Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

I tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.

The thing with Nostr is that the protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.

What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers.

There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.

Nostr breaks down along the longstanding ambiguity around what 'decentralization' means.

In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite.

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) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced.

Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.

for those simply looking to try nostr for the first time, https://iris.to is a great way to get started.

Funny timing on this - I just came across my backed up keys recently and signed back into it. Poking around over the last 24 hours has left me underwhelmed in terms of actual interesting content (I'm not a cryptobro) nor overly innovative things built on top of the protocol.

Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...

Nostr is very useful when using it as underlying network for trystero

For me, the great idea behind Nostr is that identity is a self-generated key pair, which can then be used wherever you want (and the economic model, with much potentials). In terms of decentralisation, however, I'm not convinced; I find the model of the late ZeroNet, the KAD network and others, essentially DHT, far superior, because it allows content to stay alive as long as there's interest in it, and every member of the network donates a certain amount of storage and bandwidth (adjustable at will) without being able to choose which specific scrap of content to host.

In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.

The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:

- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)

- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)

- short posts like Twitter/X

- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit

- very long, blog-style posts

- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar

We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.

Found this intro informative:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w

Nostr is in need of benevolent shills.

Nostr is cute but I feel it runs into xkcd 191.

To paraphrase:

> If you Used Nostr your communication would be completely uncensored and decentralized.

> Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who use Nostr.

As of now it’s filled with BTC-maxis / crypto bros that mainly talk about how great Nostr and Bitcoin are … and not much else. I suppose there’s plenty of tasteless AI slop and gross adult scams if that suits your palate.

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