I just can't believe how much people's brains have been switched off. Or has it always been like this? Now I'm starting to forget...

It seems like there was a time, not even that long ago, when the average person was able to look at something and call it retarded if it was, in fact, retarded.

Now everyone is just chasing after that next dopamine high, so they don't critically process anything. All the raw processing capability of the prefrontal cortex is effectively shut off, and the result is people saying things like, "bitcoin doesn't have a deflation problem" or "I'm so glad I had the vaccine or it would have been so much worse!"

Nah. No use in arguing with midwits…especially here on nostr…what are you even doing here? Lol.

Lol. Another “uhhh I disagree.” 😆

Someone should do a relay that is very-high signal. It can issue shares of revenue of that relay and then charge for each note submitted to it.

Shareholders take a cut of the revenue, but are bound to vote on whether a note is worth being published or not. If they vote no when most people voted yes or vice-versa they lose a small fraction of their shares, the shares go to those who voted with the majority.

Would this work? Why not?

I found this definition on the internet:

An online platform is a digital service that uses the Internet to facilitate interactions between two or more separate but interdependent users (whether they are companies or private individuals). Platforms are places where demand and supply meet electronically.

And I found this table. Is this what you mean by platform?

Bitcoin only 🫡

Well said. And I completely agree. Very nice to “talk” to you.

Really this is a symptom of my greater worldview that you must be worthy of the systems and tools your forbears built for you.

It doesn't matter how cool the thing you make is, if you hand it off to someone malicious, or, more tragically, incompetent, then you have wasted your effort.

Conversely, when something is given to you, it is your moral imperative to understand the thing, and to be worthy of it. With the internet as a case study, I feel we can safely say that we (the royal we) were not ready for it to be given to us, because no one understood it, much less its first-order effects.

All of this is not to say people will not figure it out eventually, but we can only hope to do so before it subjugates or destroys us utterly.

> What is wrong with the current web hosting model?

If there is criticism there it is that people seem to want ever more centralized things, not more decentralized ones. While this may not be the intent, it certainly seems to be the effect.

> Assuming someone were able to figure out how to build an alternative with nostr, what would make that better than the current model?

I don't believe it would be /much/ better because much like early web services/sites/hosting which *were* very much decentralized, they gradually (via the application of significant pressure from large companies) concreted itself into the web we have today. I suspect that no matter how cool of a decentralized application layer you build on top of the internet (nostr, e.g.) it will at a higher and higher level be pushed to centralize further and further either via people's tendencies (as they have learned on the modern web), market pressure from large companies (as we can clearly see), or some unholy combination thereof.

It is a pessimistic view of the future of nostr or whatever replaces it, but I think it is reasonably grounded in history.

It is also why I think some people have such scorn for the vapid enthusiasm many nostr users have about how bitcoin is going to change the world. We've all heard that before and been burned rather badly, if the state of the web and internet is anything to go by. Blind enthusiasm will only make us all worse off. At least the first time it happened people could say "How could we have known?" because at least it hadn't happened before. The potential for nostr to be co-opted into something unimaginably worse is unappetizing at best, and downright revolting at worst.

I wouldn’t put it in those terms, no. I think platforms added value, in the sense that they provided a means to connect with other people on a common substrate, and engage in a form of communication that was simply not possible before.

It’s also true that the rise of social media platforms happened at a time, where computing resources and bandwidth on the internet was not really in a place where it was economically viable to do so in a full distributed way.

But like with all periods of creative destruction in the market, there is a period where the old paradigm becomes stuck in how people think about the world, and when those incumbents start doing everything they can to resist the coming change (through anti-competitive business practices, regulatory capture, etc). Eventually the dam breaks and change comes all at once.

I wouldn’t put it in those terms, no. I think platforms added value, in the sense that they provided a means to connect with other people on a common substrate, and engage in a form of communication that was simply not possible before.

It’s also true that the rise of social media platforms happened at a time, where computing resources and bandwidth on the internet was not really in a place where it was economically viable to do so in a full distributed way.

But like with all periods of creative destruction in the market, there is a period where the old paradigm becomes stuck in how people think about the world, and when those incumbents start doing everything they can to resist the coming change (through anti-competitive business practices, regulatory capture, etc). Eventually the dam breaks and change comes all at once.

Your using the alternative right now.

The concept of a “platform” on the internet is a holdover from a time when computing and storage was expensive, bandwidth was scarce, and you needed to build economies of scale to make things like social networking viable.

We now live in a world where computing and storage are cheap, bandwidth is plentiful and the economies of scale for these things have overflown and the water of unutilized excess capacity is just pouring all over the ground.

Add the rise of artificial intelligence to the mix, and it’s really not that hard to see where things are going — a complete renegotiation of the fundamental assumptions of the human-computer interface, and ultimately the shape of the internet itself.

But if you’re still thinking about building a business atop the notions of what I call “platform thinking”, you’re going to get slaughtered in the next 5-10 years. This truly is a moment of all assumptions breaking down.

Brb to this. Will get back to you later today when I can offer more focused attention. 💜

A weird idea but the more I thought about this the more I thought huh, maybe

- Special relay to which you write, perhaps you submit in markdown

- The relay renders to html and saves the post

- Relay also runs a web server, or saves the posts in a database such that a dedicated web server can retreive the file/post

The problems I see for this are:

- You would basically be reinventing tilde spaces, but with a submission interface over nostr.

- You would probably have to make this some sort of paid relay

- Multimedia attachment would be weird, it would definitely require a dedicated NIP to standardize in-band or out-of band attachments.

- Multimedia attachment would be double weird, as markdown et. al. isn't really a super appropriate or convenient medium to do that. You would probably need a specialized WYSIWYG (MS Word style, e.g) editor + nostr client to facilitate drafting and then submitting your posts over nostr

- at the end you would basically just have geocities/bloggr again, but with a weird nostr interface.

I think ultimately for all that work you would not have a thing that people actually wanted. It would be a lot like a nostr interface to a souped up twitter/or other microblogging service.

Iris has one now, and Damus will have one soon. If you’re not using a VPN, I recommend you do, otherwise anyone can get your ip.

Anything that properly implements the double ratchet protocol is probably fine bordering on ideal. XMPP's omemo is my preferred implementation and IM service.

Technically e2e encryption over email or literally any medium that can exchange text using AGE or PGP is also fine and fairly battle-tested.

Since none of those are peer to peer though, someone will always know you sent a message to someone else, but not what it entailed.

AFAIK there are no widespread p2p and e2e encrypted solutions, but maybe I'm just not plugged in to the right places