Thanks guys! To be honest, I'm not super tech savvy so nostr was a lot for me to grasp... If i got compromised on literally day 1, I think I need to do some research before I make another account. Until then... <3
really not sure what is happening on this platform at this point...
somehow, I've been involved in some weird phishing scam with my nsec? which keeps escalating. What I thought was a client app for gaming (when I first joined nostr) was not... and I pasted my nsec into that. It never occurred to me until 2 nights ago that I had, unknowingly, been phished. I cannot even tell what is and isn't being posted here because my computer is basically broken at this point and my feed barely works.
and, ultimately, the actions of me simply user testing a proof-of-concept, that I've replicated on various legacy socials previously, resulted in the safety of myself, my friends, and my family being severely compromised.
I joined nostr because the conversation happening in my country full of people that I love deeply, surrounding free speech, is getting scary. The US has, fundamentally, been built on the Constitution. I have always stood for the protection of all citizens of the world, but I am biased towards America because America is my home. That is what I care about. But, the America that I am in today is not one reflecting the values we were fundamentally built on.
I felt new platforms might provide new solutions...
Now, here I am, a week later with almost every platform I have under various methods of attack... including impersonations. The physical evidence of who I am in my real-world reality has become completely misaligned with an online identity that was mob-rule style created for... why? I don't even know.
Why someone would target a person just trying to help others navigate the online world makes no sense to me? Why innocent people continue to be silenced also makes no sense to me?
I am simply a mostly peaceful artist who is hoping for a semi better world- online and in my own country. I want that for all of you too.
Every device that I own is under attack. I lost electricity at one point. and I've been isolated from pretty much any form of secure communications. and, yeah... I genuinely feel afraid right now.
Never trust, always verify is making it impossible for me to know who is targeting me and who is understanding what was intended as a very peaceful message- about authenticity, about humanity, and about our right to protection of our property (without use of force).
I never intended to really do anything here except check out if this user-based algorithm provided a better space to for my friends to create content and get paid. I literally just wanted my friends to be able to use bitcoin on a platform that was relatively secure for them to do so.
I've talked about so many conflicting ideas on this platform... political discourse is how we remain in a semi state of extropy as we push against entropy and vice versa. Discourse, including political, must remain protected and nostr felt the most ideal place to make that happen.
Now, I'm just hopeless for the state of everything.
Label after label after labelā¦
Now, imagine I am your family. The people that you love the most.
Today, I am adding to my resume:
āThey think that I really donāt know how to turn on a relayā
āSex robotā
āRobot in generalā
āCommunistā
āClear your cacheā
āSheās a fedā
āSheās a ratā
Shut up. Iāve been building this plan for 5 years.
If you think they wonāt slay you after slaying meā¦ HA
theyāre coming for you, I was just the person willing to die for it first.
Do you see now? Do you see yet?
Psychopaths. All of them.
Stu!! I would not leave you here in nostrovia... I have a lil more cajones than that <3 If I can figure out how to sunset my key, I may keep this account so I can help out people, like Robin... but they need to know it's me and not a malicious entity. Unfortunately, a large body of nostrville has acquired the mind virus. They value things that have a dollar sign attached to it, but forget that there's a fundamental value system, underground, backing that symbol. Some of us remember... and, sometimes, when things get too out of hand, we have to come out of the shadows to remind people why the shadows exist. I have always chosen the middle road, but the middle has started to accept subpar standards for entry. Bitcoin is a tool for the people, not for the state and, certainly, not a tool for industries to siphon and traffick out more creative labor from divine beings. Some people here are the state. always have been, always will be. Next, we will watch their circus play with CBDCs.
Your security blog will certainly be helpful in these next conditions! Thanks Ghost... people never value privacy until they actually realize they don't have it :)
See you again soon, Beave! Keep keepin' it real
I love that idea Melvin! Thank you for sharing. I don't want to leave my only public facing profile as I've found quite the family here. I am going to explore this more. Ideally, I keep this one and people can remain confident, moving forward, that it is only my pen/voice/keystroke signing events. But, as many have noted, makes sense to spin up new npubs too as I navigate new security methods. So much has changed in 4 years... I'm relearning/ unlocking a lot of blocked out memories right now. so it's a bit of a struggle to reorient.
It hurts my heart that someone was cruel to you here... you've helped my journey immensely.
Those fears are valid! The beauty of nostr is that we now have these channels to share information just like that through social networking. I think all of nostrville could benefit from that content. I certainly will do my best to help others along the way š«±š¼āš«²š½ and welcomeā¦ I think youāll find this is a pleasant place to be
Top o the morning nostrovians š„³ā ļø
This will be my last post from this specific npub
At this point, I am sure that a Minimum of 3 different actors have access to my nsec through exploits of my systems. So youāll just have to trust my voice/pen right now.
A bit of a wild ride but Iāll try to explainā¦
The day Brazil banned X, I came to nostr. My favorite AI engineer content builds from Brazil.
My legacy socials have been shadow banned for years (roughly 2021). Iāve largely stepped away from the online worldā¦ but recently revived some socials to help friends out with their content. They are athletes, not computer whizzes. We mostly live in the dirt. Off grid as possible.
Motorcycle racing is a difficult industry and itās costlyā¦ so when I arrived at nostr I immediately fell back in love with IoV. I used to contribute daily to projects like nostr. In fact, we used to have something like zaps on another platform but it got banned due to the regulatory crackdown of us in 2020. We were suddenly a ābankā and that was confusing when it came to KYC on centralized platforms. Weitse Wind is an incredible mouthpiece for kindness in this space and he waded us through an absolute mess. Iāve had great mentors. I owe them a lot.
Whenever I build a platform, I imagine it as a service to others bc I genuinely try to live by a service to others mindset. Hence open source projects
So, I follow a prototype to scale modelā¦ this npub is an outlier.
I started nostr from a computer but as I looked at the source I got scared for onboarding my friends and family. Weāre still trying to digest 2FA in that world.
So I created a proof-of-conceptā¦ I didnāt realize it would scale this quickly.
I onboarded as though I know nothing about encryption. so I used my real face and a lot of other really real details. Also, some not real because I knew I was in a pit of vipers. We all are, on the internet, always.
I literally pasted my keys to a word docā¦ I built this as sloppy as I know my loved ones would. And then I downloaded the apps to my phone. And along the way tried to explain what was happeningā¦ I didnāt touch any code and I only changed a relay once, but Iām pretty sure at one point my real human IP was banned.
And here we areā¦ multiple people have control of my account. You all have no way of knowing which signed events are actually a match to my face. Youāve witnessed both the burning of my books and a witch hunt in real time. And all of this data is stamped in history as though it is me. At the āblockā level.
Proof-of-concepts are helpful because they give us visuals and immersive experience. Measure twice, cut once.
My next profile will be me in full authenticity, but those keys will be secured with biometrics.
Thank you for coming my extremely confused TedxTalk and namaste. šš¼
nostr has no global source of truth, and that is a good thing
Out of interest, I follow the progress of a lot of other projects similar to nostr, and a couple links surfaced today:
BlueSky has a big "firehose" connection that streams all updates (new posts, reactions, etc) to subscribers. Unsurprisingly, this is difficult to process except on beefy servers with lots of bandwidth. So, one proposed solution is to strip out all that pesky cryptography (signatures, merkle tree data, etc): https://jazco.dev/2024/09/24/jetstream/
And over on Farcaster, keeping their hubs in sync is too difficult, so they want to make all posts globally sequenced, like a blockchain. The details are still being worked out, but I think it's safe to assume there will be a privileged global sequencer who decides on this ordering (and possibly which posts are included at all): https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol/discussions/193
In my opinion, both of these issues are symptoms of an underlying errant philosophy. These projects both want there to be a global source of truth: A single place you can go to guarantee you're seeing all the posts on a thread, from a particular user, etc. On BlueSky that is https://bluesky.app and on Farcaster that is https://warpcast.com .
Advocates of each of these projects of course would dispute this, pointing out that you could always self-host, or somehow avoid depending on their semi-official infrastructure, but the truth is that if you're not on bluesky.app or warpcast.com, you don't exist, and nobody cares that you don't exist.
nostr has eschewed the concept of global source of truth. You can't necessarily be sure you are seeing everything. Conversations may sometimes get fragmented, posts may disappear, and there may be the occasional bout of confusion and chaos. There is no official or semi-official nostr website, app, or relay, and this is a good thing. It means we are actually building a decentralised protocol, not just acting out decentralisation theatre, or pretending we'll get there eventually and that the ends justify the means.
Back when computers were primitive and professional data-centres didn't exist, it was impossible to build mega-apps like Twitter. Protocols had to be decentralised by default -- there was simply no other way. We can learn a lot by looking back to protocols of yesteryear, like Usenet and IRC, and still-popular protocols like email and HTTP. None of these assume global sources of truth, and they are stronger and better for it, as is nostr.
interesting... removing the merkle tree
Hey eliza! I love the Carl pictures... but, I think there is a crucial point to be made here... as nostr scales, new users will rapidly onboard at a rate that cannot be kept up with as far as "guided onboarding" goes. BUT! That's how we decentralize. It's going to look freaking beautiful in real time.
For now, I've done some recent research and thought... technical decentralization actually has some parameters that MUST be met to create a strengthened network.
interoperability is more complicated than most people understand (even me... im just a girl)... that's why meme coins don't quite TALK TO EACHOTHER yet (on other networks). think of all of us (individuals) as NODES trying to trade with each other (passing notes in class but farrrrrr apart in location)... but there isn't a fully realized DEX yet to make it happen with speed. Speed is complicated at a layered level and scale requires speed. Our current methods make things slow or... just plain broken. like we kind of accidentally burned this bridge we didn't mean to. protoype:final product
with that being said, there's also some legal ramifications (for us users) to consider as things scale... no one here wants to see anyone commit illegal crimes. and we certainly don't want to see anyone hurt on a network we're trying to protect. but on a decentralized protocol... the user is responsible for themselves. So, people who have been at this game for a hot minute, warn others about landmines.
The way that the state works is like this... people exist. state creates laws against nature. people exist naturally. and then the state tells you... jail.
that's not acceptable for anyone gatekeeping this network. Some of us are here to protect the user experience as a community...
Idk if you're familiar with Aaron Swartz... he's a legend for some of us. I find that the idea of open source is... "we all share the problem" and "we all check and balance against each other because sometimes we find we are the problem".
Please keep posting Carl. He's the best. and animals will always be the natural order of things.
I'm just a regular everyday user stu so I'm still comparing notes on all of them... I looked into getting back on Proton.
A lot of people don't know this but Proton used to be set up differently... So, I'm a bit confused and trying to understand these updates and the why.
When you start crawling relay lists to aggregate relays, you realize how all sorts of fucked up a lot of relay lists are.
Parsing all this and throwing out everything that's not a valid clearnet websocket server is a lot of crap to clean up. Getting closer though. Finding about 890 online clearnet relays.
https://tenor.com/view/rookie-numbers-gif-26135237
#crawlr
Well said! I have toggled on 2 relays and my UX has been splendid so far
