Great weekly wrap-up.

Some of them are too technical for noob like me though.🫠

nostr:naddr1qqxnzd3exqmrgwp5xs6rwvfhqgspc5hteqn9fezrlyjsrd7sefjeu79htlwuh8z6vhck3my526vvj2srqsqqqa28xlgfes

just setting up my Nostr

best long-form content formatting I’ve seen on Damus 💜

#fckthisdystopia

To me, this is also very interesting. Has anyone looked at migrating tweets to nostr? Can notes be backdated? nostr:note12a2nrsxd3uuddpcefeydksa9kdjqrv5g9rmlfq2mvxnkz4w8fqjq45k2cf

Awesome, Greg! Personally I have trouble keeping up with: newly merged or hot topic NIPs, major features or apps being released (not every release of everything, but big things like the recent curated community spec). Maybe if there’s not much going on in a week spotlighting an existing tool that people love might be nice. Sometimes things get released and then I never hear about them again, it’s hard to know what people are finding useful over longer periods of time.

tech focused, not anything trending.

do it. Permissionlessly. If you have the inkling just write it.

Awesome, Greg! Personally I have trouble keeping up with: newly merged or hot topic NIPs, major features or apps being released (not every release of everything, but big things like the recent curated community spec). Maybe if there’s not much going on in a week spotlighting an existing tool that people love might be nice. Sometimes things get released and then I never hear about them again, it’s hard to know what people are finding useful over longer periods of time.

Exactly.

One of the simplest shortcuts to have a better life is to never wait for permission or the “right circumstances” to do the things you want to do.

If you wait for that you’ll be waiting your entire life.

(inb4 the akkkshually army: there’s obviously nuance to this)

I was just watching videos from this channel. It has a good playlist for the Old Testament.

I like your goals with nostr.watch but I fear there will be problems further down the road re your 2 points:

1) Isn't that all done with expensive AI? eg detecting copyrighted music in YouTube videos or book texts. We can open source such tech (though that is a challenge in itself) but who will have the resources to run that at scale on nostr relays? Big corps again. Already YouTube dominates the video market because it can (or claims it can) deal with copyrighted material. Blocking and censorship is done by machines and thousands of employed content moderators. Nostr relay owners can't compete with laws that already demand this level of censorship and filtering in order not to be sued into oblivion.

2) It won't be easy because any publicly known relay will be subject to (1) above. The only way that works is if relay owners are prepared to break the law and nostr is only used over tor. Which makes discovery difficult and therefore nostr not useful as an alternative to a global twitter/blogging/media discovery platform.

We do need to push for decentralisation but the only real way to do that is with anonymity/ignoring AI DMCAs etc, but that creates a barrier to entry and huge risks for relay owners, which is not good for adoption. A network with nobody on is not much use. Sorry I know that sounds very negative but I've been thinking about how nostr will look in 5 years and I DO see its popularity rising but I just can't see a way around it being dominated almost exclusively by the likes of Twitter and Google, with all the same problems around free speech / censorship of posts that we have now. Nostr works in the short term only when the network is to small for anybody with power to censor to care much care

I think we can have our cake and eat it too if

1. we make very robust open source relays that can have tools to automate that kind of work: DMCA takedowns, etc (if people want to comply with the law)

2. It’s easy to find and subscribe to many relays to cross pollinate widely enough that we don’t need central relays controlled by big players. Again requiring robust relays that are cheap to run and manage

That’s why I’m working on a relay discovery tool like Nostr.watch but with more of a community bent. I wanna see if I can convince relay operators to publish their community preferences and help people discover a couple dozen relays they should join.

But overall I think we just have to keep pushing for decentralisation and meet the challenges that incentivise centralisation as they come up

I think you are right to point this out. I don't see how nostr is different to how the internet started out and has always been but not used. People have alsways been able to publish their words to their own website or to a forum run by a community in a decentralized or partially centralized way. Most just chose not to. Its just as easy to publish your own blog on substack as it is on Habla or write a post on twitter as it to a paid nostr relay. But the risks are still the same in the long term because the relays that are popular are likely to be funded and resourced like twitter or facebook servers are - by big corps. Of course we can use other nostr relays (most won't - that is a certainty) but only in so far as we could use any of the plethora of social media networks that have tried to be the next twitter but nobody ever does because well, nobody else is connected to them. Nostr relays will go the same route once (if) the network expands and we are all back to square one again. On top of all this relay owners will be subject to copyright laws, porn laws, DMCAs, and all other legal compliance laws that twitter has to, and only big corps will have the budget, lawyers and high tech needed to comply and keep their relays running. I hope I am wrong.

I rarely lose my temper, but whenever I do a couple times per year, my writing gets 10x as much reach and likes and shares, and gets basically immortalized. But I'm rarely happy about it when it does.

I still think about this a lot in terms of how I choose to use social media- with reach comes responsibility.

It's both a bad thing and a good thing. On one hand, it's not great that posts based on a combination of emotion and reason get *way* better reach than ones based on more pure reason alone. For "clicks" the best thing I could do for a given post is lose my temper and go all-out on something.

On the other hand, the rare cases where I lose my temper are based on serious built-up frustrations over months. I'm frustrated about something, keep holding it back, and then something becomes intolerable. My socially-compliant self-censorship all unravels at once, not perfectly, but with a clear aspect of *deep* honesty. And people see that honesty because it reflects their own. So it spreads.

So, most of the time, I write carefully, and I know my audience comes from multiple different backgrounds, literally from Indonesian farmers to Wall Street institutional billionaires, and I try to politely move the Overton window from within the Overton window. But a couple times per year, I lose my temper and post my emotional thoughts, which in some ways are more honest, but are also not exactly my ideal self-actualized self.

I end up being grateful for both my constant attempt at control and my rare tempers, because somewhere in the middle is my truth. That blend between controlled reason and built-up emotion is really hard to manage in an era of digital media and semi-immortalized content.

Anyway, I'll post this random stuff on Nostr, not Twitter. You guys and girls get the real thoughts because you're here.

Agreed, I’ve definitely had that same question.

I definitely wanna hack on this.

I know you can query relay metadata. And people can publish relay lists. I’m wondering if relays can currently state in their metadata some concept of “communities” that the relay is “intended for”

Something optional that just indicates what the relay’s host wants to attract. They wouldn’t boot people based on this, they’d just be raising their hand so that people can find the relay based on interests/identity/locale/etc.

If that already exists then I’ll just build a relay discovery tool that aggregates this info in a way that’s searchable by Nostr users.

If not I may try to add a NIP for it / set a pattern and see if people are interested even before a NIP.

What do you think?