Nostr is full of users who are afraid of algorithms.
Nostr, itself, is a set of algorithms.
Discussion
Tiktok users love algorithms
Xitter users hate algorithms
Nostr users love to hate algorithms. 😅
It's a shame. I fully support having a chronological timeline by default, but even the ones I was building help me not missing the good things so often 😅
I'm an algorithm enjoyer. I follow only active npubs and am followed by a bunch of active npubs, and my feed and replies would be a circus without advanced curation algos.
People be like, "I use Nostr without algos by being anon, ignoring almost everyone else, and only posting boring stuff nobody reads."
Okay. That is also a plan. LOL
I guess they're just doing "media", instead of "social media". They could also just get a journal and write stuff down on paper. Same feels. No loss.
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Besides curation on the filter tab, this shows popular recent notes by either people you follow or for everyone. Also here I'm planning to add more algos, e.g for specific topics.
Oh, I haven't tried that one, thanks!
Also … I might call on your services as my onboarding client matures 💜
nostr users hate sophistry
i had a really serious grumpy outburst at my colleague last night related to the sophistic documentation of the Internet Computer Protocol's authentication systems
there is a file that their blockchain client, used to deploy smart contracts, creates on your disk, that is a .pem.encrypted file
they say "something something under the hood something our purposes something something"
which is complete bullshit, and if the code of this thing is open source then i can go and find out exactly how it gets there
i'm not gonna waste my time reading their code, i'm just gonna impute the logical conclusion: they send a cookie, that they encrypt so the contents cannot be read by you if your dev machine is breached, and that it's a COOKIE
the way the text reads in the documentation, makes it sound like it's authentication
and apparently, it seems that if you do leak that file, someone else can take control of the resource you deployed (the smart contract) and spend all the assets tied to that resource on your behalf
which is AWFUL security and a classic example of the kind of shitcoin sophistry that grinds my gears so bad i yell at my colleague for not getting it that they are LYING and pretending that's ok
it's not ok, this kind of behaviour is disgusting, and it just shows you some of the flaws underlying the psychology of some parts of the dev community, who think they are so clever they can gloss over critical security mechanisms and that everyone is just gonna be like the guard soldier being told "these are not the droids you are looking for" no, these are the droids, and you bitches are trying to trick me
suffice it to say, the entire purpose of my meeting with said colleague was precisely to add code to the smart contract that functions to give total control to the deployer to add administrators and whitelisted users, and block all other access
They create an encrypted file using your data, that you can't decrypt? So, with a foreign key?
"for their own purposes" and "for authentication" so it's a fucking cookie, obviously, but why the fuck do you obfuscate the obvious fact to anyone who understands cryptography and security???
That is odd, you're right.
Gossip encrypts your nsec, so that you can login with a password, but it tells you it's doing it and shows you how and where it is stored.
At least it’s not under the sole control of “The Algorithm”
I guess our "Algorithm to Rule Them All" is NIP-01.
And even that doesn't really do anything, unless you implement a bunch of others with a gazillion options and settings, so that the results can look totally different in the different implementations.
It starts all the way at the beginning:
Which relays should be included?
Do you have particular relays you want to use? Are you authorized to use them?
These are our relay suggestions for our users in Japan/England/Brazil or who like porn/anime/Biblestuff/knitting/spreadsheets/literature/animaltorture/baseball/baking/BDSM...
Are you more interested in things in your own language, or are you language-agnostic?
Should we translate for you?
Would you like to zap? With which wallet? How many sats should be the default? Public or private zaps?
Would you like to follow some hashtags or lists, or avoid some hashtags or lists?
Which kinds of events would you like to use?
Which kinds of notes would you like to see?
Would you like to include/exclude particular notes, based upon what a DVM or API-call returns? Which DVM or API?
Where do you want your images to be loaded?
Which emoji should be shown when you react to a note? Would you like a choice of emojis? Would you just like +/- signs?
Etc. Etc. Etc....
#nostr is the #baselayer
Reading and understanding NIP-01 was when the penny dropped for me. I've been involved in many standards efforts where I felt like I was implementing someone else's wish list that I didn't understand. The key breakthrough of the #nostr protocol is not only its simplicity but that everything generates their own identity (events, npubs) and everything is SIGNED.
Let's be honest. Most people have no idea what an algorithm actually is, so you can frighten them by saying that you're using an algorithm.
An ALGORITHM is simply a limited set of instructions used to compute something.
So, an algorithm could be:
1) Take the relay the user typed in and find events (json files) from that relay.
2) Return the events as an array (ordered collection of events).
3) Find relevant events for this type of client.
4) Use the events to customize the client and define what to display in the feed.
tl;dr
algorithm means a procedure to filter and modify information
Yeah. Well, CRUD, mostly: create, read, update, and delete.
There is just data and algorithms that do stuff with the data.
This is something all clients do. All of them. Nobody is using a client that doesn't do this. The client has to do this or it would have nothing to do.
There is no such thing as an executable software program without algorithms. It has to contain some set of instructions that are used to compute something, otherwise, it's a data file, not a program.
All we are discussing is whose algorithms users can use where and how easily they can customize them or view the logic behind them. The "Nostr Ethos" is not "Stop people from developing or using algos you don't like". It's "Make algos personal again". Allow people to customize them, turn them off, add their own, buy one and plug it in, etc.
You could make an algo that searches your feed for notes about astronomy and puts a little ✨ emoji in the top-right corner of the note, for instance.
When people talk about "the algorithm" in a vernacular sense (i.e. not the technical definition), they mean the thing that chooses what they see in their social feed. All mainstream social media select content for you, promote stuff you never asked for, while not necessarily even showing you all the messages from the sources that you specifically subscribed to. That's "the algorithm".
The clients that I use in Nostr don't do any of that. They just show me the notes of people I subscribed to, end of.
This isn't accurate. All of the relays do some filtering, so the algorithm is just a level lower. You don't know what was sorted out before it got to you, even if it was a bot or spam from one of the npubs you follow. The relays would eventually collapse under notes, if they didn't curate, at least a bit.
That is a simple attack vector: just flood them with nonsense notes saying "Happy Birthday!" or containing kiddie-porn, or whatever, and shut down the server.
Indeed, you can't prevent filtering, although you can improve the chances by subscribing to multiple relays, especially relays that you have in common with your follows.
But is there a nostr client that mixes in crap you didn't ask for? I think that's the main problem with "the algorithm". I'm amazed at how much outrage p*rn gets shoved down your throat in Twitter/X, Youtube, etc.
The closest we have to that is Primal, but you can get around their regarded Highlights feed, so it's not a real barrier.
And your example helps me illustrate:
How does your client know who you subscribed to?
1) You wrote a list "follows" or "favorites" or "people who know about Formula-1 racing" and posted an event containing the list, and the client lets you select that list.
2) Your client lets you select someone else's "Cool Nostriches" list.
3) You client assumes you subscribed to everyone not on your "mute" list.
4) You paid to be let onto a relay, that you know lots of interesting people write to, and the client allows you to add that relay and see the notes in your feed.
5) You plugged into a DVM, that suggests interesting notes to you in your DMs, and your client doesn't block those DMs.
6) You downloaded the source for a client (like oddbeans) and changed the filter code, to show you what you want to see.
Etc. There are many different algorithms for showing you the notes you want to see.
Algorithms aren't even strictly for computation. If you're building a house, buying groceries, budgetting, driving to work you're using an algorithm to efficiently do that task, it's just not written down.
Same if you manually curate. The algorithm is the thought process in your head and you execute it with your keyboard and mouse.
that's only accurate if you don't consider words to be codes that represent a value
no, that's what words are, even if they don't compute the same, that's because they are ... what is the word
ordinals
ordinals are a priority sequence, the basis of the concept of value - what is first is most important, lesser things are less important
and after being ordinals, words are another thing:
tensors
tensors are multi-parameter values that encode many ordinals together from different ordering schemes
not meaning this as anything more than conveying the idea that ideas have a calculus, and thus they are a computation, just that the actual math involved is exactly the kind of computation that our brains do well and computers are shit at because of the incredible permutations of such scales
Stop misinforming people. IT IS A PROTOCOL