6 ms·

Nah it’s DOA because it was adopted by the alt right.

by gigatexal 23d ago

grumbel 23d ago
Nostr is a protocol, not a service. That's like saying HTML was adopted by the alt right.
- __MatrixMan__ 23d ago
  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.
  - ttoinou 23d ago
    I doubt widespread adoption was slowed down with mainstream news about BitTorrent, or what are you talking about more specifically ? Others peer to peer sharing platforms got much more popular despite mainstream news about them like LimeWire and eMule
    - bmacho 23d ago
      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.
      - ttoinou 23d ago
        Which ISP is blocking bittorrent ?
    - grumbel 23d ago
      Lack of BitTorrent support in browsers is big thing that is missing. Brave and Opera have it, but all the mainstream browsers don't. Thus torrent downloads never got out of its specific niche. That said, I don't think piracy is to blame here, but more the murky nature of copyright in general, with BitTorrent you automatically become redistributor of everything you download and that's just a huge liability and privacy risk that I can easily see browser developers wanting to avoid. Also browser developers have gotten lazy, they couldn't even find the resources to keep FTP alive, so I doubt BitTorrent would have survived for long even if they tried adding it.
      - inigyou 23d ago
        Why should they keep FTP or Gopher alive, or support Gemini, when they're just worse HTTP? I think they should make it possible to write a new protocol handler though.
        __MatrixMan__ 23d ago
        Is FTP really worse HTTP? If you try to enumerate directories over HTTP alarms start going off because you look like an attacker.
        duskwuff 23d ago
        > Is FTP really worse HTTP? I don't think I'd even call it that. FTP had one purpose: it was an early protocol for remotely managing files. It never had any intent to support dynamically generated or otherwise "virtual" content (as supported by e.g. CGI scripts and mod_rewrite in Apache), and I don't think anyone has ever made a serious attempt to implement that. There's no practical use case for it. Even as a file management protocol, though, FTP sucks. Its connection management is primitive in the extreme - one TCP connection per transfer - and that ruins performance for transfers involving many files, and is difficult to pass through firewalls and load balancers. FTPS encryption is an afterthought, and makes small-file performance even worse (as each connection requires separate TLS negotiation). There's no standard format for directory listings, just ad-hoc parsing of "ls -l" output. Support for modern filesystem features like extended attributes is largely nonexistent. Need I continue? :)
        chuckadams 23d ago
        The strange way FTP manages connections goes back to FTP being older than TCP/IP itself, and thus using older circuit-switched networks. It wouldn't have been unusual for a server to dial up the receiving machine on-demand, which didn't have to be the machine running the command session. Before SMTP came around, email was commonly implemented on top of FTP.
    - __MatrixMan__ 23d ago
      I took a bioinformatics class, students were emailing large files around via the university's email portal. The files were frequently corrupted somewhere along the way. I had to show them how to check hashes and then they would just repeatedly download the file until they got one without errors. But then the sysadmin showed up and asked us to stop downloading multi-gig files repeatedly from his server. I proposed bittorrent as the solution and the sysadmin lost his mind. Without the piracy stigma, I think we'd just have integrtated it into email clients. The user doesn't need to know that the "attachment" is actually a torrent file, they should just "download" it and end up with a reliable copy of what was sent.
- inigyou 23d ago
  It's like saying the web was coopted into delivering nothing but ads.
nunobrito 23d ago
Yeah, zero moderation and you can't talk to the manager. Truly awful to have decentralized freedom.
- gigatexal 23d ago
  I mean when you start organizing the next jan 6th event the press (not this admin's fbi) is gonna go straight to nostr pages for research on the time and places and what will happen.
  - nunobrito 23d ago
    When you dive deeper into NOSTR you'd find completely encrypted communities with a privacy level far higher than mainstream products because the servers here can be completely randomized and very difficult to track: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqszqwr0f8pclmskaydx9x4lvwh057zjcwuppmlytyq83cj4chk4egqufenfe https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqszqwr0f8pclmskaydx9x4lvwh057zj... The other advantage is that NOSTR doesn't necessarily run on the internet only. Things like LoRa and radio waves are within reach and even harder for eavesdropping. Not that I would care about protests nor governments in general, my typical focus is communication when electricity/internet are gone.
littlecranky67 23d ago
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.
jasonvorhe 23d ago
I've been frequenting nostr for 2+ years and most "alt right" (how 2017 of you) comes from Mastodon bridges.

Nah it’s DOA because it was adopted by the alt right.

grumbel 23d ago

Nostr is a protocol, not a service. That's like saying HTML was adopted by the alt right.

__MatrixMan__ 23d ago
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.
- ttoinou 23d ago
  I doubt widespread adoption was slowed down with mainstream news about BitTorrent, or what are you talking about more specifically ? Others peer to peer sharing platforms got much more popular despite mainstream news about them like LimeWire and eMule
  - bmacho 23d ago
    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.
    - ttoinou 23d ago
      Which ISP is blocking bittorrent ?
  - grumbel 23d ago
    Lack of BitTorrent support in browsers is big thing that is missing. Brave and Opera have it, but all the mainstream browsers don't. Thus torrent downloads never got out of its specific niche. That said, I don't think piracy is to blame here, but more the murky nature of copyright in general, with BitTorrent you automatically become redistributor of everything you download and that's just a huge liability and privacy risk that I can easily see browser developers wanting to avoid. Also browser developers have gotten lazy, they couldn't even find the resources to keep FTP alive, so I doubt BitTorrent would have survived for long even if they tried adding it.
    - inigyou 23d ago
      Why should they keep FTP or Gopher alive, or support Gemini, when they're just worse HTTP? I think they should make it possible to write a new protocol handler though.
      - __MatrixMan__ 23d ago
        Is FTP really worse HTTP? If you try to enumerate directories over HTTP alarms start going off because you look like an attacker.
        duskwuff 23d ago
        > Is FTP really worse HTTP? I don't think I'd even call it that. FTP had one purpose: it was an early protocol for remotely managing files. It never had any intent to support dynamically generated or otherwise "virtual" content (as supported by e.g. CGI scripts and mod_rewrite in Apache), and I don't think anyone has ever made a serious attempt to implement that. There's no practical use case for it. Even as a file management protocol, though, FTP sucks. Its connection management is primitive in the extreme - one TCP connection per transfer - and that ruins performance for transfers involving many files, and is difficult to pass through firewalls and load balancers. FTPS encryption is an afterthought, and makes small-file performance even worse (as each connection requires separate TLS negotiation). There's no standard format for directory listings, just ad-hoc parsing of "ls -l" output. Support for modern filesystem features like extended attributes is largely nonexistent. Need I continue? :)
        chuckadams 23d ago
        The strange way FTP manages connections goes back to FTP being older than TCP/IP itself, and thus using older circuit-switched networks. It wouldn't have been unusual for a server to dial up the receiving machine on-demand, which didn't have to be the machine running the command session. Before SMTP came around, email was commonly implemented on top of FTP.
  - __MatrixMan__ 23d ago
    I took a bioinformatics class, students were emailing large files around via the university's email portal. The files were frequently corrupted somewhere along the way. I had to show them how to check hashes and then they would just repeatedly download the file until they got one without errors. But then the sysadmin showed up and asked us to stop downloading multi-gig files repeatedly from his server. I proposed bittorrent as the solution and the sysadmin lost his mind. Without the piracy stigma, I think we'd just have integrtated it into email clients. The user doesn't need to know that the "attachment" is actually a torrent file, they should just "download" it and end up with a reliable copy of what was sent.
inigyou 23d ago
It's like saying the web was coopted into delivering nothing but ads.

nunobrito 23d ago

Yeah, zero moderation and you can't talk to the manager. Truly awful to have decentralized freedom.

gigatexal 23d ago
I mean when you start organizing the next jan 6th event the press (not this admin's fbi) is gonna go straight to nostr pages for research on the time and places and what will happen.
- nunobrito 23d ago
  When you dive deeper into NOSTR you'd find completely encrypted communities with a privacy level far higher than mainstream products because the servers here can be completely randomized and very difficult to track: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqszqwr0f8pclmskaydx9x4lvwh057zjcwuppmlytyq83cj4chk4egqufenfe https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqszqwr0f8pclmskaydx9x4lvwh057zj... The other advantage is that NOSTR doesn't necessarily run on the internet only. Things like LoRa and radio waves are within reach and even harder for eavesdropping. Not that I would care about protests nor governments in general, my typical focus is communication when electricity/internet are gone.

littlecranky67 23d ago

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.

jasonvorhe 23d ago

I've been frequenting nostr for 2+ years and most "alt right" (how 2017 of you) comes from Mastodon bridges.