By several orders of magnitude.
Nostr as it stands cannot scale to millions of users without indexing—or put another way as it scales power and profit will naturally accrue to indexing parties to the degree that Nostr will lose itself. And since indexing (naturally) isn't part of the protocol, it will be done in a computationally inefficient manner, with multiple competing parties performing the same tasks, and then falling off one by one due to the immense costs each party must bear alone due to the lack of cost-sharing.
This will become much more obvious after around 500k daily active users, should Nostr one day hit that mark. It's not an issue now, but the initial hints of it are here.
There are only two ways to avoid the more-scale-more-indexing trap. The first is to stick to use cases that make indexing irrelevant (it doesn't help with anything). The second is to accept that core use cases will be those for which indexing does bring about benefit at scale but bake indexing into the protocol at the most fundamental level. Both are still roads Nostr could take.
And there is a deus ex machina that some kind of decentralised indexing technology comes along and is simple and just works.
> The largest cost by far would not be bandwidth or storage but rather the cost to index these relays. By several orders of magnitude.
Touché, but I was talking on an individual relay scale, not global scale, to be fair.
That's a bridge that we will cross once we get to it.
If the majority of nostr clients will stick to being this global x-like (kind 1) feed, then yeah, you are absolutely correct, that's something that needs to be solved, but I forsee nostr eventually evolving to something else.
>but I forsee nostr eventually evolving to something else.
Same here. And feels like the first stages of that evolution are progressing.
This is a study of nostr resilience and how notes survive even if top 5% relays go down
Didn't see this paper before! Nice find
Yes primal can censor me, and when they do I'll just stop using primal.
That's the thing a about nostr, it's not owned by primal and damus.
Primal and damus are just clients used to access the protocol.
If I really want to avoid being censored I can even build my own relay with my own personal media hosting.
I'm struggling to see how that's the same as any centralised social media platform.
When Facebook banned me my account was removed you can't even find it anymore, all the information censored and hidden.
Nobody has that kind of power over nostr
Relays are just web servers. If you run your own, no one knows it exists. If you use someone else's, it can censor you.
No one will run a scaled web server for you for free.
No government will allow a scaled web server that does not censor.
Nostr can never scale while preventing censorship.
Most people cannot imagine scale. That’s why they still think Lightning works.
Also, whatever you’re working on will be replaced by bitnames when miners activate bip300
Someday, people will stop trying to strap bullshit onto Bitcoin.
Someday, everything will be strapped to Bitcoin
What do you think of this? Apparently 32 bytes on a UTXO for each "publish changes" button press. The rest is client resolved. Bullshit on Bitcoin? Or makes some sense? I'm not sure where I stand on these pin-a-tiny-anchor things.
why does the server itself have to scale so massively? why doesnt ever user have a server and they only scale it according to the content and attention they receive. mine could stay quite small, Kanye's would need to be pretty beefy. Peer-to-peer connections between personal servers. only.
Your idea obviously results in fragmentation, isolation, and echo chambers, instead of censorship resistance
Dig into "Kanye's would need to be pretty beefy" and answer your own question. ;)
Scale requirements are a constant on the web.
One great thing about Pubky is it has a key-based discovery method, so you can safely include centralized servers into the design.
If you get censored, you just change your DNS to a new provider or self-hosting. No loss of context.
it doesn't answer my question. for the Kanye's of the world, they can R&D performance and scaling features that help them meet their own ruinious popularity.
for 99% of the rest of humanity, home-scale personal servers will be just fine. and people can form comparatively small networks between themselves with no peoblem. the mildly more popular can throw a few extra bucks at their setups.
This is incorrect.
If you want to have pocket networks of limited size, then maybe you can keep using nostr for hobbyists and outcasts.
But Kanye is never gonna host his own server, and millions of people self-hosting following Kanye will never be performant without massive indexing.
You're just re-injecting nostr into the design for no benefit. (But nothing stopping people from using Pubky that way if they must...)
It is too inefficient to have everyone syncing everything locally, hence why Bitcoin doesn't scale well.
I didn't even have nostr in mind when saying that. more like urbit.org or plunder.tech
also how do you know Kanye won't host a server? maybe servers are just too hard to run and maintain... I'm sure Kanye has a smartphone and a car - those are pretty complicated and performant, but have been made idiot-proof and simple to operate.
Who (or what) says every relays has to scale up with the growth of the ecosystem? Why?
Ah I see that nostr:npub19ma2w9dmk3kat0nt0k5dwuqzvmg3va9ezwup0zkakhpwv0vcwvcsg8axkl was asking the same here 🤓
Well, they don't need to scale if no one uses it.
But if they do, you have a big problem because now a few businesses power the bulk of the network, and the users have no way to hot swap servers.
I agree that is just one scenario that could happen. But is that something that will break the protocol? I don’t think so. I think this scenario will be played out somewhere in the future and for now I would be ok with that. With that scenario we already have a way better internet / communication layer than we have today.
Breaking the protocol is not the concern, it is that the protocol solves real problems for many people.
Without that it dies.
Let me be clear, nostr is not a "better internet" layer, it is the same web we already have, except it signs everything with a key.
Everything else is the same, or worse.
What is the main difference for you between what the internet is and what the web is?
I think we have to clear about how we see things (making the definitions clear).
I appreciate the response and it's good to hear more context. I've heard your name but don't know much about your work.
My understanding is that the relays can be run on many devices (kind of like bitcoin nodes, so similarly decentralized). If I can run a relay that my family and/or community can use, isn't it up to me whether it's censored or not?
Relays are only like bitcoin nodes in the bad way, they do not scale.
Unlike Bitcoin, every "node" can censor, and thus every large relay can be censored by the gov.
Relays are just servers. They are no more "decentralized" than traditional web servers, which you can also run yourself.
Nostr has no meaningful comparison to Bitcoin, which entirely different as a system.
Furthermore, relays fall into the same legal and moderation requirements as any cloud server or social media website. If caught failing to comply, then legal trouble...
Oh no. Im shaking typing this note.
🤣
You probably pay taxes on your bitcoin. Lol
Enjoy life as a retard.
John you clearly suffer from some kind of mental illness that makes you project your own insecurities onto others.
I would guess you have some deep repressed childhood trauma you're running from.
Don't you think its weird that anytime i try to criticize the protocol and tradeoffs, a bunch of people want to attack me personally?
Is anyone here capable of earnest debate?
Some people having it in real life struggle for having critized the entities in power that the person become silence .
Then your colleagues , your friends, your neighbour , your bank , started giving you little hurdle for small things then people you know avoiding you and Then the person learn that Silence is better .
People who said “
Good morning all the time , they have nothing to say “ ..😉 literally .
I thought the debate we were having was earnest, and I have seen other people here debate you earnestly. Sure this may not be a formal debate, and we may use words that are (mostly) not uttered in debates, but come on.
I don't think the personal attacks help, I agree with you but you can't just say that nobody on nostr is willing to entertain a proper debate
for anyone coming across this brainrot thread, know that this is a half truth. because right now, sure, most relays store events but it is mentioned in the protocol specs that relays should be dumb aka only relaying events and never storing them. therefore traditional cloud/social media legal and moderation requirements may not apply.
It doesnt matter who stores the data, you still need central points of failure, and thus a solution for including servers and indexers in the design.
exactly, that's the whole point, you don't have a single point of failure, instead you have multiple independent relays where your events could be broadcasted.
the more relays you post to, the lower the chances of your content being censored everywhere become.
John, you're a smart person. Which Nostr developer hurt you that made you want to have these takes?
People hurt him by not moving to pubky.
Which of those takes do you disagree with though?
-Bitcoin and Nostr are quite different systems?
-Nostr relays are analogous to web servers in many ways?
-Large Nostr relays can be censored?
Brash delivery to be sure, but none of those takes seem particularly out-there. I think many people here would accept all three.
I know my style is raw, but that example he is replying to is only a clinical explanation with none of my spice added.
He just wants to cut me down.
So here is some spice:
Maybe nostr people are just out of their league?
As a propped-up community of cheerleaders, with an allergy for criticism, learning became stunted and derivative.
The idols here are much less talented and experienced than anyone realizes, and are actually horrible stewards.
They just can't see it because they are so damn proud of themselves, and who is John to say differently? Just some jerk!
Hey, I know I am a smart person, but you don't seem to care, so, fuck you, right?
But I do care. That's why I'm questioning everything.
Try to think about the larger picture and look at it from the outside or another person's perspective. What do your actions solve?
If you want to help, this is not the way. I haven't seen any community outreach or attempts to work together or attempts at solving existing issues. Did I miss them?
To me, it looks like you want to be a dick and stir things up for laughs. If that's not the case then I'm sorry that I've misunderstood your actions.
From my perspective, it looks like you saw Nostr, said hey that's a good idea, I can improve upon it, but I want to do it on my own and not work with them. Again, did I miss something?
Because this reminds me of what Shitcoiners do. That's how I see all of this.
Besides, to take on the masses and change the world or save the world, if you want to get deep, we're going to need to work together. The adversaries are far greater than us put together. Why the fuck would we split efforts and fight one another? That's borderline dumb. And as I said. You're a smart guy.
Thanks John.
Derek, I have been discussing my vision for the web with fiatjaf since before nostr existed. Any notion that I am derivative or lack creativity in systems design would be intensely ignorant and ironic here.
The idea that I would just see a protocol and copy it is obnoxious, self-serving and lazy.
I have been researching & designing related solutions deeply for a long time. When I say things, they come from experience.
I compulsively share what I learn on all platforms that engage with it. Nostr seems to really like engaging with my criticisms, but they can't figure out how to do so in any way other than to insult and act out.
As far as working together, Nostr will need to learn that the cultism of Bitcoin does not map to the web. Because, like my popular post this week highlighted, people like me can't work with children offering fearful insults and tribal struggle sessions.
Until nostr gets comfortable with the idea that nostr is broken and dying, there's no point in tolerating this nonsense.
So what if I'm brutally candid, wtf reason is that to make it personal?
So what if I think your idols are hacks? You should be interested in why I am so sure!
Like I originally said, you're a smart guy. I know this. You know this. I followed you for years on Twitter, man. But I also sense you love arguing for arguments sake, because you know you're a smart guy. It's the typical geek with a chip on their shoulder scenario. You're brilliant. You are! You're also kind of a dick. And I think you know that too 🤣
So now I'm here trying to figure out what all of this solves and I'm coming up with nothing.
Nostr has many apps that are broken. You're right here! And I'm sure some aspects of the protocol could be improved. I may not understand this at the technical level as well as you or other developers, but I understand the concepts and I surely understand the real world scenarios. I've made it my mission to onboard users to Nostr over the last 2.5 years. I probably know better than most since I'm in the trenches here.
You don't have to tell me things are bad and need improvement. But I'm working with what I have. I'm trying to make it better. I'm literally doing that right now by having a conversation with you.
Our developers, whom I've met most, are all amazing, passionate and talented people. They're now close friends and people I generally have a good relationship with now. I love them.
Are they the most talented people on the planet and just mere hacks like you said? (I think they're talented and brilliant, but you may not.) I don't frankly care though. Why? Because they're the ones building and trying their best to make this all work. They're working together for a common good.
If I could help them in any way possible with their goals of building Nostr, I would, and I am.
What pubky needs is a professional representative who can communicate with the Nostr.
This guy is obviously highly intelligent but like Peter Todd, the pair of them are socially retarded and they just can't do it
What if I just think nostr design sucks and wanna explain why and how it should work instead?
I am not here to steal users, there are much better strategies for growth than coercing a cult.
What sucks about nostr's hex keypairs or npub/nsec format?
This is what needs to happen.
But to be clear, my intent is to find a way for us to work together. Division is dumb. We don't have enough users willing to leave legacy social media to do that.
Why not just implement pubky to increase nostr's censorship-resistance? It's an open protocol that is compatible with nostr. Why not just do it?
Maybe, just maybe you are too smart for this. And for us. I know a lot of smart people who are not paying any attention for simplicity. Because for them it’s already (too) simple and they stop caring about other who advocate for more simplicity. But on the other hand, I could assume you have a lot of self-knowledge and you already know this and have found a solution for this (I hope this solution is not by being a dick to everyone who disagrees with you). I hope you are ok with the idea that we can agree on things we disagree with.
I hate complexity and I am well-known for this on the Bitcoin side.
Nostr is not simple, it is incomplete.
Im not a hardcore Bitcoiner so Im not familiar with the work you have done there. IMO you also cannot compare bitcoin with nostr in any way.
As for the defimition. Simple if something different than simplicity. And incomplete yes, that’s true but to me that irrelevant regarding the complexitiy / simplicity of the protocol.
You cant complete the system without making it more complex.
Optimizing for "build an app in a weekend" is actually worthless if it is broken.
Im more of the approach where you need things more complex before you can simplify it. Same as you only can write a short letter by writing the long variant first.
And for completing things, it just need to be complete enough to get things working. If things are broken, we need more completion perhaps. This adds complicity. If things are working again, we can simplify. Till things are starting to break again ;)
* complexity (not complicity lol, Im starting to hussle things up)
How long have you been using nostr?
You sound like you have absolutely no idea how it actually works.
I'm kinda new here but I still have a much better understanding.
You can make your own relay.
You aren't being censored just because some individuals choose not to share your crap.
"You are wrong, i can tell because i am a noob"
Censorship resistance in Nostr is definitely a weak form of it but the system seems antifragile given the cryptographically linked userbase. We could use more tools to detect deliverability problems and measure common-neighbor (that we need to share a relay to communicate) efficiency.
Perhaps a DHT plus things like negentropy can help with scaling. There are definitely trade-offs when attempting to handle the bandwidth this sort of system could generate.
A single user's data is arguably "cryptographically linked" by signing, but not the userbase itself.
I don’t understand the technical stuff language , i assumed bottom lime is a thin
Borderline censorship is always exist both in Relays or centralised social media .
Except for relays or Nostr protocols that you have the ability to completely free censorship if : you hosting your own relay , your own media and file storage and make it private . You completely free censorship but NO ONE discover you .
Then why you are on Nostr ?? Pretty irony. .
Your understanding of nostr is incorrect. What you described is the same thing as web servers.
The reason I am here is because I enjoy sharing my experience and challenging myself.
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I don't think he answered your question, unfortunately. he made other good points but he dodged your question
"we discovered a better way"
Oh please tell, if there is something better than nostr for censorship resistance I'd like to know.
Sign me up, I'll join right now.
Finish reading my posts, researching the Pubky design, and then provide a report of what you find. If you do, and you are honest, you will agree with me. You have my word.
it does have discovery. nip05 and nip66. while not widely used yet, it's there for devs to use.
Seriously man, this is how you look like right now
John has blocked me, cause he can't stand being called out on his stupidity, but anyone looking for reasons why his arguments are extremely stupid can go through this paper
If you want to have a good faith argument maybe put forward your argument instead of ad homs and projection.
You're the only one that seems to be acting like a child from my perspective.
I like nostr because it's the only social media that isn't actively censoring me.
I'm not even allowed to use my real identity on Facebook anymore.
Just because I criticised my government for sending billions of dollars to fund genocide which drives our cost of living and leads to tax increases.
I can say fuck Israel as much as I like on nostr.
I can tell the truth and share my opinions here without being silenced.
I'm not a man.