6 ms·

Nostr breaks down along the longstanding ambiguity around what 'decentralization' means. In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and t

• nunobrito 23d ago
  What "awkward" coordination? Clients fetch updates from whatever servers they follow. Same thing with email that you've been using for decades, doesn't get simpler than that.
  • john_owl 23d ago
    Just like a RSS feed client or a podcast client that connects to multiple feeds to update your timeline.
    • synctext 23d ago
      > decentralization of power 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.
      • colordrops 23d ago
        What's wrong with RSS?
      • littlecranky67 23d ago
        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.
        • synctext 23d ago
          > You can simply attach sats that are worth a couple cents to the content. That is a great point! You can attach real money to messages to prevent spamming. However, this has been tried many times and failed to get mass adoption. Friction is too high when users need to load money on their fresh wallet. Giving everybody their own karma-credits could be the best of both worlds. AI slop is a fundamental problem. The signal in Youtube clicks/views has gone to zero. Even adversarial machine learning can't make it a nice place anymore. I think its even doomed if we find a collective system that filters crap. btw RSS usage is consistently declining, its 1999 server-focused technology.
          • littlecranky67 22d ago
            Adoption will come when the friction caused by spam is high enough. We are just getting started with the slop era.
      • abc123abc123 22d ago
  • mw888 23d ago
    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.
    • littlecranky67 23d ago
      > 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.
      • inigyou 22d ago
        The problem wasn't about private conversations being too public, it was about intentionally public conversations being too hard to coordinate.
    • nunobrito 23d ago
      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.
• chr15m 22d ago
  > network effects favor the largest No. You can write a client that does not use popular relays and it will work fine.
  • kragen 22d ago
    Can you elaborate on this? What can you do with this client, and how does it find the relays to use to get notified of new notes? I don't know very much about Nostr, so I don't know the answers to these questions, or even if they are the right questions to ask.
    • hardran3 22d ago
      Users set their own relays. Other users can see this list and use it to send and receive events. It's fixed the need of big common relays. https://nips.nostr.com/65 https://nips.nostr.com/65
      • kragen 22d ago
        So how does this hypothetical client find out what non-big relays have been set by the other users whose notes its user wants to receive, if not by receiving notes from those other users via one of the big common relays?
        • chr15m 22d ago
          By seeding relay lists widely. This is the "bootstrap problem" faced by all p2p networks. NIP65 suggests spreading relay lists widely and to "pay attention" to popular relays: > Clients SHOULD spread an author's kind:10002 event to as many relays as viable, paying attention to relays that, at any moment, serve naturally as well-known public indexers for these relay lists (where most other clients and users are connecting to in order to publish and fetch those). Note this is different to centralising the whole protocol on popular relays. If affects the discovery phase only, and is robust to large relays disappearing. If clients seed address lists widely they can easily find each other without major centralisation.
• kragen 22d ago
  > 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) Let's not. Decentralization of power is not the same thing as accountability. They are alternatives that can achieve some of the same goals, but in significantly different ways. My working definition is that a system is decentralized to the extent that a person cannot be banned from it. I assure myself of a bed to sleep in in a decentralized way: there is a bed in my bedroom, in my house, which I lock with a key, so that nobody can sleep in my bed without my permission (or my wife's). Or I can go to a hotel, if I can find one that is willing to accommodate me, or to a friend's house. I am not accountable to anyone for my bed. If my bed has boxes of books on it and cannot be slept in, nobody will hold me to account. Not even my wife; she has her own bed. It is impossible to ban me from the Bed System, other than by arresting me; even if you took the bed out of my house, I could go over to my friend's house and sleep there, or I could get a new bed from a store, or from someone who's selling theirs. This is somewhat inefficient. For example, tonight my wife is visiting her parents, so nobody will be using her bed. This kind of thing results in the community in aggregate needing more beds than people. If I were staying in a homeless shelter, I would instead rely on accountability. If I arrived at the shelter and there was no bed available to me, I would complain to the staff. I would attempt to complain to the manager. I might at some point write a letter to their funding agencies. Depending on factors like my social status, I might or might not obtain some kind of alternative accommodation, and homeless shelters that systematically failed to provide accommodations to their clients might be shut down, or they might not. If the homeless-shelter system in an area is completely centralized, accountability is all I'd have, and banning me from that system could be done at the stroke of a pen. But if there's some degree of decentralization, I might hoof it to another shelter, and perhaps find accommodation. Otherwise, I'm stuck either looking for a place to sleep on the sidewalk where nobody will steal my shoes, or maybe trying to find a bus ride long enough to permit me to nap in a seat for an hour or so, because I am significantly vulnerable to the centralized power of the homeless-shelter staff. Despite its efficiency, this is considerably worse than my current actual situation, in which I really don't have to worry very much about having a bed to sleep in tonight, considerably lowering my stress level. So accountability is very different in practice from decentralization of power. And that is why we prefer the Bed System, and most other necessities of daily life, to be decentralized. In the case of Nostr, the idea is for relays to enjoy economies of scale without enjoying centralized power, in particular because they don't coordinate. There's always some tension there; if one neighborhood store stops carrying Sugar-Free Speed Energy Drink, you can go to another one, but there's no guarantee they carry it either. So the power enjoyed by the shopkeeper is definitely nonzero, even in ordinary commercial transactions (not to mention if they accuse you of shoplifting, which other shopkeepers might notice). It's still much less power than that enjoyed by a big-box supermarket in a neighborhood with no neighborhood stores, and often economies of scale tend to drive neighborhood stores out of business when a big-box store moves in. As an alternative to trying to decentralize your food retail system in neighborhood stores, you could try to centralize it and make it accountable, with a food co-op. If the co-op members don't like the food buying decisions of the staff, they can vote in a new board of directors that will fire the management, if necessary, in order to ensure better food buying decisions. But this is very different from the decentralization of a diversity of neighborhood stores. Among other things, the food co-op can ban someone.
• tkel 22d ago
  Accountability is not the same as decentralization of power, don't conflate them. Decentralizing power means that many people are made powerful in their own respects. Accountability means that one person or a small group of people are made powerful, but there are checks or mechanisms on that person's power. These have vastly different impliciations for how organizations and groups of people develop and grow and interact.
  • mw888 21d ago
    The intent was to collapse this meaning. In the context of 'decentralized tech' I've come to believe literal 'decentralization' has unavoidably poor network effects, while 'accountability' gives what people envision from 'decentralization' without the tradeoffs—by being a more fundamental property (decentralization can emerge from it if required).