Your relay isn’t magical. It only allows you to see what people post to it.

This would work if each user had a separate “home relay” and only posted there. Each client connect to as many relays as people you follow.

In practice pretty much everyone post to the same dozen relays, multiple relays at a time.

So these relays can easily manipulate what you see — no matter if you run your own relay.

If you decide only to post to your own relay, then people will likely never see it. If you post to other relays too then people will have little incentive to keep an expensive connection to yours (esp on their phones which is how 99% will ise Nostr).

Saying “use your own relay and shill it” is like saying “create your own platform” — completely impractical.

The problem has never been finding *somewhere* to host your content — the problem is if people will actually see it.

Nostr adds absolutely no new tech or incentive that didn’t exist 15 years ago when Twitter was becoming dominant — there’s just no breakthrough in it — and you can expect things to turn out exactly the same way unless some other thing that isn’t Nostr affects the outcome.

The *one* thing that is different this time is that now Lightning Network exists — if Nostr clients are faster to integrate LN reliably and attract users than legacy social media, that might change incentives enough to change the bigger picture— but that’s wild speculation, and again has nothing to do with Nostr specifically.

Nostr is just RSS but with JSON+WebSocket instead of XML+HTTP.

Exactly

Unless you convince everyone you follow to add your relay it makes no difference.

Unless all your followers add your relay you’ll lose reach

Don’t worry the relays will filter events for you. They will have their own algos.

Only way to know they’re not doing that would be to receive *all* messages — and have a way to verify you got all messages.

Nostr doesn’t allow for that. So you have to just trust relays are not manipulating your feed.

History shows that is very unlikely to hold true for long.

As number of events grow into daily millions the incentive to discard most in a way users will not notice or care is tremendous.

Remember Twitter censorship grew out of its anti-spam efforts.

How do you tell a spammer from a legitimate user?

What uses are legitimate and who gets to say that?

It’s like people never talked to anyone irl. They can’t understand how did people managed to talk to each other and not die of hurt feelings before the Internet lmao

It was an attempt. It didn’t work.

Not sure how you can get a fair sample with just Nostr as it is now.

Of course you can’t force people. Buy you can make it easier for them.

How long until malicious relay + impersonation + asking for zaps and personal info phishing scams?

If people aren’t yet using malicious relays to impersonate jack and jb55 to ask for zaps then its still very early 😂

That sounds good to me. Perhaps could add a very specific warning that malicious relays can do phishing by impersonating people you trust.

Can’t read people’s minds don’t use Twitter but perhaps the fact that Nostr doesn’t live up to the ridiculous over-hype around isn’t helping.

Yes. But when you add non-recommended ones there could be a text explaining the risks.

The downside is most people will get scared and never add other relays. Well most people will never add relays manually anyway.

That’s why I think we need fair sampling.

You can actually do that for the past to a certain extent.

Books used to be expensive to create, and the most important ones were made to be even more expensive.

Before print you if you just focused on the most beautiful books (in terms of cover, illuminations, illustrations) you’d focusing on the information people thought valuable enough to spend resources to attach huge amounts of proof-of-work to it.

You could read just 20 books in your whole life and be very well informed abou all *relevant* events of history— and you didn’t need to trust your social graph.

People usually get it completely wrong about the Church restricting knowledge during the Middle Ages — it was the other way around, they were tirelessly working to preserve information, in a mostly decentralized manner.

It was just *after* the printing press that censorship become a relevant problem — because they tried to keep the world from changing by fiat, which was doomed to fail and end in corruption.

I think that’s sad.

The Internet can connect all humans on Earth. It was supposed to.

Yet we keep looking for ways to be live in our tiny little echo chambers.

If people have to go out of their way to hear from those outside their circle they won’t.

And if they see all info filtered by a group — that group will eventually use that fact against them.

Instead of finding solutions we keep inventing new ways of reproducing the same old problems.

Could also just automatically validate the sig when you interact with a note in any way (like, reply, repost, etc)

Fewer UI changes.

Adding a warning about adding non-trusted relays is also a good idea.

That’s a good idea. Ideally should display a serious warning if the check fails auto-remove the relay that sent it, and resync everything.

I kid you not

Damus and Snort don’t check for sure. Jb55 himself said so about Damus and I saw the code in Snort. I think many more.

If devs don’t see clients not checking sigs as a problem yet…

That means they don’t take Nostr seriously… yet.

Why should anyone take it seriously then?

Code is just commented out without any explanation… in a commit that does a lot of other stuff.

I think the worst is how client developers deal with it as some minor thing — while shouting to the world that Nostr is tamper-proof, censorship-resistant, and all the amazing things it’s going to do.

If you don’t check signatures you get the worst possible deal. The more relays you add the less you can trust the events you see are real.

Kinda cognitive dissonance telling people to join Nostr as if it was ready to take on the world while coding their software as if it isn’t actually important.

Weird.