very true

I think you’re right to be concerned about centralization if relay specialization is the direction we go.

Ideally, the barrier to entry for new relays to pop up would be as close to zero as possible. That way, it will always be easy to bypass relays that somehow manage to get captured by centralizing forces. If running a successful relay requires building up brand recognition, then the barrier will be large, and disintermediation of captured relays will be more difficult.

Legacy social media uses advertising to finance the design, implementation and maintenance costs of:

1. platform UX

2. content storage / archive

3. content delivery to end user

4. content curation algos

With nostr:

FOSS is handling (1).

Nostr uses relays for (2) and (3), although unclear how relay monetization will play out.

Also unclear how (4) will work with nostr. The ability to make lists is a start. But long run:

- Who designs the algos? Does someone need to be paid for this or can they be implemented at no cost via a combo of FOSS + user input that is provided for free (e.g. using lists)?

- Who implements / executes the curation algos, the computations & data processing? Will these costs be trivial compared to (2) and (3) or will these costs be significant?

My thoughts: once we get into web of trust, which will probably require high quality data + computationally expensive graph analysis, the costs associated with high-quality content curation will be nontrivial. In the long run users should have a mechanism to be compensated for their contributions to content curation. Legacy media expects users to provide things like ratings for free, but the legacy monetization model needs to die. Have mechanisms to pay your trusted users a few sats for their ratings, not just for their “content”. Let your WoT help you decide which users to pay for ratings in any given context. This is how we replace the legacy advertising-based monetization model.

Regarding the roadmap, my current focus is to build a path starting at nip51 (already implemented in several websites & clients) and ending at something like Curated Lists (already implemented in my desktop app) in a way that users will find value.

They’re not that far apart!

🏃🏻 ☀️ 👏🏻

So the questions, from the perspective of a designer / developer, should be:

1. What tools and apps need to exist in that world that don’t currently exist

2. What’s the roadmap between here and there

Decentralized, WoT-based tools to filter and curate the deluge of information that greets us in the information age are going to be ridiculously powerful and amazingly effective once they get off the ground. For the first time, we’ll have genuine confidence in most of the information that reaches us through the filters.

Often when I discuss things that can be built with decentralized web of trust I am met with the response “but is there a demand for that?” and I think: no, but it’s bc no one has ever seen or experienced tools like this. Like there would be no demand for chocolate if no one had ever tasted it.

Yup. And I wonder if there are tools that could & should be built for nostr but aren’t bc no one asks for them bc we’re simply accustomed to not having them.

I suppose it would be challenging to build the tools in a way so that they don’t inadvertently reveal some piece of data that shouldn’t be revealed.

Legacy social media typically don’t tend tend to give users very good access to social graph data. Example: I don’t know of any widely-used tools that would allow me to visualize the Facebook social graph and do things like discover interesting connections between different friend groups that I didn’t know existed.

Is it because most users simply aren’t asking for sophisticated data analysis tools like this? Or bc Big Tech doesn’t want us having too much access to their proprietary data?

Data model types, interoperability at the semantical level … I agree: these topics are worthy of many PhD theses!

One thing that has always amazed me about the spoken language is that the space of all possible sounds we could conceivably use to represent any given thing, like a “spoon” for instance, is so large, with no schelling point, and yet we somehow magically all agree (99.9% of the time) to call it the same thing, with no central authority enforcing the consensus.

Perhaps if we could figure out how to reproduce that phenomenon for

data model types in the digital world, then VC interoperability would improve.

Nostr has tremendous replies, the best, really great replies. They’re incredible.

today’s websites, sleek but all the same, sometimes feel like processed food, full of seed oils, compared to the real food that came before

Interesting. I’d never compared those two concepts - composability vs interoperability. Makes sense.

I sometimes wonder how tolerant a network like nostr is of disagreements or incompatibilities between clients at the protocol level, and whether this sort of tolerance is something that can be well-defined and quantified. Seems to me the NIP system makes nostr very tolerant, and this is a good thing: a small handful of NIPs is enough to make any given client compatible with most or all others. Smaller feature set, but compatible nevertheless.

In contrast: if were to build on IPFS or bluesky, my understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) is that I’d have to adopt basically their entire protocol (or a huge chunk of it) just to do an MVP. Imagine the state of nostr if there were 1000 NIPs and you had to adopt every single NIP from 1 to 1000 (e.g. you have to import a ref library) before releasing v0.0.1, even one with a small feature set, or else your app would break.

I don’t know what you call this feature of nostr, the fact that the “minimum requisite protocol” for a starter MVP with a sparse feature set is very small compared to alternatives. Is there a name for this? Seems like it’s worth giving it one bc it’s one of nostr’s greatest strengths imho.

Good call - I need to start using hashtags more!

Anyone read the Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu?

The book opens in 1967 in the midst of the cultural revolution in China. If anyone needs a reminder of why bitcoin and why nostr, read the first two pages. Absolutely devastating.

Piggy from Lord of the Flies. I read it when I was ~ 12 and it hit me hard.

That must be what this guy is doing 😂

nostr:note1ykck9c5l2d50kr2d35ar3gerc3d0d9yez7ded6wlqp5u6lsmqcdsrtaz4e

First thing I saw: “There are multiple drivers for this shit.” 😂