Subnostr

Quick thoughts on NIP-95 in no particular order:

- There isn’t anything anyone can do to prevent someone from putting files on a nostr relay. It doesn’t matter what you think of the idea.

- NIP-95 does not belong on the majority of relays (perhaps all) that exist today. If it is ever adopted it will be by specialized relays (likely operated by existing http image hosts) who are willing to give up efficiency for some interoperability gain. I think it is naive to write off the entire spec because it doesn’t fit in to our idea of nostr today.

- Relay operators deserve notice before something like this is released in a major client. I know that won’t be possible forever, but while our ecosystem is still small it wouldn’t take much to get the word out. I think a lot of the reason for the controversy (client rendering aside) is that files were “forced” upon relay operators before most of them even knew NIP-95 had been proposed.

- Open source relay implementations should probably be a bit more selective about the type of events they accept with how quickly nostr is evolving. There may be plenty of other event kinds in the future that you also do not want to store for one reason or another.

0xtr 2y ago

IMO, kind 1064 and 1065 should be blocked by default in relay implementations as they are interntionally used to store files. Let relay operators actively decide if they want to store everyones files on their harddrive.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Blake 2y ago

Kind 1063 seems ok, as it’s basically like a mapping or lookup metadata event. It’s not designed to store data, but basic properties and how to fetch it elsewhere.

However kind 1064 storing files on relays is a bad architectural approach for a few reasons.

1. Events are stored in DBs today. DBs hate binary (in general). We have enough text based data to try make fast and efficient - especially when we 10-1000X.

2. Relays need to be lighter weight to minimise the cost of running them.

3. We don’t want to encourage the vector of DDOS or fill relays disk space denial of service attacks. Or even promote storing encrypted blobs of file chunks - like in DMs.

4. We need a general purpose distributed and decentralised file storage system anyway - Nostr can piggy back off it when we solve that problem.

5. Files create more attention for geographical regulation. Hosting issues. Vector of DCMA fraud. Etc.

The main issue today is client compatibility and breaking user experiences - with something that common sense tells us cannot scale or function as intended.