I worked with a junior dev the other day on writing unit tests for one method, to show him how unit tests should be done. It took about 30 minutes. It required about 4 test cases and setup of the class, etc.
At the end, for lolz, we put the method into ChatGPT and told it to write unit tests. It took 30 seconds. It wrote the same tests I did.
#[0] I was hoping the 'social network' settings would help with loading notes but it's still struggling. I don't know what it's doing when it tries to find a note, even if I use the relay that has it (as documented by nostr.band) - Do some relays not respond to queries? Do you randomly pick a relay to query? Do you query them all? I just can't understand why it can't load a note when I'm using the same relays, especially now with the social network settings turned off.
I believe that if you're worth hearing, you'll be heard here by those who value it enough to do the bare minimum. But I'm interested in seeing how it plays out. We'll see. I'll keep using as broad a relay setup as possible to experience it myself. I'm here to witness and judge it for myself. I intend to resist any censorship just because I demand to hear all voices. I demand to be in control of such a choice, as is the intention of Nostr.
Currently I don't see what they can do to prevent my efforts there.
You're adding a relay that you, or someone sympathetic, owns, not just another random one. It can't be IP blocked, you're running the host itself, too, by necessity.
This is a losing fight. You can't require someone platform your speech. The censorship-happy people aren't wrong there. The issue is that our current internet and speech mechanisms are run by only 1 or 2 major operators and your ability to spin up an alternative (Truth Social) is extremely limited and unviable in its ability to attract users, and also very expensive.
Nostr fixes THIS, it doesn't fix the censorship-happy people themselves. They'll still exist, that's true. It means there are now 100,000 platforms, equally viable, and you can run your own and spin up an alternative. You platform yourself. You just need to get people to follow you, really follow you, to this new platform. This is very easy and barely a thing, if your speech has even a minor value to people. It's simply adding one 'free' relay.
But you can't pay for coffee with Bitcoin! It's too slow!
That's about the experience I had at every job I've had. This is why burnout is so bad in the industry. It's a creative job, that doesn't happen on a schedule but the 'managers' cannot allow flexibility. They need 'control' to feel as if they matter at all (They don't).
Censorship is not always bad. We don't like seeing spam. If some of us don't like seeing racism or disruptive trolling, then so be it.
Censorship is bad if it is a central authority and not a user choice. If it is every users choice. It is their apathy that prevents them from adding 'free' relays. Then it's not bad. It's natural. Tribalism is natural. Secularism is not natural.
The question is what is blocked?
Public keys aren't likely to be blocked because the worst offenders (for relay performance and UX) is trolls and spammers who create keys very easily, not like emails/phone numbers on twitter.
Content will be blocked, mostly.
If a government or public campaign against a person results in a public key block, it only requires one relay and some other communication mechanism, outside Nostr, to get the word out. It's very easy to add a relay.
Focus on what you can do, not what they should do. There are also dog whistles that most dogs really don't like and if you teach it that it is a response to the barking, it can learn.
Technically the TCP/IP stack is already a decentralized streaming service. I can toss a file on my VPS and pretty quickly stream it to folks.
The problem with this is the data cost of one host serving all users.
We need a way to monetize peer hosting. Where I downloaded and watched the video, so now I have a copy to retransmit a few times. The centralized hosting model of most internet services and hosting platforms is the thing that fails here. That's economic, not technical.
nos.lol is an aggregator of many free relays, so is relay.nostr.band (nostr.band uses a trust rank to control spam, too)
That's how we build a future free of authority and control. Put your hand out and humbly ask for the support. That's value4value. It's already working.
Spam, however.... we need to work on this attack vector.
100% agree - but voluntarism is a part of the value4value ideology, I believe.
Pay after you get the value, not in anticipation of it. If we require payment up front, before a good UX is witnessed, that's not value4value. That's just subscribing to a service that may provide value, you don't know until you try it.
Trust that people want to support all of this, they've just never had a means to do so. Subscriptions don't win, as seen in the current web. Subscriptions provide you with access to a limited garden of suspect value.
Let's just admit spam is one problem and support/funding the actual costs are another.
Proof of Work was originally meant to solve this problem, not the Byzantine Generals problem of transaction finality across decentralized participants.
It was a spam prevention proposal. Require someone prove they're a normal user with limited activity by doing a quite large amount of work that wouldn't bother a normal person making 1 post per minute or so. The problem is that this seems to be a phone first ecosystem and work is hard on a phone's battery.
There's just too much downside to the gardens with fences of 'paid' relays, is all I'm saying. Pay to post is the same if there's no option to post for free, like once every hour (reactions not included, maybe).
Proof of Work solves this and lets you verify its not spam without any of that.
Let's not be greedy for a monetization system. We need it to be engineered for freedom first. I don't have any doubt, people will voluntarily run software they believe in and that provides the world with a public good, without needing to be paid.
Solving spam without building fences is what we should focus on, not pushing people to pay for access to the gardens.
The important bit is that it's optional. We need to accept proof of work as verification that you're not spamming. We want to build an accessible system, not fences.