I’m playing with changing relays, and what that makes to timeline and followers.
Weird stuff
If everyone is using just 3 relays it’s not that trivial to switch relays.
Why would you connect to a new relay if nobody is posting there?
Why post there if nobody is listening to it?
Nostr isn’t P2P
So things seem to be going according to my predictions.
I expect it to get worse as user base further grows.
Exactly.
That’s the most likely scenario— one or at most a few entities controlling everything, except by a few silos that work like Mastodon instances.
All incentives are still the same. Why expect a different outcome?
On the other hand it could happen within people even noticing, as the same entity might present itself as multiple different relays.
Using Nostr for a few says made me realize I don’t want a censorship resistant alternative social media.
Social media sucks.
The best thing to happen to me was being kicked out of Twitter. My life got a lot better.
I want a censorship resistant alternative to find information and connect to people — and that is completely different from social media.
Twitter was kinda good when it was just microblogging without all the “social” crap.
Maybe I’ll make a Nostr client that only shows posts. No likes. No “boosts”. No followers. Maybe bios. And doesn’t let you interact with other peoples notes either. Then we can work from there.
Best way is using beef jerky as the fruit, and replacing the grains with a bit of nothing
I can see serious privacy issues with that being automatic, but if it’s optional…
Also note such a system would have much stronger guarantees than something like Nostr (which in my view isn’t censorship resistant in any meaningful way).
If such a system was created and became popular would it mean Nostr becomes irrelevant?
Most likely not.
Lower value use cases would probably be better served by something like Nostr (or any centralized platform).
Ultimately the broadcast system could be used as a transport for a subset of Nostr events (or whatever other uses).
You could use Bitcoin OP_RETURN to store censorship resistant, global broadcast messages.
It has *many* disadvantages, and I don’t recommend doing that for most use cases. But the fact that you can is proof by construction that it is possible to have a censorship-resistant global broadcast network, that is completely trustless, and fair — in the sense that everyone has a shot at broadcasting a message proportional to resources spent.
In fact if you remove individual transactions and treat each block as a message, it is quite perfectly fair and very hard to censor — as long as there’s a honest majority of hash rate.
“But it doesn’t scale!l” yes it doesn’t scale very well — but even at one message every ten minutes, a PoW chain of messages would already offer a lot of value.
But the main problem of scale here is that a PoW chain or “blockchain” was designed to offer a number of guarantees that are really expensive but essential for financial use cases.
Namely: strict immutable ordering, retaining records for indeterminate amounts of time, not having any liveness assumptions.
Those aren’t needed for broadcast communication in general.
It is my belief that other data structures are possible that preserve important properties of “blockchains” while being cheaper and obtaining higher bandwidth by giving up guarantees that aren’t relevant.
In the near future I will publish one, after working a bit more on a PoC . I want to be sure it works first.
I’m old enough to remember a time when
There were no “likes”
No reposts
No follows
Everybody had their own blog.
People switched “platforms” quite easily.
You could read your favourite blogs in an RSS client app of your choosing.
Nobody got “cancelled” for wrongthink.
Nobody was worried about misinformation.
You could find all kind of crazy stuff on Google and nobody thought that was “unsafe” much less a matter of national security.
Why did we go from that world to this one? How?
If we are kinda starting over again, how do we prevent it from happening again?
Bitcoin was nothing like that when it was as early as Nostr is now.
The very people proposing it were skeptical of it, willing to hear about all possible limitations etc — and it was a breakthrough obvious to anyone who did any research around the idea of digital cash. Nostr obviously has no big breakthrough in it — there’s not even any attempt to make arguments in that direction— only about how it changes everything, assuming it solves the problem of censorship.
It reminds me not of Bitcoin, but of the way newborn altcoins are shilled with wild assertions and zero research to back it.
Nostr doesn’t offer anything that wasn’t available before.
Does it offer the same things in a better way? Possibly. We’ll see.
To celebrate victory against the evil forces of censorship and brag about how Nostr will change the world — as most of the community seems to do — is just silly though.
Even if we find out you can’t actually do better than Nostr, that’s no excuse to claim it does more than it actually does.
It’s not that it doesn’t meet an hypothetical ideal.
It doe’s meet the standards its own proponents hype all the time.
You say there’s no way around it with such conviction. Yet a way has been known for decades.
If being connected to everyone necessarily meant being drowned in spam — then Bitcoin would be impossible.
You’re still limited to what people/relays/organizations you trust are willing to let you know about.
The internet was supposed to connect *everyone*.
I can see a future where after reinventing RSS people will realize they want to be able to find more than their tiny little social circles, so they will reinvent web directories, then web crawlers, PageRank, etc
Eventually we’ll have the whole web again! With exactly the same problems!
I don’t think any Nostr client support the Bitcoin blockchain. Some have integration with LN wallets. Is that what you talking about?
First you need to know the people exist.