What can we do about it?

Does your browser allow to access the clipboard in website settings? It might be on "never" by default. It needs clipboard access for amber to work.

Most people look at well-rounded Nostr apps and think Nostr is "almost finished": it just needs some touches here and there. That's like looking at Windows 3.11 and saying: "this is it".

We haven't even started. We are still a whole kernel re-building away from Windows 95.

I'm not sure I should write down these thoughts right now while I'm not sure about them, but if you are reading this apparently I did.

I think nostr may already be doomed for two reasons. And as a result of that, if I conclude as such, it would make sense to start working on a successor protocol. I've been taking some notes about what we should change if we started over, but that's the extent of it, I'm not working on a successor protocol. I'm only working on nostr. So don't misinterpret this note, which just represents some thoughts I've been having.

Reason one is the misaligned incentives of note copying. The incentives are to copy your notes to every relay you can, blast them out everywhere, to get more reach. That incentive doesn't go away until and unless all the clients do the outbox model. But they don't have an incentive to change, and there are people who don't give a fuck about fixing this and argue against fixing it and argue for note copying, and there is no way in a free society to make them care. So we can never fix this, and nostr will always be centralized in practice and never what it could have been. That means nostr is doomed and unfixable and we should make sure to start differently next time so this doesn't happen again.

Reason two is that the seed culture of nostr was far too monolithic: bitcoiners. What a culture develops into probably depends on how diverse its seed was. It's quite hard to get people onto nostr unless they are at least very bitcoin tolerant. Most people (yes, I think most) are put off by so much bitcoin promotion and related posts. Certainly people can follow anybody they want, and make their own independent cultures, perhaps even on a disjoint set of relays. But this isn't likely to happen due to the law of large numbers - there are far more ways for them to encounter and interact with the nest of bitcoiners then to not encounter and interact with them.

These are thoughts I'm entirely unsure about. Maybe I'm wrong in both cases. These are my worries.

What issue are you having?

Yes Iris and Snort are the same software

I have been able to convince exactly 0 people to use #Signal after they dropped SMS support.

Most of the people I convinced to use it only used it mostly with me. BUT, the selling point was that they could just set it as the default (better) SMS app and not just have another fucking messaging app just for me.

About 90% of MY communication used to be encrypted on Signal, even if theirs wasn't (it didn't matter to them).

Now? All of them are back to sending me SMS. This erased about two years of work I put into converting people.

So great, Signal is now more secure. Except no one in my life uses it with me anymore. Where exactly is the benefit we were supposed to see?

This is an old topic at this point, but just wanted to call out the fact that what many of us predicted is now a reality.

The interesting thing is that overlapping people in my network (friends, family, etc) were starting to use encryption incidentally without even knowing it.

A network effect that took a lot of work was completely destroyed by one decision.

Signal is dead in my life now and it's truly sad. I'm putting an end to my fruitless attempts to convert people. Sad.

#Security #Cybersecurity

Coracle lists relays and shows how many people you follow are on each. It also drops the top few to encourage network decentralization.

nostr:note15nrfx28lp99pml2u502dfv5se2nwjt08q9xqxt5ft3yem3rlkjgsxmnkf7

That's in the nostr.band statistic I posted elsewhere in the thread.

Smaller relays aren't listed.