One of the most interesting learnings from this Edits conversation is knowing how much some devs want to control what users can and cannot do in this network. So much so that they spend days trying to break working implementations, that people are actually using, just to impose their opinion on everybody else.
Discussion
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I understand your view, but there is probably an unintended consequence of having more features battle tested. It would be naive to think that stuff like this won't happen as popularity grows. Unless you mean they submitted bad code or something like that. That's a different issue but still one to watch out for in perpetuity.
Nothing against battle testing it. But at some point it stops being just battle testing it to go into the "I require you all to stop using this feature" attack.
Also, we had over 50,000 real edits before the current wave of attacks. Those offer a better testing ground than what has been happening lately.
Fair enough. I totally support productive testing over what is essentially seethe trolling.
Because edits only exist in one client, it makes it possible to target that client using the protocol. To stop the attacks, you can 1. drop edit support, since it's not interoperable, 2. convince other people to support edits so that the attacks against amethyst become attacks against all complying clients (or 3. find some other clever way to defend).
Instead of resorting to character assassinations maybe we should take this opportunity to learn about how protocol attacks work, and improve on building consensus.
Or 3. People realize that even with the attacks people are still using it and grow the fuck up.
Whatever happened to "permissionless decentralized network"? If you (we) can't deal with even simple attacks like this then nostr is DOA. The main defense to protocol attacks is counter-attacks, either via client feature support (or lack of it), or specially crafted events. The result in either case is that users get a broken experience if they or people they follow use "bad" features.
The edit spam is the latter kind of attack. If users want edits but don't want spam, they can keep using Amethyst and stop following fiatjaf. If they want to keep following fiatjaf but avoid spam, they can use a new client. Be glad I guess that the spam is coming from just a few users, not from an entire hostile client like might someday arrive when Meta finds nostr.
> Whatever happened to "permissionless decentralized network"?
You tell me. You are trying to tell not only me as dev but all my users what they can and cannot use.
Amethyst is working great even with the attacks. And yes, many people are blocking those that are trying these attacks.
Most importantly, everybody is learning who is here to impose their will on users and who is here to figure out what users want to do and support them.
So why are you so bent out of shape about it? Is there no reasonable motive for doing what fiatjaf is doing that doesn't depend on him acting in bad faith?
There was a reasonable motive that has been debunked over and over again. Now it's just recycling old arguments that don't make any sense. To me, that is the definition of bad faith. He is not interested in leaving people alone in the way they want to use Nostr for.
"debunked" Who exactly is the arbiter of truth here?
No one told you you "can't" implement edits, just that you "shouldn't". That's an appeal to reason, not an imposition of power. Edit spam is a demonstration, within the rules of the protocol, of that disagreement. Now, if fiatjaf deleted your PR from the github that would be bad, but nothing like that is happening.
I don't think most Amethyst users care that you guys are spamming your relays with edits.
You're not attacking Amethyst.
Was it a war? I enjoyed watching
You know its not about control, Vitor, come on!
Edits are an imposition in all clients that centralizes the protocol.
Why? Are you imposing kind 20 feeds on other clients with Olas? I wouldn't think you do.
What's wrong with a feature people want? If other clients don't support it, they don't support it. I can give you a long list of things clients don't support, and that I would consider essential. Edits is the least important of these things.
Edits overload kind 1s, creating conflicts in what people might see in different clients when viewing the "same" event. It's quite different from purely additive features.
Deletions overwrite kind 1 too. Nobody cared for months. Some clients still don't.
Deletions are either effective (the note is gone), or additive (the note is "deleted"). They don't change anything in place. The effect of a successful delete is the same as not being able to find a note, which has to be handled in any case.
And for the record, I resisted deletes for years. I recently added them, because they do in fact appear to work pretty well. It was nostr:nprofile1qythwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnwdaehgu3wvfskuep0qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpr9mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnt9uq3zamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wwa5kuef0qyfhwumn8ghj7am0wsh82arcduhx7mn99uq3vamnwvaz7tmwdaehgun9d35hgetn9ehhyee0qy0hwumn8ghj7mn0wd68yttjv4kxz7fwv3jhyettwfhhxuewd4jj7qgmwaehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnw3e8qmr9vfejucm0d5hszxnhwden5te0wpuhyctdd9jzuenfv96x5ctx9e3k7mf0qys8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnwdajx2un4dehx2unn9ehx2arhdaexktcqyqlhwrt96wnkf2w9edgr4cfruchvwkv26q6asdhz4qg08pm6w3djgcxlara who convinced me, because he publicly deleted a post, and it did indeed disappear.
You will probably still find it on njump, except they changed something recently.
Yeah, it was there a while ago when I originally did this experiment, and I think it was around in people's local Damus cache.
Maybe one day you will also see how much edits just work really well.
It could happen! And maybe someday you'll join the anti-edit masonic cabal.
Edits do work really well in theory. But attackers cause that theory to be reworked.
The edit implementation wars. Someday this might be a book.
Edit spammers get the block. The purple and white text is the sign.
Power Corrupts
I'm out of the loop, what happened?
commies, commies everywhere
Or how a dev want to control what other devs should implement? :)
Jokes aside, in the current form, edits are an imposition from above, given the spread of Amethyst.
Fortunately, we are all interested here in making Nostr a success, but what if this is really an attack from the outside?
And the problem is not only editing, but also markdown, which can easily be exploited to create chaos in visualization.
So like bitcoin and bitcoin cash we will now get nostr and nostr-(non)edit?
That's basically what we have today.
Their point is that people actually want edits, and since Amethyst is the only one implementing it, users would choose to use Amethyst which centralizes Nostr on a single client.
So, instead of implementing edits, they want Amethyst to stop existing so that they can force their "fork" on everybody.
Pfff this is a really hard nut to crack.
I mean i understand you want to make an example post of things that could be to make a point, but actively trying to destroy something at this stage of development seems very weird too.
Is this really about amethyst becoming the centralized client or simply a problem with (and a hard stance against) edits? If this about it becoming centralized i think other clients have to step up their game instead of actively trying to take the most used one down. In the end one of the clients will become the most used one.
Can this then not easily be fixed by offering users a way to go trough previous events to see what was edited (and thus remove the spam? If that is what it turns into?) Is the edit a NIP or is it just a custom way amethyst implements an existing event? All the previous events should usually still exist right? It's like deletion, you can request it but there are no guarantees of a relay honoring it.
Maybe i am oversimplifying it. I have not been part of any of the discussions on this topic. I just hope this could be resolved without so much mud throwing, we need more nostr devs building stuff instead of actively attacking eachother and making it personal.
Yeah. Edits are just new posts. The old one is still there. The interface shows all versions of the edit. There are no deletes anywhere. In that case, it is even better than some of the replaceable event and delete and repost proposals that have been circulating.
By the way, you can also do Delete and Post again on Amethyst right now. So, our users get all of the options:
- Don't edit/See the original content.
- Edit with history/See all of the changes
- Edit without history, just delete and post again.
Users can choose what they prefer.
Ah yes i just now noticed i can click on edit of one of pablo's replies and it goes through a huge list of edits. It does tell me how little i actually thought about the problem and there is really no easy way around it.
I could just block a spammer who is clearly abusing it?
To form a proper opinion on this i guess i'll have to go through everything that has happened in between fiatjaf's post a while ago and then all the way up to this point to not look stupid and ask the same questions that have already been answered.
Guess I'm just gonna have to ride out this one. I love amethyst and even if you end up choosing to remove the edit feature or make it always show the original (forgive me if it's already there and i haven't found it) i'm fine with it, i just hope a resolution does not have be accomplished by a burned out dev on either side of the table.
Is this about those streams of a single character from nostr:nprofile1qqsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8gprfmhxue69uhhq7tjv9kkjepwve5kzar2v9nzucm0d5hszxmhwden5te0wfjkccte9emk2um5v4exucn5vvhxxmmd9uq3xamnwvaz7tmhda6zuat50phjummwv5hsx7c9z9? Haha, thought it were weird notes...
IThe giant colourful text thing is annoying (Iβd remove it in the next release of Amethyst). Regarding editing attacksβaside from spamming and confusing their own followers on Amethystβdoes it actually break editing in any way? If it does, Iβd fix it and update your NIP proposal accordingly.
Alternative approach: call the police on them; it apparently ended the last attack wave on Nostr π€£.
No it doesn't break anything. They are just pissing off their own followers, hilariously. So much so that people are just blocking them.
In that case, maybe just let them? π€·ββοΈ
Iβm not trying to be sneaky here. Honestly, while I like editing, I donβt care too much one way or the other.
But Iβm really allergic to enforced consensus. Let other clients implement their own short note editing proposals and see if it gets adopted, just like NIP-96 vs Blossom. Iβm sure that if a simplified protocol starts gaining popularity, Amethyst will eventually implement it.
Agree, Amethyst will implement anything that gets popularity. Regardless if I agree with it or not.
By the way, I've just edited my post above to fix a typo. π«‘
letting go of control can be a good thing. Either way AI is gonna force people to let go of controlling all the work at some point or other, cuz doing it all manually, will not keep up with the times in 2045
the AI on things, its always screwing up my carefully crafted feeds. thats what i dislike most.
example: if i only follow asthetic rain, and guineapigs and... on reddit. why show me this other shit? gets out of control fast, engaging you with maximum shit that IS NOT GOOD FOR U. lmao π
If a client wants to implement edits, how about "review this post before it goes to the relays. You have 20 seconds to comply."
Two paths:
1) Work with other people, decide on a good path forward, go together down that path for maximum compatibility
2) Believe you are the smartest person in every room, reject other proposals without any deep reasoning or discussion about them, and do it your way as fast as possible and roll it out as far as possible to force other clients to do it your way since you "beat them to it". Then argue from the position of "it's working" and "we have 50,000 edits already".
You took path (2). It is indistinguishable from an embrace-extend-extinguish attack on nostr. I don't think any protocol can defend against this kind of attack. It is why Microsoft was so successful at crushing open technologies in the early days.
Since edits are not just an additive feature, but a fork of kind-1 and it's very meaning, all we can do is not implement PR 1090 and let the nostr community naturally fork.
So that is what we are doing. IMHO edits will be Amethyst only, and eventually Amethyst users will either recognize the futility of fake edits, or they will become a separate community.
If other devs worked together and decided that PR 1090 was the right path forward, then we could all go there. But the devs are spread out into very different opinions on how edits should happen.
Amethyst currently has 4 ways to "edit" a post. I coded 4 others that didn't work well. I don't "believe I am the smartest person in the room". I just coded them all and gave it to the users. It's their choice. I am just reacting to them. In fact, my preferred way of editing didn't work.
I can wait for you all to code it and check for yourselves. What I can't do is to have people saying "it doesn't work" or "it breaks Nostr" when I have shipped for MONTHS now and it not only clearly work but doesn't break anything.
Do Amethyst users all know that the edit only works for other Amethyst users? If so then it is not so bad.
Lots of events and custom tags on Kind 1 (like appraisers, for instance) only show to other Amethyst users. So, the general expectation is that many things they do on Amethyst won't show up anywhere else. Here and there we see somebody surprised about it, but they get it pretty quickly.
I don't think it is a good idea to ever communicate that clients show the same thing because it is almost never true. Especially these days that each client has a completely different way to assemble the main feed.
I definitely encourage my own users to use other clients and see the difference for themselves.
* zapraisers.
Let's settle the dispute with a Nostr-wide poll!
Is such a thing possible? Could clients be hard-coded so that every new npub has to follow the same one account, like nostr:nprofile1qqsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8gprfmhxue69uhhq7tjv9kkjepwve5kzar2v9nzucm0d5hszxmhwden5te0wfjkccte9emk2um5v4exucn5vvhxxmmd9uq3xamnwvaz7tmhda6zuat50phjummwv5hsx7c9z9 or @nostr, like the old Tom of MySpace that everybody HAD to follow, and then this account could put out polls to everyone on Nostr, or other important messages?
I know, this is somewhat centralizing...
#nostrideas
This is 1 hell of a thread. I'm super noob, not just to #amethyst, but to #nostr generally... I edit shit all the time. I think it's an awesome feature. Now I know that other clients may still see my original note without edits. I'm cool with that.
Usually it's because if a typo, but when I first got here, I worried that some of my posts were too negative, like saying fuck you, etc. So I requested some if these to be deleted.
I never knew that doing so was problematic to some folks. π€·ββοΈ
Well. Fuck you guys. I like edits. Haha. Glad to have chosen amethyst.
At the end of the day, isn't Nostr just the beginning stage of a protocol for information broadcasting and cataloging?
Clients can do whatever they want as far as broadcasting info and cataloging it. Other clients can implement the same methods to allow interoperability.
Decentralization means no central decision makers. The network will grow organically, and it is unlikely that in a decade or less it will not be recognizable as the Nostr we see today. You're building a version of Nostr on top of the base protocol, you're showing other clients an idea and they get to see if it causes any issues or a success that they should implement it too. That's the free market, let it work people! Play nice, we're all on the same team.
*it is likely that in a decade or less it will be unrecognizable as the Nostr we see today.
(Hey, here's an idea, edits can show up as asterisks over the original comment that can be expanded to see the edit. Preserving the original comment as the main one people see, but allowing edits to be easily viewed.)