This is inevitable, and I think it may actually turn out to be a huge strength of nostr

Could see this being useful for dev

Seems like that will be the defacto outcome for most people if we don't deploy something better

RSS - and yes I'm working on it

Any thoughts on what will replace captchas?

Agree - the DMs will be an option

Yeah totally possible - actually I’m working on a more general solution right now that includes auto approve. Thanks for your patience!

People unconsciously perceive that one's dignity is proportional to one's rights, and airports are a liminal space where those haven't been seen since 2001.

Speaks to the way that liberties (and lack thereof) are expressed interpersonally.

> With a Web of Trust based on follows that scarcity starts with the user's follow list

I agree and I think that's a great way to think about it — but obv this only works for users that are already following people. The question of how to make a "general" trending feed (to show by default to non-signed-in users) seems like a different, separate thing.

A general trending feed is not 100% mandatory (like it's totally possible that you just have to start following some people to see new content, nostr will keep functioning) but I think that it could really help nostr for two reasons:

1) In the short term — faster growth. Lowering the barrier to adoption by showing people interesting stuff immediately.

2) In the long term — avoiding stagnation by not having followers be a prerequisite for visibility/virality.

I think it was George Hotz that said something like "algorithms promote class mobility", which I agree with. If you are some anon poster who is totally unknown but you have really amazing content it would be optimal to surface that content so that person can actually gain followers. Tiktok works because their algo identifies "underpriced" stuff and pushes it up. People are looking for opportunity and it seems they're willing to engage with dystopian systems to get it, so I think the realistic move is to work on a credibly non-dystopian alt version of that opportunity machine (that works even better in edge cases where you'd normally run up against censorship)

Sure, you need experiments to validate any theory. With you there 👍

I'm thinking of it by analogy to the way that btc depends on energy scarcity. A PoW token is in some sense an abstraction of energy, like a joule wrapped up in computer code. This mapping between something finite (because of the physics) made abstract (because of code) is the magic transformation that allows btc (or dna for that matter!) to collapse the infinite space of abstract reality into something that behaves as if it were finite and concrete. Physics comes with a very handy, fungible source of scarcity (energy) that we can use, abstractly, as money (or food!) but extending "consensus about account balances" to "consensus about interesting content" involves moving to a higher dimensional space. At this point it makes sense to ask the question of what should we model as being scarce in the social realm? Reputation is the obvious answer, which is why most client's have defaulted to whitelisting a set of well known people as the root source of scarcity from which consensus flows. But that's not a granular or self-regulating solution. I don't have a fully formed answer yet but intuitively I think there will end up being something akin to miners which validate the formation of social capital.

The UX is super important, but I'm starting to think this is a physics problem

I think PoW is necessary to tilt the balance of power toward defenders in the spam war. But there's still the question of what is "interesting" content. WoT is probably the best thing we have right now, i.e. the "note that was upvoted by trusted user is considered popular" approach. But even in a web of trust, the long term solution can't just be total number of followers (even when considering followers of followers of followers) because it's trivially easy now to create an army of fake people. A determined adversary could boost their own signal. On a fundamental level there needs to be a source of scarcity to ground the web of trust in finite reality (like how btc uses the energy conservation principle). The way I see it, scarcity in a social context can be:

1) A hand-picked list of "trusted root nodes" of the web of trust (so not actually decentralized) or,

2) Derived from something else that is scarce (so probably money)

This is my current understanding — by no means do I think like I have this all figured out!

No I agree communities have not been explored/developed nearly enough. Competing with Twitter is in some ways harder than competing with Reddit because Twitter is a platform for famous people and thus the "gravity" of who's already using it is stronger. On Reddit it matters less who you are, it's more content focused. People go there for information, not as much for news.

> communities may join migrating from other platforms and stay in the reddit-ish/forum-ish sections and similarly ignore the'social feed' twitter-like function, like how I ignore Global

Yup. Nostr has the potential to replace both Twitter and Reddit, but not by making the UX both at the same time

Cool! I'll add it with the next update

Interesting - but what about non signed in people? Is there a "default" algorithm? If there was an objective way to identify the most popular algo that could work, but in some sense that's just recapitulating the question of how to objectively identify popular content in n+1 dimension

Necessary but not sufficient imo

Good points, from a fundamental perspective even an algo that was successfully designed to be decentralized and ungamable is going to have to derive its metric of what constitutes "interesting" from the way humans use the app and the things they post about, so it's function will at least indirectly reflect the interests of existing users. If oddbean is pushing down btc content it's genuinely debatable if that is a good or bad strategy — but in any case it's an editorial decision that fails the decentralization requirement (not saying that's necessarily bad in the short term). In the long term there's this question of how to remove a reliance on editors. Paradoxically the solution might actually be leaning into editorial maximalism, in effect having lot's of competing moderators, i.e. communities. But then there's still the question of making sure that new/alt communities are visible so you don't end up like Reddit with a set of defacto "default" subs

Curious what the basic metric is for measuring "hotness" — is it number of replies, zaps, some web-of-trust thingy? For Satellite I'm using a rolling sum of zaps received in the past 24 hours to surface content that these (presumably) not-spammy pubkeys have either posted themselves or interacted with, but I'm not completely satisfied with this because it's still trusting lightning network servers to not forge zap receipts, and it could totally be gamed if you were determined enough. Client side algos are a huge win for decentralization but damn it takes some work