Nostr Web Client

There are many scorecards we could draft up on which nostr gets an undeniably higher score than the others. But then it's back to the nos-Fermi paradox of Where Is Everyone?

There are a few common ways I see the nos-Fermi paradox explained—or glossed over. Someone says "nostr's great", you ask "well were are the people then?" the answer you'll get might be:

-We don't talk about that here

-Nostr band's stats are a lie (spoiler, they're not)

-It's just a bootstrapping issue

-It's just a marketing issue

-Nostr is destined by the heavens to follow the trajectory of Bitcoin (and definitely not destined to follow the trajectory of anything else) so let's all just sit back and watch destiny unfold

-Nostr doesn't need users (i see)

-All protocols have build phases and growth phases, we're in a build phase now.

-This is a 20 year mission and we're only in year 3

-An event will soon occur that results in an influx (though unclear why no events of the past year have been influx-triggering in this way)

Whatever the answer is, while all these fediverse and Bluesky and X scandals are going on nostr's growth remains flat. (The absolutes from nostr band stats might have some question marks around them, but the 6 month trend-line should be useful.)

My take is that it's a use case issue and that nostr has more immediate growth potential in the business world than in the town-square world. I'm guessing your take is that it's in fact a marketing issue? Which if so I could see as legit—it's true that there is a lot of stuff inside nostr that would be of interest to a lot of people outside nostr if they knew about it.

Constant 8mo ago

Well, marketing is obviously a problem, if not for the fact that 'marketing' a protocol is a pointless endevour. The only users of protocol are developers; the rest of the people use apps.

But its not just that, its also trying to communicate a new paradigm. Now it is better to show rather than tell; most people cant do much with abstract notions, they dont translate to insight for them. Yet, i do still see merit in 'propagating' the paradigm message under the Nostr banner, it has its use.

As to 'market-product-fit', let a 1000 flowers bloom; Nostr can actually do this, the variety of clients in existence today proofs that. What will actually hit the mark, i don't know. But i trust that:

1: different developers are looking at building vastly different things.

2: that atleast one of them will get some meaningfull traction at some point.

Luckely its innitial fit with Bitcoiners resulted in a good bootstrap.

What is most important I think, is that the moment something really becomes succesfull, the ecosystem as a whole should be able to latch on; the paradigm shift will become more obvious to more people, and things can snowball in a broad manner, not just one particular vertical.

Untill such time, the ecosystem seems to simply prepare itself better every day to grasp the opportunity when it arives.

Which leads us to the final question; can we hold out long enough? In that regard i think we can. You can argue that things are being propped up by dorseymoney TM, which I wont discount. But in the grand scheme of things, it is not a lot of money actually, especially if you look at the sums of money thrown around elsewhere in the world. And that money is not driving force behind Nostr, in my experience people are very inspired and motivated; it will take a lot before they abandon Nostr.

If i look at the caliber of people that 'get it', i am almost tempted to think it is a matter of time.

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Discussion

Garbage nsec 8mo ago

I agree with most of this, but an important x factor is none of this is happening in isolation.

On the atproto side the variety of clients is getting up there. It’s probably fair to say there’s now similar client variety on atproto as on nostr, plus there are some 'other stuff' clients there of a type nostr doesn’t have yet. There are just a lot of independent atproto devs right now, really buzzing, and night and day from last year. And there’s more funding.

Also the cost to spin up an atproto full network relay is now down to around $30 per month. A full network relay is everything, every post, every reply, every reaction, from everyone, peaking at 2k events a second, and can be seen in the same terms as Primal’s cache relay. These relays are popping up around the world (blog linked below), and anyone can spin one up.

There’s also been key movement on the identity side in recent months, which is a lot to sum up but TLDR things are getting more sovereign and not less over there.

Basically atproto is becoming a little more nostr-like each month. Will that continue? Who knows. But if so it might mean nostr ought to focus more on what sets nostr apart regardless of how many steps atproto can shuffle in nostr's direction.

Then you’ve got pubky with some good ideas like PKDNS, and legit claims to censorship resistance untied to DNS concerns. And Holepunch is doing it's thing. (But it’s really atproto that is not to be slept on.)

I do think though that when you look at atproto and nostr there are some clear things that set nostr apart. It's just that the focus is perhaps less on those things right now. If more focus goes there I think nostr has quite a good chance still.

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l

Constant 8mo ago

In terms of protocols i am a grumpy tired old man, that leverages his heuristics to know Nostr is 'the way'. It may have many tiny flaws but i also recon those dont matter in the grand scheme of things. I simply can't be bothered anymore to look at other stuff.

Now i am aware that history shows the 'best' thing has no guarentees on winning. Many stupid things won out for stupid reasons.

I did listen to this talk with the bluesky CTO, and around 20 minutes in it is about ID's. All the sudden, the talk is not so smooth anymore, picking his words more carefull, and things are framed more in terms of desires and promisses for the future than current fact. Smh.

https://fountain.fm/episode/1klXv2lENvPf5JEjsl0A

Its all so tiresome..

Garbage nsec 8mo ago

The identity stuff is hard to fit into a soundbyte. But I think it's still worthwhile keeping up on other protocols.

To unpack atproto identity, the ultimate authority for identity for most people is did:plc, and the ultimate authority for did:plc is the self-signed and self-certifying operation log for each individual did. (There’s also did:web—but fiatjaf is right that that's like 100 or 200 weirdos.)

The complaint against Bluesky is a directory complaint, specifically that they operate plc.directory, and that did:plc IDs need a lookup with a that particular Bluesky-owned server.

That’s true to a degree, plc.directory is the largest and most used directory. To keep it honest people have set up mirrors and live replicas, and there can be active-active cross-replication, write-through, etc., but no getting around the fact plc.directory is the big fish.

But zooming out, it’s, well, a directory. You need a directory, you don’t necessarily need that directory (or a single directory, as consensus from multiple directories also works). So the nuance is that the identity issue is a directory issue and not an underlining identifier issue.

But most of that is besides the point. They’ve recently publicly confirmed plc.directory itself is moving to an independent org soon (some say ICANN, some say elsewhere) and it’ll also likely be grouped with other directories as part of a a consensus mechanism. We have to wait for that, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't.

There are already 'outside of bluesky' implementations of relays, appviews, clients, etc. Once plc.directory moves out then these will be 100% outside of any control of Bluesky PBC. And there are thousands of independent PDSs, with their own keys. (Could be in a few months that the number of atproto users part of an infrastructure chain fully independent of Bluesky is higher than the number of nostr users.)

Then the only control argument after that is that it's bad to have to trust ICANN or whatever org holds plc.directory (or it's bad to trust the consensus mechanism, which is even more unlikely to suffer from tampering.) Given that nostr (unlike Pubky) relies quite heavily on DNS itself, nostr arguments against ICANN would be a little much.

Anyway for nostr it's worth being on top of these things because it helps you figure out where nostr is truly unique and where it's not. And then go hard where it is unique. And it prevents red-faced things from happening, like back when Primal announced how Primal offered far more algorithmic choice than Bluesky, having no idea what Bluesky actually offered in that department at the time (a lot more).