Nothing about the Nostr protocol struck me as particularly interesting. Spam control, moderation and anonymity are not really dealt with. Why the hype?
All these projects don't understand that it's not the principle of free communication or the idea of sharing content that made networks like twitter and facebook so successful. It was an army of engineers and designers working closely together with marketing people and even psychologists to maximise user engagement and retention. Heck, you could just endlessly recycle the same algorithmic content mixed with camouflaged marketing influencers sans any real stuff and people will suck it up like crazy (looking at you, tiktok). One of the key things nostr criticises (addictiveness) is what will keep it from succeeding on any broader scale.
>Nostr is a protocol, designed for simplicity, that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network.
So they basically want to create twitter without Musk (or anyone in charge for that matter). Nothing wrong with that goal, it's just highly unlikely to succeed given the fundamental shortcomings of this approach.
Just for the record: Mastodon is not a network, but a server app. The network is the Fediverse and the dominant protocol (currently) is W3C ActivityPub.
right. was going to ask the same thing. i'm okay with it being a relative niche. that is to say, writers, economists, artists, etc with a lean towards tech. i'm completely fine with Nostr not becoming the worldwide phenom so that it doesn't attract the spam and the types of people that comes along with popularity.
I think at least some number of people will grow burnt out on addictiveness and want something else. While it may not replace addictive social media there's still potentially substantial value there, which to me seems similar the internet pre Facebook.
To me that seems about as likely as drug addicts suddenly growing tired of shooting up stuff and going into gardening as a hobby instead. Sure, it's not theoretically impossible, but I definitely wouldn't start a gardening platform targeting those people. Pre-facebook basically means a 90s style forum with highly specialised zed communities. You don't need decentralised approaches for that.
> Pre-facebook basically means a 90s style forum with highly specialised zed communities. You don't need decentralised approaches for that.
For a number of years I was a forum moderator for a game forum called Uru Obsession. Eventually that wound down and the forum closed, meaning all those discussions have also been lost (unless someone backed them up - by the time they closed I had moved on, so I dunno), and that community as far as I know has mostly dissolved since its closure.
A gossip protocol means there is no host - clients communicate directly with each other and also store the conversation locally so someone else deciding to stop paying hosting costs becomes a non-issue.
> To me that seems about as likely as drug addicts suddenly growing tired of shooting up stuff and going into gardening as a hobby instead.
I've seen a lot of people leave Facebook over the last couple of years. And I mean a lot. Oh, they might still log in every month or two to see what's up with friend and family, but daily use? Nope.
We'll see, I guess. This feels like an attempt to apply lessons of what happened yesterday to today. It feels like assuming success only has one mold. And it resists acknowledging how much people hate the thing we have, how many people consider it toxic and damaging.
I think people just need to be lead to greener pastures. Right now the alpha geeks aren't cooler & better, don't have great & obvious advantages for being out on the frontier trying cool shit. The Tim O'Reilly "Follow The Alpha Geeks" advice is rarely wrong, in my view, for the alpha geeks mostly want to expand capabilities & power & enable, in ways most consumer efforts are too bounded & limited to go for, but we keep forgetting this wisdom's words anyways.
Once the alpha geeks are unqualifiedly better than the mundane normy-nets, the tables will start to turn. I think the geeks are doing the good work, are putting in the right effort.
Dogfood your way to success. Do what empassions & excites you. Don't worry about l-users. Focus on being really good & powerful. You'll be out competed if you do what sigmoid10 says & compete to be the lowest common denominator of social networking, and your product will suck as bad as everything else we have.
Truly good works market themselves. Places where genuine authentic people (and creative fun bots) mix & share themselves in are what we are searching for, is the authenticity that the engagement-loop corporate networks break & burry. There's different races here. I do think the broader we are searching for better more open pattern en mass to replace the walled garden networks (a challenge many distributeers reject), but the path to victory is assymetric competition, is tapping into different sources of value & raising it up in different ways.
Do you believe in humanity? Or do you think synthetic gloss shit forever & ever will always win?
There's little spam at the moment. There will be. But at that time the relays (pieces of server software that relay nostr messages) can step in and implement spam control via whatever they see fit. Perhaps some smart filtering, perhaps pay a few sats to have a message relayed or perhaps some real name policy. Clients can pick a (set of) relay(s) which fit their preference best. Or not, and accept the default.
The protocol is surprisingly simple to read [1], many relays and clients exist already.
I exchanged messages with a friend of mine who was using a very different client and it just worked!
Personally I like the fact that you can 'like' posts by sending a couple of sats via Lightning. I think it is a great motivator to write thoughtful, quality content.
Currently nostr is radical, weird and unpolished. The Amethyst client is slow at times. But the pace of development is incredible.
assuming it's the same as Scuttlebutt (also gossip protocol) a relay is literally just a relay. There's no "home server". You don't have an account on anyone's machine. You just shove data out to "people" who are listening to you. In scuttlebutt the relays are configured so that anyone can ask it to "follow" them and then they send their data to it. Anyone who listens to that relay can get any data the relay has.
in scuttlebutt the problem was that I never felt like i could trust a relay to exist for more than 6 months, so i just followed every one i could. No-one wants to set up a relay, and relays have to have a static domain / ip so that you know where to look for them. It's not like tor where you can just leave your computer on and that's good enough. I expect the same problems here.
Nostr is way simpler than ssb, there isn't even a gossip or replication strategy. You just publish your signed messages on servers. There isn't even a blob strategy!
This makes it way easier for people to write clients or bots or whatever, but it also tosses out many of the guarantees people who used the original scuttlebot took for granted.
You configure your client post your content to one or more relays. You can use relays that you setup for just yourself, paid relays, and/or free public relays.
When you follow someone, or someone follows you, the follower's client will get a list of relays the person they want to follow is posting to. The follower can connect to any of those relays and get any new content.
On many relays it's possible to get a firehose feed of everything posted to that relay. On free public relays this firehose feed may contain lots of spam accounts.
The responses are quite funny "yeah we don't need to have moderation or spam control as opposed to literally any other successful social network". I don't really get excited when that's the default response, because it means they don't get that that's basically the point of a social network.
Coming up with a protocol is not that hard. The technical side is fun to work with, but I guess technologists don't realize that the human side is way harder to do.
Spam control = relay configuration
Moderation = client side moderation features, most allow muting and blur images from unknown accounts prior to opening. If you don’t like the way a client moderates, move to another
Anonymity = not sure how it’s not anonymous. There’s no sign up, no email, no password. It’s just keypairs being generated. Use a vpn.
How did you use it? The default setting is anonymous unless you reveal who you are.
After I muted a small number of people and used some paid relays I don’t see spam or bad content.
Coolest feature is that you can switch clients while keeping the same relays and all your data stays with you.
Plus a bunch of clients have this auto translate feature so people are talking to each other regardless of the language they speak. I started following some people in other languages - very unique social media experience.
I used paid relays. The reasons are higher quality content. It works alright for spam prevention. Also, I use the nostr.wine filter relay, which is pretty neat. You can connect to it and it will pull notes from your web of contacts (your follows, plus their follows). Additionally, it will rebroadcast your notes to public relays.
It's a pretty nice way to keep your feed quiet (not spammy), but also allow your notes to make it out to the broader public nostr sphere.
I feel the same way. It seems like it doesn’t even try to solve most of the hardest problems for decentralization. I too find it weird, but it is fun to play with.
It's simple, you can develop a client or relay without too much effort, and has an active dev community. It's also FUN. It keeps me going back on a way that Mastodon never did. Not to mention client interoperability is dead easy. It kinda just works which is really nice.
> Does Nostr have any mechanisms to ensure anonymity
Your identity on the network is a public/private key pair. You don't have to associate your real name with your posts, if you don't want to. And you can have multiple key pair identities if you want.
Posts are plain text by default, but encrypted private messages can also be exchanged.
You can choose what relays to post to, and obfuscate your ip address with a vpn or tor if you desire.
I don't see much spam. It's far, far less than Twitter. I can mute people I don't want to see. And I can be anonymous if I want. What exactly did you mean?
Nostr is decentralized. I think a big part of the idea is that relays just dont carry spam/bad actors. The protocol doesn't, as of yet, have need to handle most of your "it doesn't handle complex social issues X Y or Z" nags because it so far handles these problems socially, not technically, and that's been working for now.
Nostr is all based on anonymous cryptographic identifiers, so it seems like you have some special definition of anonymity that you are looking for, as it seems nothing if not anonymous. Having a stable identifier allows relays to know who to send versus who not to send, and allows connecting data together. Users are free to sock puppet up to their hearts content, if they wish to further diffuse traffic.
The appeal? The appeal here is that this is an incredibly malleable & comprehensible low level tool for messaging. Competitors like AtProto or ActivityPub involve complex protocols to exchange/syndicate data around, as much as the payload of the messages themselves. They are high level visions for what a network is. By compare, Nostr's low level approach is organic & searching not a refined final product, but a thriving ecosystem of expanding ideas.
Nostr has extreme elegance as a protocol by being focused primarily on messages themselves, which start as very simple & understandable self signing devices. The transport & exchange of messages is almost incidental, and indeed, Nostr over shoebox or carrier pigeon is possible. This allows a lot more flexibility with how the network can form distributed connections, allows great offline capabilities, allows creative relays & creative/selective distribution mechanisms to form.
Nostr is an excellent base layer. The base specs are quite short & direct. It's a protocol one can happily implement in a weekend.
Nostr has incredibly wild applications, because it is a simple extensible base. There's a wide variety of interesting capabilities that have already need accepted as Nostr Implementation Possibilities, NIPS, that grow & build on one another. Nostr base protocol is just a start, just the seed of an idea, one that's meant to be iterated on & expanded, and it's so easy & direct to do so. This is the biggest advantage by far; I cannot stress this enough. Not trying to do absolutely everything & making a modular simple protocol to start building & iterating from is all the wins, is the Bazaar to the ambitious Cathedrals.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
Nostr is by far the most malleable, most open set of possibilities, the most grow able, of the social networks we have. Everything else seems to have been designed to arrive somewhat fully formed, ready to go, but Nostr's strength is that it doesn't purport to know every use case & to have a total picture of what it is. It's a much simpler idea, with much more focus on finding out the uses.
Yeah, I just don't understand what would relay operator actually do if someone would generate 10k key pairs and post 100k gpt-generated replies to some random posts.
There's actually a NIPS (Nostr's equivalent of RFCs) which introduces a proof-of-work scheme to prevent spamming.
Event IDs are a SHA-256 over the event's payload and metadata, so the idea is that you put some extra metadata saying "I'm doing a bunch of extra work to generate an ID with N leading zeros in the ID", and then a nonce value. You generate the ID, and check to see if it has the number of leading zeroes you wanted. If it doesn't, you increment the nonce and try again. If it does, you're all good- you sign the event and send it along.
Because the ID must be a SHA256 of the rest of the event, you have a fairly good indication of how much work the client would have had to do to generate that nonce. The more zeroes in the ID, the more effort they would have had to expend.
So, as a relay operator, you can define a policy that you won't relay events that don't meet this proof-of-work requirement, and boom, no more spamming.
Of course, there are other ways to handle the spam problem, such as requiring authentication mechanisms or external attestation of messages. But there are multiple tools in the toolbox here.
What does it rate-limit based on? If it's just IP address then I doubt that'll do much good as it won't stop any spammer worth their salt and yet could affect large groups stuck behind a NAT device.
Jack is not a cofounder. Nostr.com is owned by a random user (not sure who, but can probably figure it out). Nostr was created on 2020 by an anon developer named fiatjaf. Jack made grants to nostr devs in 2022 (among other FOSS projects) after he first discovered it. He has no part in the development of the protocol other than the grants, although he is an active user.
Someone's got professionals pumping it, for sure. Along with the recent context-free appearances on the front page, note that this is the 2nd post from submitter @throwaway689236.
