Whoa gossip got a makeover. Looks nice!

🎉 I actually just fixed a bug I found where they could shown back up for a minute if relays that don’t honor the expiration date return them. Should be in TestFlight later this week.

👀

😍 love it. You are tempting me to buy an Android phone just so I can use Amethyst.

This is the first I’ve heard of this project so forgive my ignorance, but what are the merkle DAGs storing if the files are stored in git? Are you rebuilding the other parts of Github like issues, PRs, permissions, etc?

Wow! Is this Tor support for opening links in notes or support for connecting to relays over Tor?

What other clients support long-form posts besides habla.news (and Nos)?

Just pushed out build 41 of Nos! We threw in a couple experimental features on this one: expiring messages and display of long-form notes. They are rough around the edges but let us know what you think! The priority for next week is adding support for mentions.

The full list:

- Add support for setting a NIP-40 expiration date when composing a note.

- Nos now displays long-form blog posts (kind 30023) in the home and profile feeds.

- Added Spanish translations (thanks Martin!)

- Updated app icon

- Open links in an in-app web browser instead of Safari

- Fixed link detection in notes for URLs without a scheme (i.e. "https://")

- Made the reply button on notes easier to tap, and it now presents the keyboard when tapped.

- Increased the tap size of the ellipsis button on note cards.

- Increased the contrast of text in light mode

- Fix link color on macOS

Yeah I haven’t invited any IRL friends to Nostr yet because I know the content isn’t useful or interesting to them. I think good groupware is the way forward. Once people have spaces to talk about specific topics instead of just blasting notes out to all followers I think we’ll see big uptick in the diversity of content and users.

Coming soon! This is our top priority right now.

New Nos icon brewing… it’s actually just the “s” from our logo, but it also looks like a bird, which feels kind of poetic. The bird was actually first associated with Twitter by a third-party app, Twitteriffic. In a way I think of Nostr as third-party apps making a comeback.

It probably won’t be our logo forever as I think #[0]​ threw it together quickly. But for my part I love it.

I spent some time on Mastodon yesterday and it was weird to see people breaking their thoughts across multiple toots because of the character limit. I get that short-form has its advantages but I find a lot more value in some of the longer posts people share on SSB and sometimes on Nostr.

We’ve got support for long-form notes in a PR for Nos that should be merged this week. They’ll just be in the normal feeds for now though.

Is anyone else following the final CS:GO major that starts today?

Let's go! Every few years I write up the alternatives I'm using on my blog. Would love to see what you've chosen to replace things with if you want to share.

Here it is: "so a couple of thoughts on what fiatjaf is saying

I’m gonna start with this: I don’t feel the same way about nostr or activitypub or most other projects. generally speaking, everybody is engaging in tradeoffs and optimizing for different things. which is a good thing

I’m pretty confident in what we’re doing but I won’t pretend I’ve got it all sorted out. there are so many ways I’ve fallen on my face working on this stuff in the past. I have strong opinions but we’re all working in a difficult space

the anger at us starting with a single instance, I don’t know what to tell you. it was either that or we kept cooking in private rather than testing the core of the software with real users. the absolute wrong move would be throwing the doors open on an incomplete protocol

we’re working on the vibe control tech right now: curation and moderation. *that* is protocol. curation and moderation in a social network just is core protocol. you know it is because we all know the nightmare that would follow if we didn’t do that first

you can open tcp sockets between a bunch of computers and say you’ve created a network but all you would get is noise and resource consumption—so we make things like atproto and nostr to structure the communication once those sockets are open

the same applies to people

if we just open connections between people and don’t structure how they communicate then it’s just going to be noise between them. people will be miserable. curation and moderation tools are core protocol as much as solving how things go over the wire

now let’s talk about his thing about the BGS — the aggregators in the network — and whether those are sufficiently decentralized

I agree: aggregator nodes have power. not a small amount.

I once wrote a paper about the dynamics of power in social technology that was so pretentious that I’m ashamed to share it now but it was entirely about how authority models get embedded in technological systems and this is a really good example of that. authority pockets exist all over these things

the problem is that if you view decentralization from the lens of removing authority entirely from the system then you’re asking for anarchy, which means no resource sharing and an overwhelming amount of pairwise relationship

this is exactly what we were doing with secure scuttlebutt and while I am really proud of that project, I think it proves the upper limit of what can be accomplished if you refuse to entrust any authority in another entity. the answer is: very small scale

and small scale interpersonal networking can be really nice for the right things but that’s not really what we at bluesky want from public broadcast social media. we want a global network. we want big world networking

once you’ve accomplished that you can create small groups and communities within it — which is also wonderful, and greatly assisted if there’s a solid public backbone to connect them

well for large scales the laws of physics just come into play. federated queries do not scale. you need high performance, high volume indexes that can satisfy queries about the state of the network. things like how many likes does this post according to hundreds of millions or even billions of users

people who have worked in the ethereum world may be familiar with Infura. same exact thing. you’ve got an entire distributed VM on a blockchain with ethereum but the basic reality is that companies can’t afford to compute the whole dataset so they use infura instead

so yeah, pockets of authority. what do you do about that?

you lean on ways to check that power. external auditability. an open data network that allows competitors. a low friction to switching off the points of authority

you also do your best to divest responsibilities from those potentially powerful entities

one of the reasons it’s so important to have community driven curation and moderation is so that doesn’t get done by these powerful aggregators, because that becomes the mechanism of control over people

what scares me personally is when a profit motive drives the decision about what’s good for people rather than people deciding what’s good for themselves. and everything that we’ve been building for this protocol is about making sure that the capital intensive systems don’t do that

so these are the tradeoffs we made. this is the atproto system and the bluesky approach. and I’m sorry that the nostr folks don’t see eye to eye with us, but I really do hope they find success because it’s good to have more than one network in the world. because hey, I could be wrong”

r/wooosh

You might find https://rsslay.nostr.moe is useful for starting out.

Getting rid of Google is a lifestyle 🤘🏻

☹️ that was sudden. Left without even saying goodbye?

Also for those who would like to join but this time or day doesn't work, stay tuned. Our hope is to have the Decent Nostr community talking throughout the week on Nostr, and there could be multiple synchronous meetups catering to different timezones. We have to start somewhere and the idea of a consistent date and time seemed important to establishing some regularity.