6 ms·

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 sim

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 25d ago
Just like a RSS feed client or a podcast client that connects to multiple feeds to update your timeline.
- synctext 25d 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 25d ago
    What's wrong with RSS?
  - littlecranky67 25d 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 25d 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 25d ago
        Adoption will come when the friction caused by spam is high enough. We are just getting started with the slop era.
  - abc123abc123 25d ago
    Email spam is a solved problem. Normal people get approximately 0-5 spam messages per year or so.
    - Cameri 24d ago
      I’d challenge that definition. 0 spam messages are a solved problems, any positive integer greater than zero and it’s still a problem.
    - inigyou 24d ago
      Yes, we solved it by centralising and ceding our power, so that two companies can see when a lot of people get the exact same message, and delete it for them.
      - abc123abc123 23d ago
        Not at all. I never had a google account and I know many people who do not have one, and no, they have no problems with spam either.
        inigyou 23d ago
        Where's your email hosted?
  - iamnothere 24d ago
    > We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin. I find it hard to parse the intent of this. Are you saying this is good or bad? I think it’s good; I want my communications to be “uncontained,” even if there are downsides to this approach. I do not believe in such a thing as “The Common Good,” to be quite frank, and find your mention of the concept to be alarming. What is “good” is relative across individuals, cultures, and situations. I certainly have my own beliefs about it but I don’t believe they should be enforced at the technological level. Most people working on decentralization tech understand this innately. It’s not about reinforcing majoritarian views of what society is or should be.
mw888 25d 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 25d 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 24d ago
    The problem wasn't about private conversations being too public, it was about intentionally public conversations being too hard to coordinate.
- nunobrito 25d 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.

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 25d ago

Just like a RSS feed client or a podcast client that connects to multiple feeds to update your timeline.

synctext 25d 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 25d ago
  What's wrong with RSS?
- littlecranky67 25d 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 25d 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 25d ago
      Adoption will come when the friction caused by spam is high enough. We are just getting started with the slop era.
- abc123abc123 25d ago
  Email spam is a solved problem. Normal people get approximately 0-5 spam messages per year or so.
  - Cameri 24d ago
    I’d challenge that definition. 0 spam messages are a solved problems, any positive integer greater than zero and it’s still a problem.
  - inigyou 24d ago
    Yes, we solved it by centralising and ceding our power, so that two companies can see when a lot of people get the exact same message, and delete it for them.
    - abc123abc123 23d ago
      Not at all. I never had a google account and I know many people who do not have one, and no, they have no problems with spam either.
      - inigyou 23d ago
        Where's your email hosted?
- iamnothere 24d ago
  > We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin. I find it hard to parse the intent of this. Are you saying this is good or bad? I think it’s good; I want my communications to be “uncontained,” even if there are downsides to this approach. I do not believe in such a thing as “The Common Good,” to be quite frank, and find your mention of the concept to be alarming. What is “good” is relative across individuals, cultures, and situations. I certainly have my own beliefs about it but I don’t believe they should be enforced at the technological level. Most people working on decentralization tech understand this innately. It’s not about reinforcing majoritarian views of what society is or should be.

mw888 25d 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 25d 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 24d ago
  The problem wasn't about private conversations being too public, it was about intentionally public conversations being too hard to coordinate.
nunobrito 25d 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.