I didn’t understand a lot of this but thank you for laying out your thought process so clearly. Interesting to read and an incentive to try to understand more.
Questions:
- What is wrong with the current web hosting model?
- Assuming someone were able to figure out how to build an alternative with nostr, what would make that better than the current model?
> What is wrong with the current web hosting model?
If there is criticism there it is that people seem to want ever more centralized things, not more decentralized ones. While this may not be the intent, it certainly seems to be the effect.
> Assuming someone were able to figure out how to build an alternative with nostr, what would make that better than the current model?
I don't believe it would be /much/ better because much like early web services/sites/hosting which *were* very much decentralized, they gradually (via the application of significant pressure from large companies) concreted itself into the web we have today. I suspect that no matter how cool of a decentralized application layer you build on top of the internet (nostr, e.g.) it will at a higher and higher level be pushed to centralize further and further either via people's tendencies (as they have learned on the modern web), market pressure from large companies (as we can clearly see), or some unholy combination thereof.
It is a pessimistic view of the future of nostr or whatever replaces it, but I think it is reasonably grounded in history.
It is also why I think some people have such scorn for the vapid enthusiasm many nostr users have about how bitcoin is going to change the world. We've all heard that before and been burned rather badly, if the state of the web and internet is anything to go by. Blind enthusiasm will only make us all worse off. At least the first time it happened people could say "How could we have known?" because at least it hadn't happened before. The potential for nostr to be co-opted into something unimaginably worse is unappetizing at best, and downright revolting at worst.
Really this is a symptom of my greater worldview that you must be worthy of the systems and tools your forbears built for you.
It doesn't matter how cool the thing you make is, if you hand it off to someone malicious, or, more tragically, incompetent, then you have wasted your effort.
Conversely, when something is given to you, it is your moral imperative to understand the thing, and to be worthy of it. With the internet as a case study, I feel we can safely say that we (the royal we) were not ready for it to be given to us, because no one understood it, much less its first-order effects.
All of this is not to say people will not figure it out eventually, but we can only hope to do so before it subjugates or destroys us utterly.
Excellent explanation. Thank you.
