Woop w00p.

There it would be a job, here it's just fun.

I have an X account. Never applied to get a checkmark, but never did it here either. I have never received a single penny from X.

I think you have to be a big shot or some influencer to get paid there.

I'm a tinkerer. It's what I do.

Top tip. When using #Amethyst, if you search for #asknostr to follow it, the first few hits will be users who have sneakily named themselves the same.

Scroll, look for posts with #asknostr, click the hashtag and follow that.

Feels good to earn sats just by using social media.

🤑🤑🤑 https://video.nostr.build/dba5ceb3f8afc7a618c40b232b2d42a69fa3b9f02ee29e1c746e70fd8acb9011.mp4

I did notice that had disappeared. 😅

nostr:nprofile1qqsyvrp9u6p0mfur9dfdru3d853tx9mdjuhkphxuxgfwmryja7zsvhqpzamhxue69uhhv6t5daezumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcscpyug I'd like to understand a little more about how I can tell that my posts are reaching.

I have sometimes posted while on the train and I suspect those posts aren't really reaching out.

Does the client keep a note of posts that didn't broadcast and retry them?

Is there a way to see all my notes, reply or otherwise and see how well broadcast they are?

I would love to check up after my journey and hit a button to rebroadcast any posts that are weak.

I do have a local relay on the phone. not sure it it helps or hurts in my situation.

Is nostr.com still owned by nostr:nprofile1qqsvrlrhw86l5sv06wkyjgs6rrcekskvk7nx8k50qn9m7mqgeqxjpvgpzdmhxue69uhhqatjwpkx2urpvuhx2ue0tc48yt?

Mostr pulls content from mastadon and bluesky. Maybe the mess is really happening mostly on the controlled, moderated and censored platforms.

What?

You bought a coupon and it asked who you were buying it for?

Wow. Put it this way and it seems democracy is about gaslighting the public to believe things are fair while the ruling class take from the public for whatever they want.

nostr:nevent1qqsxffpx720v7ggu2hqvmrh8zze7f4r4g7jekx34e2tv6dsk8hcpkxqppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgs0eac2gh86s9l24qfmnw52xawhz0f3d862yleaetpafygjmanaxlsrqsqqqqqpcn0u5h

Paid relays will be clear about what they do, if you pay enough, they might even get audits to ease your mind. Free ones will do what they want.

Each note you post is like publishing a webpage online. https://archive.org/ is a cool website that scans the internet and archives everything it can. If you change the page, or if the site goes down, then these guys have historical records to look back on.

This is no different than public records of public events in libraries for example.

Remember that your posts are public. If you want private comms, use group chats on privacy focused apps like Signal, but then you aren't getting public reach. Tradeoffs. I use private chats to share personal photos, I don't do that here or on any social platform. Not even Instagram. I don't trust it not to feed my pics to AI and in the past I didn't trust them to not leak photos, sell them to advertisers, or take pictures of children and sell them to pedophiles. Not that they did any of those things, but I don't take risks I don't need to.

If you ask to delete your data, the relay can choose to behave like https://archive.org/ and say "no, it is a matter of public record" or say yes and do it, and a malicious relay could say yes and then keep it and sell it etc.

It is our responsibility to preserve our own privacy. There is no undo button in life. The undo button only existed when you were editing documents on your personal computer. Once we started doing things on the internet, the undo button could never truly exist anymore.

I'm not totally sure, nostr is a protocol and so every new feature has to go through a public process where people can review it, criticize it and help to improve it.

If something will compete or conflict with other existing features, then it will be caught before clients and relays begin to include those features.

Relays don't need to implement all features and clients don't need to support all features. The protocol ensures that relays and clients who follow it will always know what is supported when they communicate so that things run as smoothly as possible.

Users will pick the clients that work best for them. When new core features come out, some clients will be fast to adopt them and they will be for the power users who are willing to test new features and deal with the bugs, then more polished clients will start to adopt them ONLY IF IT IS USEFUL... For example, an Instagram-like client like #olas might not ever need to support custom fonts in messages.

It is chaotic. Life is chaotic. Embrace the chaos and we'll build great things together.

For relays, all messages are signed by your nsec. If your note I'd modified in any way, the signature will not match and a digital signature is not like a physical one that can be forged,: it is impossible to tweak or remake a signature to match.

For clients, they are responsible for validating signatures and dismissing/ignoring invalid junk. They usually also look after your nsec. This is where things get technical, but we can probably rely on social protections.

Clients should be open source. There shouldn't really be anything to hide, and technical experts will audit the code and raise the alarm if it does anything bad with your nsec; like if it leaks it or makes changes to your notes that you don't expect before signing.

There was a client in the past, I think it was by thndr, and they went the route of letting you create a username and password. Behind the scenes they would create and look after your nsec for you so you don't need to worry about it. This was critisized heavily because I think the client was not open source, the servers looked after your nsec so it definitely wasn't private and your secret, and so they could TECHNICALLY request deletions and create new posts on your behalf while you are not paying attention. Ultimately you had to put your trust in them the same way you put your trust in Twitter not to ban you or remove your posts.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have remote signing apps and even devices that some clients support. You can imagine someone as important as the POTUS who writes infrequent but important messages would carry around a dongle that only unlocks with their fingerprint and would need to use that to sign each message they write or approve.

I actually use Amethyst for my main client, but Amethyst doesn't know my nsec. Another program called Amber has it, and when I send a note, it will ask Amber to sign it, Amber will show me the request in a pop-up and I can inspect it to see what it is signing before I approve it. If Amethyst wanted to do anything behind the scenes without me prompting, it would need to ask Amber and I would see a popup, so I know that Amethyst cannot misbehave as long as Amber is secure and not colluding with Amethyst. I actually auto allow things like likes and zaps to reduce the number of taps I need to make for such small things and zaps mean nothing unless I open my wallet and press send the way I have it set up.

When I go on my laptop, some clients allow me to log in by connecting to my Amber client. The website does not get my nsec. When I post a message, Amber let's me vet it and if the website tries anything else, I see a popup on my phone and I can reject the action if I don't like it.

Basically, this stuff has been thought of and there are solutions. The more you are worried about malicious clients and your privacy, the more work you need to put in yourself to understand it all and take control. The devs put in even harder work, they wanted protections and they built it and they now support and maintain those solutions. You just need to shop around, find the right solution for you, use nostr and ask around to see if it is legit and then use it.

I have a dream, that when MLS is ready, we will have real private nostr.

Imagine Olas but it just has your family and baby pictures. No creeps, stalkers or corporate servers allowed.

I think a lot of people will say yes to nuts, not all of them know about ecash.

A lot of your questions are actually unknown. Some might consider that scary but I think it is exciting. I can't answer with what WILL happen, only what COULD happen.

Relays follow a protocol, so the software used by a particular operator could be a popular one, or one they made themselves.

This means that some relays accept everything unconditionally, some can be configured to block based on arbitrary conditions, they could block by IP, they could block by your npub, they could block by hashtags or using AI to filter content. Some relays will only host content from specific users and ignore the rest of the data sent its way.

Not only that, but at some point, a conversion was had about how relays can cover costs, so the protocol was grown to include a way for relays to declare a payment method and they can choose to only store content from npubs that have paid.

They can also limit read access, you need to sign a challenge to prove your identity (basically log in) and then they will let you connect and get notes.

I think you should look for podcasts about nostr to hear interesting discussions around this. nostr:nprofile1qqsx2wyjt6lmvc05rrvv05r5hm3w3t7h0pcpmkyswrpd4ymd2u09tscpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtc7dx3ah is a great podcast app for it.

We already have relays that store profiles and follow lists only (they don't store content).

Relays don't store media, just notes. There are some interesting innovations happening with "blossom servers" to handle media. Right now, nostr.build is the main host for all media and they provide a paid subscription to help with running costs. Primal have their own media servers for their users too.

There is discussion about relays focusing on supporting certain communities. There could be a football relay which relays only football related content.

Some relays focus on finding and blocking spam.

None of the nostr clients are alike, but as the demand grows, so will the network and so too will everything evolve. As data gets organized across relays non-uniformly, clients will adapt.

Right now, hobbyists run relays, some have already turned them into businesses, but eventually we will see, will many small servers work well or do we need to have a few big reliable relays?

Even if we need a few big relays for the majority of people, there are so many possibilities in between. We just don't know how it's gonna go.

Just a note about scaling. If we do get community specific relays, that could mean that load is distributed across many relays and relays may never need to be as big as Twitter or Facebook's servers.

The website is pretty good all by itself.

I spent some time trying to get it too. Even though it doesn't work in the UK 😅.

You do incur ever growing debt. Ideally you pay the interest so you're not growing faster than you need to. As long as your asset keeps growing faster than your debt, you never need to pay the debt.

It isn't as easy as it sounds, but if your asset pays dividends and the dividends (after tax) help to keep the debt in control, then it is manageable.

If you ever settled the loan by liquidating the asset, you would be liable for Capital Gains tax.

When you die, you pass on the asset. The inheritors also inherit the debt. The "cost basis" is reset. This means that if THEY pay off the loan by selling the asset, then there is no capital gains to pay.

They settle the loan and have no extra bills, then they start again with whatever is left of the asset.

If they can afford not to sell, they keep going without paying off the inherited debt first.