These protocols seem to think that people actually want an alternative to what Instagram, Facebook, X etc. give them. They don't, we all just want the comfort of our own little bubble and a constant feeling of perceived fame. The rest, and all the talk about the protocol that underlines this is just fluff for nerds that will have zero impact in a society dominated by tech capital.
Do you wanna change social media? Try and find and effective way to bring them down.
Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?
> The most interesting feature of Mastodon is that by its nature it creates communities with shared values that grow in each of its servers. Or, should I say, that should be a feature if it actually worked like that. In fact these are not really communities, but a mashup of users that may share some interests among each other, but also have other interests and those other interests end up polluting the supposed "community" with things that do not interest the other users.
ie. they're complaining that federated communities are too diverse and multi-faceted, instead of being divided into nice little laser-focused grids of shared interests
That's basically the point of nostr.
Are there any major figures of interest primarily participating on any Nostr platform? Or is there any kind of uniquely interesting content that is being primarily produced and shared on Nostr?
The "algorithm" in any social media is a blessing and a curse. Nostr shifts the responsibility of what to show to the clients.
In the past, the way that I would typically get to know people online was either through niche topic-specific forums or IRC channels. Then eventually if we got to know each other well enough, we would connect on other platforms. The modern version of this seems to be Discord. These platforms are all topic focused, rather than being user-first.
Discoverability is important! And one of the limitations of search or tag based discoverability is that you're limited to finding things which you already know about. But it doesn't help you find new things that you don't know about! This doesn't mean that algorithmic discoverability is the only option, for example: you could find some way to map the user's interest spaces and search for unexplored or undiscovered nodes.
https://bitchat.free now uses nostr for non-mesh contacts somehow, but I see no-one there either.
Then there is https://www.amethyst.social/ which is excellent because it brings out more of the potential of the platform.
Lots of people also like Primal. It's well polished and replicates Twitter/X reasonably well.
Not reliable for larger values.
And attention that Monero isn't the only privacy coin in town, but it is the one that is without doubt more attacked by governments due to its privacy. You don't see the same treatment for neither LN nor bitcoin, instead you see governments supporting it. There is a big difference.
I am involved in Lightning and run my own node - it is pretty much private enough for all sorts of micro payments for content creators. Not private enough for organized crime to move large sums, agreed.
You also forget to mention the 51% attack monero recently suffered. Lightning is bitcoin based and way more resilient to that.
"An open protocol with a chance of working" = ?huh? "Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech"" = ???huh? "BEEP BOOP" ???wtf??
Please don't explain technical things as if you were talking to children. Explain them as if you were talking to a colleague sitting next to you. Talk to them as a person and as a professional.
If you are familiar with the IRC chat system, it is similar to IRC but with JSON messages and the ability to store & resend messages on the servers. Servers have to connect to each other and are free to each have their own policies.
You write an email (note/message) but instead of sending it to one server, you can send it to multiple servers of your choice. Each message is digitally signed with your keys and a time stamp, so you can verify that the identity is truly yours no matter where the message came from.
In my opinion is the most innovative way of communicating that I've seen in the last 20 years. There is no concept of server nor permanent location.
A relay can refuse to receive your messages, but they can't block your account because you can always write new notes, sign them and send to wherever people want to read your texts.
Imagine the case with Trump when he got blocked from Twitter. With a click of a button they have deplatformed him, with NOSTR he would have just continued writing and people would simply tune to another relay to keep reading his texts.
On top of that are other good developments. For example, file sharing also became decentralized. So files, images and other media can be sent to the relays and you mention them from the notes based on the file hash which is good save content when someone else hosting your texts and media decides to stop hosting.
That helped me understand the protocol better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w
This also helps understand the whole basic concept: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
There’s also work on a Web of Trust in some clients that filters notes from people that don’t meet the WOT score. It’s essentially a weighted score based on who you follow and who they follow
Nostr users, how does this differ in your experience from Mastodon? At first glance it seems like the same idea but with the extra ingredient of blockchain, I'm not sure what this adds though, anonymity?
You start by creating a pair of public/private keys. That is your "account" but is independent from everything else (e.g. not tied to any specific tool nor web service).
Then you create texts (notes) which are digitally signed with your private key. Using the public key anyone can verify it was you writing it and nobody else.
There is no blockchain in the process, these simple text messages get sent to a multiple number of relays (you can even host them yourself) and other people can read them very freely.
The main difference to mastodon is that exists no central server where someone registers an account and has the power to kick you out from the site (deplatform). This also solves the problem with the mastodon servers decides to stop the service and suddenly everything is gone.
On NOSTR your texts are your texts, and there are multiple copies everywhere (more than 1000 free relays at the momment).
So with Nostr - it's decentralised to the point that I'm (me the user) the individual point that's sending et, rather than Mastodon which is decentralised less such that there's multiple servers with many users.
On Nostr the server is just a dumb relay, it controls and owns nothing. User identities are proper public key pairs. If a relay goes evil, you can just use another one or use multiple at once to begin with, since the location of the messages is irrelevant, everything is held together by public keys.
Have there been any attempts to make more of a “network” that incentivizes operating personal websites but adds a mechanism for typical social media features like chat, a feed, etc. in a centralized way? The only thing I can think of is RSS, and that is only a way to follow content publication.
Can't monetize that.
However, the copywriting there is not in this vein at all. IMO the metaphor of personal websites is a simple, universal one that most people can understand. Nostr seems unintelligible to anyone that isn't pretty technical.
The end result is a bad experience for both user and developer. Using a single relay is centralised and defeats the point. Using multiple relays is slow and cumbersome and requires the user to know/care which relays they are connecting to.
When I played with Nostr a couple years ago the "NIPs" were already a complete mess. Later NIPs supersede earlier NIPs changing how clients are supposed to interpret messages. At least some are flagged as "unrecommended: deprecated" now.
Most NIP are fine and continuously improved.
This is trivial to solve when there is there a periodic release of the NIP as done in other specs. So far there hasn't been much need for that formality, most developers understand quickly how to create tools on top of it.
The protocol's real value lies in other use cases.
Effectively, everything else is left to be implemented.
That probably explains try-everything-see-what-works approach to client apps?
In the end the content I was seeing there was almost exclusively about Nostr and Crypto so it wasn't that interested to keep using it.
Some people say that labeling yourself apolitical is 1, a polticial statement 2, a privilege itself which puts you into a certain socio-political position
And others say that we should use our positions of privilege to help others, which seems to apply in this case.
...which is a very much a political statement.
But the point is, nostr does not intent to judge that. It happens automatically while communicating. Nostr is just the means to communicate.
One of the most depressing things about the decentralised protocol space is the adversarial attitude to other projects - whether that's Nostr v. ActivityPub v. ATproto v Nostr, XMPP v. Matrix v. IRCv3 v. Deltachat, etc.
Imagine if the energy spent on positioning yourself relative to other open-source projects (who should be fellow travellers, if anything) was instead invested into competing with the centralised proprietary incumbents instead.
The same applies to open source as a whole, but it's depressing to see the same vibes leach into the literal tagline of the project.
AFIK Freenet is the only truly resilient anonymous network that lasted +20 years without literally a single successful attack by the state actor.
It's like RAID over the internet over encryption with global replication of data. Amazing project for PHD thesis lol
Imagine it this way, freenet needs electricity and servers to keep running. NOSTR messages can be printed in paper (handwritten even) and you'd still be able to verify it belongs to a specific person.
Basically freenet builds a network for communication (roads) but NOSTR is only about messages (cars) and doesn't really care about which road is using.
There is no centralization because there is no coordination. There is not even knowledge of what can be happening elsewhere because these messages might not even be using internet to be shared (e.g. radio or paper messages)
On the other side this is what makes it so powerful. You can download the full set of text messages from someone into your disk, that disk be found centuries later and digital archaeologists could easily read the contents because it is plain text.
So it isn't competing against freenet, it will use it very happily when available as option.
staticelf•1h ago
As a user I don't want to see it and the submitter should be found and jailed for distributing it. Right now, it's hard to know where it even comes from since it can come from any of the relay you are connected to. Most apps do not show which relay the content originates from and honestly, what can you do?
I guess one solution is to only use paid relayes or heavily restricted ones that require invitation. But if that is the case, it kind of defeats the purpose of Nostr to begin with IMO.
nunobrito•1h ago
I'm a long time user of NOSTR. When you enter the network through any of the main clients you will only see curated topics (trending). The WoT assures that the best content comes up.
stonogo•1h ago
Geep5•1h ago
nunobrito•56m ago
If you feel that is wrong, please describe the steps to replicate such situation.
stonogo•33m ago
Step 1: In 2023, notice a crypto spam post on Mastodon with a weird account name.
Step 2: Look up what could have made that post, which was bridged from some other service.
Step 3: Set up a key, grab a client (I used a web client that deployed to Netlify's free tier).
Step 4: Follow some howtos, add relays, follow some accounts that repeat other accounts, try to figure out how discovery works.
Step 5: Start seeing really disturbing content.
Step 6: Delete all this stuff, and write it off in the same bucket as Freenet.
Step 7: Wait some years.
Step 8: Get called a liar on a web forum.
t1E9mE7JTRjf•21m ago
nunobrito•20m ago
The easiest way to try NOSTR is using any of the common web platforms like https://primal.net or https://yakihonne.com/
Heck, you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years.
It is very unbelievable that you followed such a complicated process, even went to effort of deploying to a server (what?!?) and then somehow you see disturbing content without looking explicitly for it.
In case you are sincere, try it again using any of the common methods.
throwaway290•7m ago
> you can even install NOSTR clients directly from the App and Play store since years
Since feb 2023, apparently;)
numpad0•43m ago
This happens because Japan always has disproportionately massive online presence with significantly better democratized attention engineering, and so content selections naturally mimic a crossing at Akihabara(despite it almost has been entirely superseded by Chinese tech cultural centers such as Shenzhen), not the Times Square(in NYC), which infuriates a lot of somewhat vocal people.
And, the reason why I must bring this up is that it is not merely it is inaccurate labeling, but it is also counter productive to not face it straight on. Such as, people would move away from pornography, making it less actually pornographic, which is more child-pornographic by the standards of people using this term in this manner, because that is what are considered LESS sexualized contents by its producers, which by the way exist in orders of millions in Japan and leaking out fast into Asia at large.
TLDR. Hating anime, fine. Just don't call it CP. Your words sound opposite of intent. That's what brought us here. So stop.
photios•1h ago
BoorishBears•55m ago
Is there a fundamental reason this wouldn't be true? Isn't it a place where people can anonymously share multimedia with minimal moderation?
In my experience even the most toy application exposed to the wider internet will face this issue.
nunobrito•50m ago
The best thing is asking them to provide steps for replicating their claims, which they won't since it is the not the common user experience at all.
immibis•42m ago
0xAFFFF•37m ago
nunobrito•17m ago
What doesn't make sense is when the other party starts making stories just to tarnish other competing technologies. Just now the OP was asked to provide details to replicate his findings and those were indeed very "fuzzy" to say the least.
numpad0•34m ago
These people come back fuming hot with more derogatory, still indirect, descriptions, and cycle repeats. This has been a "problem" for social media for almost as long as I've been online.
t1E9mE7JTRjf•18m ago
I can't think of any clients which surface weird stuff (I've never seen any on nostr). I think to reach this situation a user must follow weird accounts and thus get their content - but then I can't see that as being nostr related, since someone could do that on the internet or other networks.
the_real_cher•40m ago
Its on the individual to block that kind of stuff.