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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 enga
by 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 23d agoThe problem wasn't about private conversations being too public, it was about intentionally public conversations being too hard to coordinate.
- nunobrito 23d agoThere 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.
- mw888 21d agoYou can choose relays, and everyone using one (centralized) relay avoids the issues. And network effects push everyone to the same one.