I tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.
That is an unfair judgement. There are people there using LN, just as there are others using Monero, BCH or whatever crypto rocks their boat.
I develop for NOSTR and use zero cryptocurrencies because the communication aspect is what matters, especially the account with npubs which are basically universal entry cards to avoid anyone having to create separate accounts just to use some website or app.
That is really not doing it justice. Some people say the same about podcasting 2.0, but it is so much more, even Apple is starting to pick up features from it (chapters, artwork, transcripts). Not the Lighthing/boosting no. But that's ok right?
Many people get all emotional around crypto and blow it out of proportions imho. Sure there are many bad things about it, but to let your opinion of crypto taint so many nice tings is sad imho.
This is about the structure of metadata, why would you want to tie this to a file format? Even Apple realizes that is not the way to go. And what about transcripts then, Person/guest metadata, Chapter artwork, Live tags (so you can tune in live in a podcasting app)?
"Some subset of these features is in MP3" is not a valid response.
If you really think that crypto people invented podcast chapters and transcripts, you might want to do a reality check.
These have been around in podcatchers for a long time, see e.g. [1] for chapter markers. Apple lagging behind on podcasting features/quasi-standards is also the norm, not the exception.
Crypto-people? As in that that other part of Homo Sapiens that is about to split off, or what? (Yes sarcasm) What are you even talking about? Please do some research before coming with such a response.
Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth because as soon as the term comes up there is a heavy emotional reaction.
I was under the impression you were referring to the Podcasting 2.0 <-> Lightning monetization history. (Podcasting 2.0 includes a few Lightning-related extensions as far as I understand.)
My point stands also if you weren't: Podcasting 2.0 did not invent chapter markers, it only added them to the RSS feed.
> Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth.
I can't deny that I'm coming into crypto-adjacent discussions with some preconceptions, even though I'm sympathetic to many of the ideas, and don't treat the ecosystem as a monolith. There are well-intentioned folks in it, but also libertarian fanatics, corporate short-term-profit maximizers, social media grifters... I really wouldn't say that only crypto critics are at fault for the lack of grounding in truth. (And I say that as somebody that's been somewhat involved with it for a very long time.)
If you're one of the remaining well-intentioned folks in what has largely become a sea of grift, I do feel for you, but I also understand where people here are coming from.
Ok, yes, that is true, but there is much more and I wouldn't call them "crypto-people", that's just a term that paints those people in a bad light, especially here on HN, where "crypto" is a loaded term.
Yes part of podcasting 2.0 is lightning payments (which address a lot of issues people here have with crypto and has the potential to support indi devs and creators more fairly), but I admit I played with it and it is not there (yet).
NOSTR is a protocol so there's no entity for you to be bitter with... You can be annoyed at the people who were on there, but that's a different subject.
There's probably a better analogy than this, but what you're describing would be like playing soccer and being annoyed that your teammates are furries. Go find another team to play with.
But now imagine that the regulating body of your favorite hobby sport is deeply corrupt and fundamentally profit driven, so while playing with your friends is still fun, just thinking about ever competing at the regional level makes you shiver. [1]
Sure, you can always fork a protocol/not federate with who you dislike etc., but you might find yourself fighting an uphill battle against other people’s experiences and preconceptions. Protocols are ultimately always designed by people too.
[1] Note that I have no experience with either Nostr or professional football, so take this as a purely hypothetical analogy with no relation to real organizations. I have to assume both are lovely passion projects by people that just share a common passion.
I honestly think it would be completely legit to build a completely separate ecosystem on top of the same protocol. A separate set of relays, separate apps which connect to those relays by default, no lighting payments, different defaults, marketed to a different audience. Ultimately it is not just a single network. If users need interoperability eventually they can easily add other relays. But it's true that many people are put off by the current community.
Nah, you didn't understand it. Lightning is a layer-2 protocol on top of bitcoin. Nostr is the so-called layer-3. Good luck trying to build Nostr without Lightning.
False. Nostr is not “Layer 3” in any standard technical sense. Nostr is an open, decentralized protocol for exchanging and publishing messages/events. It doesn't sit on top of Bitcoin or Lightning in the way Lightning sits on Bitcoin. You absolutely can build/use Nostr without Lightning. Stop with this (anti-crypto)-bro fear mongering (yes anti-crypto in brackets as 1 thing). It's not helping FOSS, it's doing big-tech's work.
You're just lying because you hate crypto. That is as bad as the blind evangelizing of cryptocurrencies.
If you have any other proposal for true micropayments (as in fractions of cents of value that flow freely) please, indulge me. I for one would prefer to give value via lightning over forcing my eyeballs on ads everywhere I look.
You can't blame the protocol for the user it attracts. It is in early development. Just imagine the year is 1996 and you are complaining that WWW, IRC and the USENET is full of male tech nerds with a STEM background and a taste in SciFi/Fantasy culture. It will take some a while for the evolution to happen until you can get your beauty and makeup styling content.
The thing with Nostr is that the protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.
What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers.
There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.
> protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.
That statement is false and if you disagree: please provide a source.
There is no such restriction on the NIP (protocol guidelines). I have been writing NOSTR software since years and there was NEVER such restriction in place. In fact, wouldn't even make sense because some relays (e.g. Primal) are super-aggregators for smaller relays.
> users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays
This is a false statement. NIP 65 provides a list of which servers the users declares to be using. This way readers for that user know at which door (server) to knock and ask for updates.
there are relays built exactly for this, for rebroadcasting. You can do whatever you want in nostr btw.
this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with.
there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.
But part of the protocol is that user profiles also list the relays where to find their content (where their posts go to) and a second user connects to those relays to fetch their content directly?
it doesn't explicitly forbdit it. It just doesn't spec it out, because it doesn't need it for the protocol to work. There are already many relays and clients that do just this.
I think GP's point (which I agree with) is that the functionality is almost essential. When it's not part of the spec, then you end up with differing off-spec implementations, and again, centralization risk.
This would be like the HTTP protocol not defining `POST`, and leaving it up to servers and clients to implement it based on however it feels like.
I really like the ideals behind Nostr, but I think its implementation and execution could be better.
It would be more analog to HTTP not specing out how CDNs should work, or Usenet not specing out how DejaNews is going to work. It's infrastructure stuff neither the client nor the simple server has to care about.
The Nostr spec covers what matters, cryptographic identities and unique message ids, that make dumb relays that duplicating messages from elsewhere possible (an area where HTTP or Activity Pub fail at).
Nostr breaks down along the longstanding ambiguity around what 'decentralization' means.
In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite.
People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced.
Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.
Email requires a message to reach a specific, limited set of participants. Nostr is a public forum, which means an unbounded number of participants who can engage.
Ordering a conversation between an unbounded set across independent nodes leads to misordered interactions not possible if you just centralize. It seems like a small issue, but at scale quality really suffers when some universal, fine-resolution ordering can't be agreed upon.
You can devise many clever schemes to try to avoid centralization and achieve coherency, but if one service is more up to date with more info, it is preferable and offers a more coherent public conversation. Network effects still dominate despite the protocol.
All that said, if I wasn't very aligned with the spirit, I wouldn't care so much to think about it. I'm also aligned with the spirit of Bitcoin but the culture present in both doesn't help it. The fact that Nostr is Bitcoin aligned, meaning it rejects the technical options of protocols taking more risks, hurts it.
The way it handles public keys and identities is very simple and good and to me is very obviously reflective of a good future state. But it's not unique to Nostr.
There are things like mailing lists since decades and they do fine.
You are assuming that everyone can spam your messages whereas in reality with NOSTR you choose from which relays to get updates. These relays are sovereign in the sense that they can (and will) define the rules and who can use them.
I've never experienced misordered interactions since years of using NOSTR. This might be something of a theoretical issue because in practice that isn't observed.
> Nostr is a public forum, which means an unbounded number of participants who can engage.
Thats why you layer encryption on top of that to restrict the audience to whatever you intend. And yes, traitors in your audience can rebroadcast unencrypted versions of your encrypted one - that is the equivalence of a person reposting a private whatsapp chat on instagram.
Insightful! We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin.
Email, RSS, and also Nostr are too simple. The core protocol does not contain any measures against spam, abuse and fraud. No accountability. Just launch a million fake identities and spam these network. Your Internet address got blocked? Try the a16z-funded startup that uses a USA-based phone farm. Decentralised accountability is unsolved.
My university lab has focused on decentralisation for decades, its hard. We need a decentralised trust framework (e.g. our TrustChain protocol), decentralised spam prevention (StarveSpam) and decentralised democracy (our TwoStepDemocracy protocol). Getting this deployed and do iterative improvements needs more resources then universities have. Another coordination problem for The Common Good.
the main method against spam in Nostr is probably lightning. You can simply attach sats that are worth a couple cents to the content. Note that lightning has the concept of hold invoices so the receiver may or may not chose to actually claim the money. I.e. your friends and family will always attach 50cents to a message, knowing that you will never claim it anyway. If a spammer attaches 50cents to a message, the recipients will claim it and the spammer looses.
This is where we are headed in the AI age without Nostr/Bitcoin anyway. On some sites like youtube it has already become impossible to separate spam bots fom real comments. Agents that remote control users real browser instances and post AI slop all over the network will bring spam to another level. Attaching some money to whatever you post will actually be usefull to separate spam from real content.
The homepage could be a description of ATProto. Except lots of people around me already use ATproto, and a successful European instance has just been launched, Eurosky, focusing on expanding the protocol with apps doing other things than micro-messages (Bluesky).
ATproto is defacto not decentralized and the protocol is about 50x more complicated to get working than NOSTR.
Whereas in ATproto you have to find a place to register an account, say a domain for yourself or use someone else's domain, in NOSTR creating an account is nothing more than a public/private key that is generated on the fly.
Then is the storage of information. Whereas in ATproto information is stored in plenty of different formats and specific folder configurations which are easy to miss, in NOSTR is all JSON from a single base template file.
Third is the absence of global moderation and islands. Whereas in ATproto only a few (I think 3 main providers) exist, you can be kicked out from them and effectively stop reaching your audience. In NOSTR if a relay stops receiving your texts it is a bummer but there are hundreds of other volunteer-based servers to where you can send your texts, so it is very difficult to block people from reading texts of the authors they are interested.
Simplicity is the key. NOSTR is the first and only network that I've seen so far where content/authors are truly disconnected from the servers hosting their data.
The nice thing about open, federated protocols is that it is relatively easy to connect them together. There actually is a Mastodon to Bluesky bridge already for example. These protocols should compete on merit. There's no good fundamental reason for them to not federate each other's content. But there are lots of non technical reasons. For example mastodon users particularly are quite picky about how their content is filtered and used. Even implementing a search engine is something that gets a lot of pushback.
The reason people might care is taking ownership of how they filter and curate their feed. Instead of outsourcing that to some algorithm owned by a company, having a federated network allows you to pick and choose or even implement your own filtering if you self host. It also gets advertising as the primary revenue mechanism out of the way and that removes a conflict of interest between what users want to see and what advertisers want them to see.
Of course the drooling masses on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. seem to be perfectly happy to have their endocrine system manipulated by self tuning algorithms. But there are some legitimate concerns about whether that's actually healthy for them. Federated social networks provide an alternative to this.
I really like nostr because it gives you freedom of association. You can unfollow other users and, if you run a relay, you can refuse to accept content from users you don't like, but you can't ban other relays (like mastodon does) and you can't refuse content based on relays other users use, because you don't know. In other words, you only can ignore people you don't like but you can't meaningfully deplatform them or prevent them from looking at or following your content. That's how it should be and, incidentally, that's what makes people in favour of deplatforming furious, which can only be a good thing :)
Unfortunately nostr has little network effect because the current ecosystem was stood up by bitcoin enthusiasts, and there's no much generalist discourse on it. Luckily, it's a simple protocol and it's really hard to kill protocols in the first place. Maybe the next censorship debacle on the current alternative social media platforms will give it a boost, or maybe it will remain a small niche group of ecosystems for specialized users? Who knows, but I'm glad it exists.
Took a look and when I got there, the first post was about bitcoin, the second was an add for a cryptocurrency app, the next one was about nostr and bitcoin. The fourth was actually unrelated to either ! But then it was crypto or nostr again. Terrible way to make a first impression (unless you are into crypto I suppose).
Seems to be surviving just fine bases on the comment feeds I see utilizing it in Podcast 2.0 apps. Sorry, nobody cares about your police, we're just here for the tech
Funny timing on this - I just came across my backed up keys recently and signed back into it. Poking around over the last 24 hours has left me underwhelmed in terms of actual interesting content (I'm not a cryptobro) nor overly innovative things built on top of the protocol.
Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...
It's a very rich protocol with many advanced features but here are the basics:
1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM)
2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos
3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff
4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read
5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues
6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group
7. Like twitch with live video streams
8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)
Social media is one of its most underwhelming usecases, there's loads of productivity apps building on it like if you look that formstr ecosystem (about.formstr.app) and gaming ecosystem as well, it's really just a new communication medium
I build edtechs apps with it. Lets me develop tech like the ability to create scholarships with learning, cross-platform badges/achievements and cool stuff like that.
For me, the great idea behind Nostr is that identity is a self-generated key pair, which can then be used wherever you want (and the economic model, with much potentials). In terms of decentralisation, however, I'm not convinced; I find the model of the late ZeroNet, the KAD network and others, essentially DHT, far superior, because it allows content to stay alive as long as there's interest in it, and every member of the network donates a certain amount of storage and bandwidth (adjustable at will) without being able to choose which specific scrap of content to host.
In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.
The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:
- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)
- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)
- short posts like Twitter/X
- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit
- very long, blog-style posts
- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar
We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.
> If you Used Nostr your communication would be completely uncensored and decentralized.
> Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who use Nostr.
As of now it’s filled with BTC-maxis / crypto bros that mainly talk about how great Nostr and Bitcoin are … and not much else.
I suppose there’s plenty of tasteless AI slop and gross adult scams if that suits your palate.
The website mentions the network is pro-censorship:
> Pro-censorship: The protocol is ownerless, relays are not
> Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" — it simply recognizes that different people have different morals and preferences and each server, being privately owned, can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please and users are free to choose what to read and from where.
From what I've gathered it's pro-censorship however since the user is entirely mobile and can change relays at will without friction that the power still remains with the user... the relay doesn't have much power in anything they can't keep their users from finding you, and they can't keep you from publishing elsewhere they can only choose to not accept your posts.
When I setup my account I list 3-4 relays that will host my content, if any one relay decides they dislike me and bans me no big deal everyone who follows me already knows to check 3-4 different servers for me and will find my content on the others, and I can update that list at any point in time just as quickly as I'm banned... so unless you can get every relay (which ideally are all individual groups with likely different rules / regulations) I publish to to ban me at the same time there is no real way to "censor" someone in the way we are used to currently.
Which is the point of free speech, right?
You should have the ability to say whatever you want, people just don't have to listen to you or be around you.
Nostr relays can censor however much they want. And users can just add other relays and route around it. That's fundamentally different from most other protocols, where user identity and posts are tied to a single server, and there is no means to just broadcast to another one.
On Lemmy for example you can't even find a post another server, since post ids are tied to a server. So despite post actually being cached on multiple servers, it provides absolutely nothing that helps with censorship or crash tolleranze.
There is a feature called "follow" so just follow the people with topics you are interested, same as any network unless you prefer tiktok-style algorithms that choose everything for you.
Same problem as with telegram messenger or tor browser: once you promote censorship resistance and inability to be deplatformed, it attracts people who previously got censored and deplatformed. Then on the other hand, when the hong kong protesters and the ukraine soldiers used it for their purposes, it is a welcome freedom tech (unless you are china or russia). Decentralization and true censorship resistance will always be a double-edged sword.
Adoption by too narrow an audience can totally poison a protocol for the rest of us.
Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.
Maybe they want to torrent Linux ISOs but can't because their ISP/VPN blocks the torrent protocol. Http for server->client downloading is inferior but we are stuck with it.
I develop for NOSTR and use zero cryptocurrencies because the communication aspect is what matters, especially the account with npubs which are basically universal entry cards to avoid anyone having to create separate accounts just to use some website or app.
Many people get all emotional around crypto and blow it out of proportions imho. Sure there are many bad things about it, but to let your opinion of crypto taint so many nice tings is sad imho.
"Some subset of these features is in MP3" is not a valid response.
These have been around in podcatchers for a long time, see e.g. [1] for chapter markers. Apple lagging behind on podcasting features/quasi-standards is also the norm, not the exception.
[1] https://id3.org/id3v2-chapters-1.0
Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth because as soon as the term comes up there is a heavy emotional reaction.
My point stands also if you weren't: Podcasting 2.0 did not invent chapter markers, it only added them to the RSS feed.
> Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth.
I can't deny that I'm coming into crypto-adjacent discussions with some preconceptions, even though I'm sympathetic to many of the ideas, and don't treat the ecosystem as a monolith. There are well-intentioned folks in it, but also libertarian fanatics, corporate short-term-profit maximizers, social media grifters... I really wouldn't say that only crypto critics are at fault for the lack of grounding in truth. (And I say that as somebody that's been somewhat involved with it for a very long time.)
If you're one of the remaining well-intentioned folks in what has largely become a sea of grift, I do feel for you, but I also understand where people here are coming from.
Yes part of podcasting 2.0 is lightning payments (which address a lot of issues people here have with crypto and has the potential to support indi devs and creators more fairly), but I admit I played with it and it is not there (yet).
Sure, you can always fork a protocol/not federate with who you dislike etc., but you might find yourself fighting an uphill battle against other people’s experiences and preconceptions. Protocols are ultimately always designed by people too.
[1] Note that I have no experience with either Nostr or professional football, so take this as a purely hypothetical analogy with no relation to real organizations. I have to assume both are lovely passion projects by people that just share a common passion.
Nah, you didn't understand it. Lightning is a layer-2 protocol on top of bitcoin. Nostr is the so-called layer-3. Good luck trying to build Nostr without Lightning.
You're just lying because you hate crypto. That is as bad as the blind evangelizing of cryptocurrencies.
Beeeep, wrong. Next question.
Anything like this in 2026?
What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers.
There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.
That statement is false and if you disagree: please provide a source.
There is no such restriction on the NIP (protocol guidelines). I have been writing NOSTR software since years and there was NEVER such restriction in place. In fact, wouldn't even make sense because some relays (e.g. Primal) are super-aggregators for smaller relays.
> users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays
This is a false statement. NIP 65 provides a list of which servers the users declares to be using. This way readers for that user know at which door (server) to knock and ask for updates.
this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with.
there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.
Isn't this true of any protocol (to a greater or lesser degree)?
This would be like the HTTP protocol not defining `POST`, and leaving it up to servers and clients to implement it based on however it feels like.
I really like the ideals behind Nostr, but I think its implementation and execution could be better.
The Nostr spec covers what matters, cryptographic identities and unique message ids, that make dumb relays that duplicating messages from elsewhere possible (an area where HTTP or Activity Pub fail at).
And how do you exactly envision enforcement? Ohhhh, you copied some bits, you going to jail!!
The idea of nostr is that you can do whatever the you like. An open protocol. There is no forbidding of anything
In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite.
People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced.
Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.
Same thing with email that you've been using for decades, doesn't get simpler than that.
Ordering a conversation between an unbounded set across independent nodes leads to misordered interactions not possible if you just centralize. It seems like a small issue, but at scale quality really suffers when some universal, fine-resolution ordering can't be agreed upon.
You can devise many clever schemes to try to avoid centralization and achieve coherency, but if one service is more up to date with more info, it is preferable and offers a more coherent public conversation. Network effects still dominate despite the protocol.
All that said, if I wasn't very aligned with the spirit, I wouldn't care so much to think about it. I'm also aligned with the spirit of Bitcoin but the culture present in both doesn't help it. The fact that Nostr is Bitcoin aligned, meaning it rejects the technical options of protocols taking more risks, hurts it.
The way it handles public keys and identities is very simple and good and to me is very obviously reflective of a good future state. But it's not unique to Nostr.
You are assuming that everyone can spam your messages whereas in reality with NOSTR you choose from which relays to get updates. These relays are sovereign in the sense that they can (and will) define the rules and who can use them.
I've never experienced misordered interactions since years of using NOSTR. This might be something of a theoretical issue because in practice that isn't observed.
Thats why you layer encryption on top of that to restrict the audience to whatever you intend. And yes, traitors in your audience can rebroadcast unencrypted versions of your encrypted one - that is the equivalence of a person reposting a private whatsapp chat on instagram.
Insightful! We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin.
Email, RSS, and also Nostr are too simple. The core protocol does not contain any measures against spam, abuse and fraud. No accountability. Just launch a million fake identities and spam these network. Your Internet address got blocked? Try the a16z-funded startup that uses a USA-based phone farm. Decentralised accountability is unsolved.
My university lab has focused on decentralisation for decades, its hard. We need a decentralised trust framework (e.g. our TrustChain protocol), decentralised spam prevention (StarveSpam) and decentralised democracy (our TwoStepDemocracy protocol). Getting this deployed and do iterative improvements needs more resources then universities have. Another coordination problem for The Common Good.
This is where we are headed in the AI age without Nostr/Bitcoin anyway. On some sites like youtube it has already become impossible to separate spam bots fom real comments. Agents that remote control users real browser instances and post AI slop all over the network will bring spam to another level. Attaching some money to whatever you post will actually be usefull to separate spam from real content.
Why should I care ? Honest question.
Whereas in ATproto you have to find a place to register an account, say a domain for yourself or use someone else's domain, in NOSTR creating an account is nothing more than a public/private key that is generated on the fly.
Then is the storage of information. Whereas in ATproto information is stored in plenty of different formats and specific folder configurations which are easy to miss, in NOSTR is all JSON from a single base template file.
Third is the absence of global moderation and islands. Whereas in ATproto only a few (I think 3 main providers) exist, you can be kicked out from them and effectively stop reaching your audience. In NOSTR if a relay stops receiving your texts it is a bummer but there are hundreds of other volunteer-based servers to where you can send your texts, so it is very difficult to block people from reading texts of the authors they are interested.
Simplicity is the key. NOSTR is the first and only network that I've seen so far where content/authors are truly disconnected from the servers hosting their data.
The reason people might care is taking ownership of how they filter and curate their feed. Instead of outsourcing that to some algorithm owned by a company, having a federated network allows you to pick and choose or even implement your own filtering if you self host. It also gets advertising as the primary revenue mechanism out of the way and that removes a conflict of interest between what users want to see and what advertisers want them to see.
Of course the drooling masses on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. seem to be perfectly happy to have their endocrine system manipulated by self tuning algorithms. But there are some legitimate concerns about whether that's actually healthy for them. Federated social networks provide an alternative to this.
Unfortunately nostr has little network effect because the current ecosystem was stood up by bitcoin enthusiasts, and there's no much generalist discourse on it. Luckily, it's a simple protocol and it's really hard to kill protocols in the first place. Maybe the next censorship debacle on the current alternative social media platforms will give it a boost, or maybe it will remain a small niche group of ecosystems for specialized users? Who knows, but I'm glad it exists.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w
Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...
1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM) 2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos 3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff 4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read 5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues 6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group 7. Like twitch with live video streams 8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)
Oh come on now.
In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.
The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:
- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)
- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)
- short posts like Twitter/X
- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit
- very long, blog-style posts
- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar
We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.
To paraphrase:
> If you Used Nostr your communication would be completely uncensored and decentralized.
> Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who use Nostr.
As of now it’s filled with BTC-maxis / crypto bros that mainly talk about how great Nostr and Bitcoin are … and not much else. I suppose there’s plenty of tasteless AI slop and gross adult scams if that suits your palate.
> Pro-censorship: The protocol is ownerless, relays are not
> Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" — it simply recognizes that different people have different morals and preferences and each server, being privately owned, can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please and users are free to choose what to read and from where.
When I setup my account I list 3-4 relays that will host my content, if any one relay decides they dislike me and bans me no big deal everyone who follows me already knows to check 3-4 different servers for me and will find my content on the others, and I can update that list at any point in time just as quickly as I'm banned... so unless you can get every relay (which ideally are all individual groups with likely different rules / regulations) I publish to to ban me at the same time there is no real way to "censor" someone in the way we are used to currently.
On Lemmy for example you can't even find a post another server, since post ids are tied to a server. So despite post actually being cached on multiple servers, it provides absolutely nothing that helps with censorship or crash tolleranze.
Truly awful to have decentralized freedom.
Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.
Others peer to peer sharing platforms got much more popular despite mainstream news about them like LimeWire and eMule