It’s funny how “safety” always leads to the same solutions.

Article without the paywall: https://archive.ph/XGz1E

Any service that allows access to content with only a URL carries the risk of being indexed by Google and other search engines. Other less-friendly bots will find it too.

It just takes one person posting the link somewhere public, even if it’s a bad actor with access to their mailbox or chat.

At least OpenAI stopped attaching the account name by default, but allowing authenticated links would be better.

Until this is handled better, I’ll experiment with using a smaller number of relays. Perhaps this will reduce the probability of race conditions.

They're definitely gone. I just re-followed a few, and I can confirm by looking at my account from different devices. Looks like it's a race condition, but should be solved (or less common) when more clients implement NIP-65.

ChatGPT summary of the disappearing follow list problem and the status of resolution. I suspect the TL;DR is - back it all up periodically. It's going to keep happening until every client I use supports NIP-65:

Nostr users often experience their follow lists disappearing due to a combination of factors: local storage loss, client bugs, missing relay synchronization, or switching between clients that don’t re-import historical data. This is because follow lists are stored in Kind 3 events that can be lost if relays prune them or clients fail to re-fetch them properly. To address this, NIP-65 introduces Kind 10002 “Relay List Metadata” events, which let users publish a signed list of their read/write relays. This helps clients reliably locate where a user posts and reads events, improving follow list stability and relay discovery. While the NIP-65 spec is finalized and some clients already support it, adoption is still growing, and many users remain reliant on older, less reliable methods. Broader support and regular publishing of Kind 10002 events are key to solving this problem at scale.

What causes Nostr to simply forget all the people I've followed? I've only been using it for a day, and I already have to start over.

Release early, and release often. But I don’t know if #bitchat should have shipped without a prominent on/off switch.

In the long term, I’d love location-based dead zones. I don’t want to announce my home-away status so readily!

Do you think there will be a network effect, with Bitchat as an on ramp to the rest of the Nostr ecosystem?

It would be helpful if the Nostr connection settings links to a simple intro. Don’t be afraid to be opinionated. Guiding users toward Nostr apps with the simplest onboarding experiences would increase success rates.

I'm convinced that child safety isn't the actual motivation. Creating a child-safe Internet after the fact is a fool's errand. Moral or not, if it's not a whitelist-based site or content filtering approach, it's child safety theater.

Political actors are newly desperate to get tools of control in place for other uses. Child safety is merely the convenient tool for inserting the tip of the wedge.

This is all happening now because politicians are unwilling to push back against any kind of child safety legislation. People are hyper-vigilant over signals that connect politicians to Epstein, and that makes the politicians anxious. This situation presented a rare opportunity.