Been hearing a little about Nostr. Apparently itās a protocol?
How did it differ from fediverse stuff like ActivityPub protocol?
What is the community size or population of Nostr users compared to Lemmy or Mastodon?
Do you use it?
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@JoeClu I think the protocol gets a lot right. Itās just a shame all the users are alt-right.
Reminds me of this essay https://nexus.blacksky.network/zine/00000001/confederal-protocols I think Nostr getās much of that right.
@JoeClu
Thanks, this is exactly what Iāve been thinking about as Iāve become more familiar with Fediverse protocols and applications.
I donāt know about the community. But from a protocol standpoint I think Nostr might actually be technically better.
At a high level, ActivityPub (and itās implementations) imply there are many servers and to operate in a federated way, each server needs bidirectional communication. This is results in a exponential increase in traffic between servers and storage requirements. Thereās also no requirements to identity so itās up to implementations and currently that leads to many duplicate accounts.
Whereas, at a high level Nostr is a client and relay system. Your identity is constructed by public/private cryptographic keys (instead of as fractured identities registered on various different servers).
This is similar to email cryptographic signatures and also most blockchain implementations. Then content/posts are sent out to any number of message relays. Consumers of the content/posts do a map-reduce query against multiple relays to find content.
The benefits here is that if the relays go down, your identity is still safe as itās manifested by your keys. This also means that thereās slightly less incentive for big centralized server dominance. Another benefit is that you donāt need bidirectional communication across all (most) relays thus reducing traffic and storage costs as the system scales.
With all that said. I have no idea what Nostr looks like in practice or what the community health looks like. Or what community moderation tools exist. But from a theoretical standpoint itās a much more scalable architecture.
@plisken Technically I like all this stuff.
These are not my people though, itās all shitcoin hype in the feed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-jiiepOrE&t=6s
@JoeClu
Good info thanks. I was looking for a technical answer but seem to be getting a few political polarized responses instead. Iād no idea.
Anyway, Iāll have to look up what a āmap-reduce queryā is. :)
Do you think thereās potential for a large, popular, and fast relay to become a sort of gatekeeper, with big centralized dominance? Like if Meta setup thousands of fast relays everywhere and started injecting advertisement attachments to user messages? Or collect info on each key so they can eventually ID and track you? Even if the user message are E2E encrypted, a relay could probably still attach an advertisement payload into the message somehow, no?
I really donāt know what Iām talking about. Just chatting really.
The fact that a selling point is ācensorship-resistant social mediaā makes me wonder how many right wing chuds are over there ājust asking questionsā.
Is ācensorship-resistant social mediaā a misnomer for unmitigated hate speech? Is that the Implication you are making? Or do you know if it really is a magnet for right wingers?
It would be very disappointing for a potential superior technology to be stomped out prematurely due to a swelling of assumed extreme political polarization.
I donāt know anything about it, just found that to be a weird aspect to market on the home page.
The first thing I thought of is that many times complaining about censorship is a dog whistle by people who just want to spew hateful opinions.
Didnāt mean to imply anything about the protocol itself, I donāt have any tangible evidence of anything negative about the protocol or people maintaining it.
I donāt care for extremes of either persuasion, or the usdefaultusm of Reddit. Superior tech technology has absolutely no guarantee of success: Betamax was the better technically Iām told.
Itās Lemmy thatās getting all the airplay on Reddit, scarcely a mention of Nostr Iāve seen. Nostr Amethyst app on Android seems to work very snappily, but numbers may dictate.
Itās this messy [ find working instance - have instance declared verboten - repeat ] Lemmy cycle thatās really starting to annoy me. Had it happen three times so far. Iām going to put some serious effort into publicising Nostr once Iāve played with it, if only to even the fight.
Iām interested in hearing more about the Lemmy cycle thing thatās annoying you. If youāre willing, what happened? I joined lemmy.world and havenāt ventured anywhere else yet.
Sure. I was looking for a local instance that would be less usdefaultism, understanding that I would probably subscribe to general communities. š¤£š
I couldnāt find anything on join-lemmy that was helpful but happened on a comment by sometime trying me to go to the fediverse site for helpful stuff. I found an instance https://lemmy.podycust.co.uk/ and tried to join that. I recall that it went reasonably and I entered my email address.
Shortly after I found I couldnāt log on. The page just gave the spinning-wait indicators. That instance was disappeared from join-lemmy and I had to go through the same process for another instance.
https://lemmy.tedomum.net/ was selected and I joined that. Shortly after that was declared verboten and removed from join-lemmy. Iām not picking these at random and with low user counts. I am directed.
Third time lucky. I found another one thatās accepting logon for three days in a row.
I do accept that Lemmy is Alpha and things change but the Devs are systematically removing email addresses and other sources of help from the join-Lemmy . Unironically they are stating that the first point of help is a sub on lemmy which is no fcuking use if you canāt log on and well used stable instances are being removed from the join-Lemmy listing because they are well used. Just look at the difflog on GitHub. People are trying to join these instances because they are going through the same pain that I am.
Thereās no real world WhatsApp or Telegram etc group published for normal people. Most people donāt know matrix exists. I donāt like WhatsApp or Telegram but thatās the popular choice for groups. Asking for a published popular group resulted in me being told that we donāt have time to help people full stop. Iām not suggesting that the Devs are on a published group for a moment, but that we give a place for users to help themselves.
Meanwhile a whale is backing Nostr. And the apps work.
I reiterate that I understand Lemmy is Alpha but going out of your way to piss off the users and ānot assistingā any self help is like inviting Lennart Pottering to tea.
Ouch. That sounds like a pain in the arse. I joined lemmy world several days ago without issue. I joined due to the population size. I have encountered where lemmy.world has been down, slow, and hacked, in the few days Iāve been participating. So thatās not good and it lends credence to what you are experiencing.
Iāve been looking for a new instance myself due to the growing pains lemmy.world has experienced since the reddit exodus.
You are right, it makes no sense to not offer support outside of being logged into a lemmy instance. It reminds me of my internet ISP. They advertise if you need support, go to <some address.com>. Meanwhile I canāt even get onto the internet. Makes no sense.
Anyway, good luck to you. Hope to continue to see you around even if itās on another instance.
Hey, sorry for the delay! Yes, stay in touch. Enjoyed the discourse!
You forgot to talk about crypto in your post.
Seriously, itās like the Crypto Corral over there. At least last I checked.
Bitcoin, not crypto.
I dunno the answers to your questions but Jack Dorsey loves it
Yeah thatās where I heard about it the other day. I never heard of it before. It doesnāt seem to be a big as ActivityPub networks.
Are you coming from Twitter? Jack got a bag in it and shilling it real hard and to integrate it with Bitcoin.