Nostr Web Client

And I agree with your 🌶 take.

I looked in the MLS, Signal and other encryption options for way too long to in the end realize they are:

- not worth the UX trade-offs at all

- distracting users away from taking responsibility and host stuff (name one of these solutions that has good UX around relays and media servers)

- a bunch of security hype that ignore the weakest link (human members) and strongest adversary (uber-wealthy deceivers class) all the time.

Technical Debt 4mo ago

I want to piggyback on that.

Seeing some nostr based chat apps implementing group chats that rely on a single relay to work is the kind of centralization that “we don’t really need”.

Federated protocols such as activity pub shift the “sovereignty” away from a single big centralized entity into many little but still centralized entities but nostr takes it a step further by bringing sovereignty down to each and every individual npub.

So tl;dr: don’t “give away power” to relays, build features for npubs

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Discussion

Anthony Accioly 4mo ago 💬 1

I think Niel here is working on the answer you’re looking for. I’m of a different opinion on this one. Relays are just like clients: as long as they’re light and easy enough for common folks to run, I have zero issues with them.

I do prefer some separation between client and relay (i.e. I think the Nostr model is better than ActivityPub on this front, and I’m not a huge fan of things like Ditto; even though I admit Ditto is how I first heard about Nostr).

However, if relays are absorbing some of the complexity, that should make things simpler for clients not just in theory but in practice. That’s not really what I’m seeing with some NIPs. Still, it’s early days, and I’ll keep experimenting until something works for communities. So far, I know that closed, auth relays work well for communities, but I’m also bullish on at least three different alternatives with varying degrees of dependency on specialised relays and backend components.

Technical Debt 4mo ago

I think the only thing that can flare up more relays is economic incentives.

If we treat relays like bitcoin miners, for instance I don’t need to pay a monthly fee to a specific miner so he (and only he) can put my transactions into the blockchain, then it shouldn’t matter if a raspberry pi in Indonesia or nostr.build relays a given bit of something, I mean come on, we have lightning, it should be possible to arrange some micropayments sort of thing.

Regarding client complexity, it doesn’t appear to be much of an issue given we have some varying uses of the nostr protocol which don’t really need every single feature to work.

We didn’t have complex access control rules on Twitter. Mastodon kind of brought up this sort of entanglement between “here lies a community of likely minded people shouting into the same void” and “this same set of people have a server in common” but that’s just an “accident”, and they are forever bound together (just like with every federated protocol).

For them, “mobile accounts, server independent” is just a pipedream that shall forever be on the backlog. But we have npubs, we have lightning, we can do better.