If both sides were making reasonable and well-researched arguments then I don't know how you'd tell the difference between a good faith debate and a bad faith debate?
Maybe you want to bite on one of these?
"Nostr has no meaningful comparison to Bitcoin, which entirely different as a system."
"Relays are just servers. They are no more "decentralized" than traditional web servers, which you can also run yourself."
"Relays fall into the same legal and moderation requirements as any cloud server or social media website. If caught failing to comply, then legal trouble."
Why not? He makes some interesting and arguments and he clearly knows the technical underpinnings of Nostr. Seems like a fun debate.
Why not just list out three of his core points (as in the points he's expanded upon at length and clearly takes seriously) and refute them one by one? Or else mute him?
Scale for the intended use case is what I wrote there, and I think we're pretty clear how ambitious the intended use case is/was, a global decentralised Twitter.
If we change the intended use case then what matters changes, sure. I for one am all for changing the use case.
That would only be true if the sole reason for the existence of every chain in the world was to have a coin. Once you introduce differing functions then the coins become coupled with the chain's underlying function, and therefore different from each other in kind, making common-denominator value comparisons somewhat absurd, like saying t-shirts will win out over socks in the end. As long as people need socks for their feet then sock coins will be valuable in a value-context all their own.
I'm actually wondering if it's a term nostr just made up? In which case even non-nostr devs would think golf or nuclear war.
How many internet users understand the word "bunker" outside of the context of golf or nuclear war? Like 0.001%?
Only devs designing products for other devs would ever use the word bunker in a public facing UI.
That sounds like there are many Samsung competitors but I haven't found an Apple competitor yet.
You can do both!
Either he's good at stirring the pot or the pot is begging to be stirred.
>I want to be in a place with my bitcoin frens that doesn't make me feel strung out on algorithm-supplied dopamine.
But your non-frens are here too, saying spicy things, and you're responding to those spicy things. Either that fits with your vision of the place you want to be, or you are not in fact in that place.
To nostr:nprofile1qqsgeksa4tajm7x673gq2v7t56dkgkh6pjhhzdhrgxlpke4za8jmmkqpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgqgjwaehxw309ac82unsd3jhqct89ejhxqgkwaehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnw3ezucnpdejqetk0p4's credit, he IS the only thing we seem to be talking about.
To our credit, few of us are even bothering to ask for an invite code to Cinnamon or whatever the Hell it's called.
There are a lot of good ideas in Pubky. Also a lot of good ideas in nostr:npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c 's Mosaic. In Nostr too, of course.
Why not check them all out? You'll get a good sense of the wider Venn diagram, if nothing else.
Goodness me, have we entered the era of sloppy writing to prove you're not an LLM? I do not write with AI. Ever. I've been fussy about grammar since I learned what it was, and it bothers me if I accidentally write its as it's, but that doesn't make me an AI. nostr:npub13ndpm2hm9hud4azsq5euhf5mv3d05r90wymwxsd7rdn29609hhvqp60svh is right about one thing, it can be hard on Nostr to get people to focus on your points and not your persona.
The plan was always for Nostr to scale, of course. In fact the plan was for it to scale without a global state.
At some point though we have to acknowledge that nostr doesn't scale for the intended use case. It's cool, but it doesn't scale. So the only fair comparison is between Nostr and other architectures that are also innovative but also can't theoretically scale. If SSB were still around it'd be a fair comparison. I'm sure there are some others.
Pubky, Keet and such are a class that *can* theoretically scale. The chance that they will isn't all that high in light of the history of the internet in general, but there are no fundamental technical barriers preventing scale (whereas with Nostr there are).
That said not being able to scale is not a bad thing. Nostr architecture could form the basis of many little worlds that don't connect to form a big world but still makes Nostr a useful contribution to the web.
Very cool direction!
Oh relays can harm!
You're making a lot of good points in this thread.
Also if I was Darth Vader and Nostr was the Republic's social network of choice then the absolute first thing I would do would be to setup a free and highly performant Nostr relay and boost the heck out of it. And I'd do it early too.
Ah okay, I get your angle now, fair. I dunno though, would someone ever have an interest in Nostr or Pubky and not know someone on the inside? How would you even come to know of the existence of either if you didn't have a contact? I guess from a blog or article something, but still seems pretty rare to come to a social protocol not via social means, and therefore have an agent of sorts.
Nostr is a potentially neat architecture for when you don’t need a global state and there is no temptation to try and achieve one vis a vis crawling and indexing. (But you do need some of the other stuff, like the individually signed JSON events and the multiple dumb relays.) That’s what I would call Honest Nostr.
The Nostr that tries to sneak in a global state (i.e. by having UI elements that only really make sense in light of one) without being willing to pay the price for said global state is what I would call Sneaky Nostr.
The Town square use case is Sneaky Nostr through and through, because it results in an large number of UI elements that are essentially lies of omission. It also rewards indexing, and therefore creates a temptation to index, which means a perpetual wild west standoff between opposing principles.
So what would an Honest Nostr use case be? I really don't know. Maybe there is one. Maybe there isn't. I wouldn't be surprised if there is one, the world is full of esoteric cases in search of quick-to-tweak existing architectures. But it wouldn't be the advertised use case, that's for sure, it'd be something a little out of left field.
That was fast. Looks great! I'm already discovering some interesting new stuff I'd never have found otherwise.
Excited to try this. I joined relay.0xchat.com but it didn't fetch my nostr profile. Or is the idea that I make a new profile for this circle and it uses that instead of my existing nostr profile?
Thanks Mijan, great stuff!
Military quantum communication network
nostr:npub1syjmjy0dp62dhccq3g97fr87tngvpvzey08llyt6ul58m2zqpzps9wf6wl
Instead of random relays why not make this "featured relays"? Like neat relays you've found around Nostr?
Farcaster is also a protocol. So is Bluesky/Atproto. But on Nostr most people view Farcaster and the eth place and Bluesky/Atproto as the left place.
It's very hard for social protocols to overcome tribalism in 2025.
Have you ever thought about how extremely unlikely it is that, despite the Sun being 400x bigger than the Moon, it appears the EXACT same size in our sky?
The official NASA narrative is that this is simply because, in addition to it being 400x bigger than the Moon, it's also 400x further away.
But the odds of this are infinitesimally small.
What if...the Sun and Moon look like they're the exact same size, because they ARE the same size?
Question everything, friends...
https://blossom.primal.net/163cc3ef924ecb6eb397b8d1e6adae39b849ee35865192c877b0c9390947310d.mp4
Ever since Galileo fell for the NASA narrative, things have gone downhill.
Ah yeah that worked thanks.
Ah, very helpful, thanks. If I were to rebroadcast it to relays Jumble knows about would that be a good experiment?
Thanks! That Primal Studio longform nadder also fails in Iris, Nosotros, Nostrudel, Notedeck and Yakihonne. Only place I've seen it work is in Primal.
Hmm, yeah, thanks for that! It's not showing elsewhere either, I wrote it with this Primal Studio, it seems the wires aren't all connected yet.
That's Jumble and Nosotros respectively. Also doesn't show in Notedeck, Nosotros. Do these articles only show in Primal if adding them via the article ID?
Lol thanks.
But that's reliant on Primal's ICANN domain, they could rug me if they wanted. And if I put my NIP05 on an ICANN domain I've registered myself to be on the safe side then what I have escaped?
Often comes down to the podcast test. You're on a podcast, it's wrapping up, 10 seconds left, the host asks: "Where can people find your website?"
In this no-need-to-purchase-a-domain scenario, what do you answer?
I think this is for sure the way, with Cahsu. And a separate wallet/mint, just pulls form the background, minute by minute, zero cognitive overhead (just have to fill up the nuts from time to time).
A lot of people do pay on YouTube, YouTube Premium has has 125 million subscribers and will hit 200 million soon. So I think enough people will pay.
If one HD view is $0.001 per minute in CDN costs then $10 gets you 10k minutes, which is 7 full days 24 hours a day. If you double that for some profit to the creator then still pretty reasonable.
The trick is to engineer all that #cashu stuff in the background, payments being made every minute under the radar. Lightning even with 3% fail rate not going to cut it.
It's all about the CDN. Storage costs are nothing compared to CDN costs. If you have a 5 minute HD video that gets viewed 100k times end to end, at low-end public cloud CDN costs ($0.05/GB for 30 TB total) that's $1,500. And that's not including the CDN cache-fill.
Storage costs are teeny tiny in comparison.
Who's paying that $1,500? It'll be cheaper if massively scaled on private infra, but still, who's paying?
Are viewers paying the CDN costs? Are creators? If the latter and the video goes viral then what? 1 million views and then a surprise bill over $10k?