Gotcha. So, not accessible via clearnet without a bridge, and then the bridges would be potential points of failure?
Discussion
Exactly
No this is not accurate, DHTs aren't "not clearnet" .. browsers are the ones that artificially deny their scripts access to UDP sockets.
But since most users use social media through native apps, and since Web browsers can add support for resolving dns records over the DHT in a weekend (I guarantee it) if they want, I would say this idea that apps can't talk to the DHT through "clearnet" is wrong.
More importantly DHTs are inevitable at scale.
let's imagine the average relay can only supporting 5000 users, ok then you need 1,000,000 relays to support 5 billion users.
So best case scenario, if Nostr is super lucky to have 1,000,000 relay, you still have the problem that clients can't publish to and query from 1,000,000 relays.
So you have to start being clever and shard users over these relays, and now you realise that you need a DHT to do that reliably.
None of this matters though because the stakes of being wrong is too low. If Nostr fail to scale, or it scales and 90 of the 100 popular relays collapse while the remaining 10 have to raise VC money to persist. it won't matter to most.
In fact, already no one cares that these current popular relays are running on grants, and if that dried they will die or persist because the user base dwindled and the expense became lower.
Meanwhile the best bet I can make is that the current millions of DHT nodes will persist even if everyone working on Pubky dies, simply because Bittorrent found product market fit for us. and proved that the economics of the system is sustainable.
Thank you for the more in-depth information. How is Pubkey planning to get around the issue of browsers denying DHT scripts access to UDP sockets? (I have no idea what any of that means, by the way)
Is their solution to only have native apps? Will they run some kind of bridge that web app developers can use? Or will they be trying to convince web browser devs to remove this restriction? Or maybe they will be releasing their own web browser?
I must strongly disagree with the assertion that "most users use social media through native apps."
First, web apps are quite popular on #Nostr, both on desktop and mobile. They also have the advantage of being able to be installed as a PWA, which can particularly help with getting around iOS's appstore and their restriction against zaps.
Second, Nostr is about far more than just social media. Long-form content in, for instance, is much easier interact with and edit in a desktop browser than requiring a native application. Project #Alexandria is another that I can see being popular both as a web app and as a native client.
If you haven't listened, we went in depth on this topic here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nuh/id1694064646?i=1000677472142
Wow! One that I missed! I'll give it a listen. Thanks!
Enjoyed this conversation. A lot of it was way over my head, but I seem to like to torture myself that way.
So, with Pubkey, a user would be signing up through a homeserver, and if that homeserver decided to censor them, they would be SOL and have to start over, just like with Mastodon? Am I understanding that correctly? No posting a note to a few different relays for the sake of censorship resistance via redundancy?
It's been a while, but I believe that's right. Cryptographically signed data is also sort of an afterthought, so there's no smooth path to trustless content replication either.
I caught that, and there was talk about the homeserver signing the content, rather than the user themselves signing their content.