The "no different from twitter" is a bit of an exaggeration perhaps, at least on some aspects of Nostr, I agree.

I am personally a big user of primal as well despite it having centralised tendency.

But we must be open about it and clear and voice our concerns so that the devs steer development in the correct direction.

And by the way the "use other clients" is not a good argument, if primal becomes the biggest client no one will build other clients. What we should do is use the decentralised clients and improve the protocol for better experience instead of going centralised.

The "it's no different from Twitter" is a gross overstatement, though I do sympathize with Will's view. I certainly prefer to select the relays I read from and have the client I am using pull notes from those relays directly.

That said, I also understand Primal's choice to use a caching relay for the sake of optimizing for new users who barely understand what a relay is, let alone how to select ones that will achieve their goals. New users don't yet HAVE goals they want to accomplish in their selection of relays.

On Twitter, you don't own your identity. On Nostr, you absolutely do, even on Primal. Yes, Primal COULD put fake notes that appear to be from your npub, but the fact that they weren't actually signed by your nsec would be immediately apparent when they cannot be accessed from any other client, and cannot be rebroadcast out to any other relays.

On Twitter, you cannot post your tweets to any server other than Twitter's centralized server. On Primal, you absolutely still can maintain your censorship resistance by posting to multiple relays, because relays reject notes that aren't signed by the correct private key.

On Twitter, you can only read tweets that were posted to their centralized server. On Primal, you may only be able to read from their caching relay, BUT those aren't just posts that were written TO their relay. You are still seeing posts that were originally written to a wide variety of relays.

On Twitter, you are a slave to their proprietary algorithm. On Primal, you get to choose your algorithm, or create one that suits your own needs.

Now, do I think this is ideal to only read from a caching relay? Absolutely not. Do I think Will has a lot of good points about why this is a compromise of Nostr's values? Yes, I do.

But it's not "no different from Twitter" by a long shot.

Angor's getting ready for 2025 🚀

I created a quick diagram to illustrate the Primal cache issue in a simplified way that may help some people understand what is going on and help with choices about which client to use. There are many ways to build clients and there are advantages and disadvantages of each.

In Primal’s case, notes are served from Primal’s cache server which gets notes from the relays rather than the client getting them directly from the relays. The advantage to this is that much of the processing can be done on the server side resulting in a very smooth and consistent experience for users.

The down side to this is that it becomes centralised as, without the server infrastructure operated by Primal themselves, the client completely stops working (the cache is open source but I’m not aware of any other instances of the Primal cache being run and most users wouldn’t use a different one anyway). The issues with this centralisation are that it make Primal much more prone to outages and it would be very easy for ISPs to block Primal just by DNS blocking of the Primal cache server or blocking the associated IPs. Primal could also potentially filter or censor the feed from their cache although I’m not aware of whether they actually do this currently.

For me personally, I want a client that talks directly to the relays and does the processing locally but others may be comfortable with the limitations and loss of decentralisation and find that Primal provides a good experience.

One of the best things about Nostr is that you can take your key and move to a different client. It is worthwhile experimenting with different clients to find the experience that best suits you. 💜🫂

Are you regarded?

Twitter's source of truth is the Twitter database.

#Primal's source of truth is the user's own relays.

Twitter owns the user handles.

#Primal doesn't.

we should stop calling clients that talk to a centralized server instead of relays a "nostr client". Otherwise this will lead to confusion when the app goes down and they think nostr is unreliable, which may irreversibly damage nostr's reputation.

if you make a web browser that doesn't fetch from websites directly and instead uses some centralized server to do this for you, you wouldn't call this a web browser.

gm

Apparently there's a UFO invasion happening in the US 🛸

Oh it's wild out there man, just bleeding money all over the place. Sometimes I go out to pickup a few essentials and end up dropping a 100.

Don’t argue, don’t beg for change. just build something better. Quietly, relentlessly, on your own terms. The most powerful revolution isn’t loud. it’s walking away and creating a world where they no longer matter.

That doesn’t sound optimal but I know you’re not the only one who does it.

I have this thing called a job that pays me an income, but that income is auto-converted to sats so I never have any dollars.

I have an income, but can't buy dips. I'm always all in.

As a decentralized protocol built on #Bitcoin and #Nostr, Angor is staying true to the cypherpunk ethos.

We don't own your funds. You have full custody.

You set up the wallet. You control the project.

Even if the Angor devs. disappear,

you can just continue to use Angor.

Protcols not platforms.

This is the way.

#angor #nostr

In case anyone is confused, this is a dip. You buy these.

A customer just asked me if I had a "standing rack roast" of lamb. Does anyone know what that is? Cuz searching images just shows a regular crown rack of lamb.

#asknostr