[pyrolistical]

Every social media platform needs to a solution to:

1. Content discovery

2. Spam

3. Content moderation

I can see relays offering unique solutions to each one. But now they are more than just dumb servers.

You get to the point where you might as well just write posts locally then submit them to X, Facebook, etc. You get the same result. And if you include a cryptographic signature with each post, you can prove you are the same person across the different platforms.

Boom. Same as Nostr, but with existing platforms

[nunobrito]

NOSTR is built to behave like existing platforms when desired. You are forgetting the fundamental difference that brought NOSTR to life: your identity and your texts being verifiable as yours.

NOSTR was a response to the situation where virtually all other social media platforms could basically block your identity and delete all your posts. There is no such drastic possibility at this platform. Sure enough that relays might refuse to receive messages from a user and delete notes from their servers but they will never be capable of silencing that user and he can continue sending his (verifiable) messages to any other relays out there in the internet. Followers of that person will continue to read his texts without disturbance, which is quite relevant when not long ago you'd see large groups of people de-platformed when refusing to inject toxic substances on their bodies.

It is a world of difference between centralized/federated platforms to NOSTR where your freedom to write messages as yourself can never be taken away.

[camgunz]

No, they're verifiable as having been signed by a key. You can still call yourself "Michael Jackson's Ghost". This is the only identity verification people care about, the big bad "send us proof you are who you say you are" gate.

[shark_laser]

"Boom. Same as Nostr, but with existing platforms" - Except without the ability to give and receive real value via zaps, and at the risk of being censored, and losing your entire audience at the whim of the network operators.

Spam is basically a solved issue. There's both proof of work and paid relays, not to mention web or trust. It has been at absolute worst a minor annoyance.

There's plenty of ways to discover content on Nostr, from hashtags to channels to location based chats to just following some interesting people. It's perhaps not as frictionless as X, but imho that's a feature not a bug.

[acdha]

> It has been at absolute worst a minor annoyance.

This is easy to say when there is little adoption and attackers don’t care about the network. It doesn’t mean it’ll remain true if that changes. Proof of work is much less effective when people are willing to use botnets and paid relays complicate life for regular users so there’s a cap on how aggressively that can be used.

[shark_laser]

Proof of Work secures Bitcoin, and people definitely care about that.

[acdha]

How much money have people spent on Bitcoin because of PoW? All those billions were spent because as a speculative vehicle they thought they’d see even greater returns but that doesn’t mean that any other service will see a correspondingly high willingness to spend large amounts of real money.

This is especially challenging in the social space where people are accustomed to not paying and you have significant network effects from anyone being able to sign up for free. Bitcoin’s transaction fees are one of the major reasons why it failed as a currency and that has orders of magnitude fewer messages.

[therein]

You missed the point of what he is saying. The point is, proof of work used to post stuff to relays etc. is not solving the spam issue that Nostr is yet to face due to network effects. Your quip about people care about PoW because bitcoin uses it is just a very unrelated statement that is super off base.

Nostr relays are like Discord "servers" if they were actually servers you could deploy yourself and each client had a cryptographic identity and was used in DMs. You can have the same UI to interact with them all. But they are disjoint. You can interact with people in the channels as long as you subscribe to the same "relay" etc.

Also you keep bringing up Lightning as if it is successful but it is not. It failed in every way. Its model simply does not make sense unless you are a node that receives as much as it sends or sends as much as it receives. You know this yourself if you are a Lightning user. Bitcoin is cool, crypto is cool, even Nostr is cool but some of your statements are conflicting with each other and they aren't making great points.

I tried Nostr but like a lot of people here have been saying, it falls short in many ways due to the way it is structured. Relays are not really relays, they are more but also less. They are like community servers. Sure you can connect to many, have the same UI, but they are still disjoint and feels lonely.

You keep saying you can sign your messages and there is value there to people who are saying it is censorable in the ways they described.

This is not a personal thing, I want to like Nostr and I tried using it. I can and would probably get some use out of using it as a pubsub or message delivery infrastructure for two things I want to connect but what if the relay goes down? It is like a centralized pubsub messagebox thing. But can't even do that fully.

That other guy that said it is just like writing a message, signing it, posting it on X, Facebook, YouTube and BlueSky. People who follow those places can see it. There needs to be some sort of relay to relay communication (actual relaying) that needs to go on. And that wouldn't scale, even if it would work for now.

Protocol itself is simple and nice to have. Could be cool as a transport. The concept is uniquely situated too but using it the way it initially came out as feels like trying to shove a square into a circular hole.

[digitalbase]

I'm building a Nostr app (+- 2mio notes). There is a lot of spam and much worse content.

But it's kinda a solved problem (not through PoW) but through Web of Trust and not having algorithms. You see what the people/communities you follow post.

> I tried Nostr but like a lot of people here have been saying, it falls short in many ways due to the way it is structured. Relays are not really relays, they are more but also less. They are like community servers. Sure you can connect to many, have the same UI, but they are still disjoint and feels lonely.

I'd like to know more. Imho the fact that relays are dumb is a feature.

> You keep saying you can sign your messages and there is value there to people who are saying it is censorable in the ways they described.

All messages are signed. There is no way NOT to sign a message. This comes with the advantage that you don't need to trust the relays/pipes where messages go through which is an immense benefit

> This is not a personal thing, I want to like Nostr and I tried using it. I can and would probably get some use out of using it as a pubsub or message delivery infrastructure for two things I want to connect but what if the relay goes down? It is like a centralized pubsub messagebox thing. But can't even do that fully.

Relays go down all the time. There was an experiment where a major relay (Damus) just deleted the entire dataset. People barely noticed. And as any client (not just the author) and other relays can re-broadcast events the relay eventually recovers.

> There needs to be some sort of relay to relay communication (actual relaying) that needs to go on. And that wouldn't scale, even if it would work for now.

There are three mechanisms that do that:

- clients posts to multiple relays - clients/followers can rebroadcast notes (to other relays) - quite a few relays are syncing (negentropy sync)

[bawolff]

Bitcoin uses proof of work in a very different way then pretty much anyone else.

[pyrolistical]

> Except without the ability to give and receive real value via zaps, and at the risk of being censored, and losing your entire audience at the whim of the network operators

Every large relay has the same problem

[shark_laser]

Please take a look at my other replies to other posts.

Read about the outbox model, or Bitchat.

The large relays are not required. They are a public service but not essential. There are plenty of community relays charging for access too, and the outbox model means you're not even depending on them. Nostr can and does successfully operate via even Bluetooth Mesh Networks. Search up Bitchat and see how it has been used in Nepal, Indonesia, and elsewhere.

[dahrkael]

if the solution to censorship is flooding the network posting the same message to multiple of their preferred relays in hopes that the recipient gets it, what happens if i get banned from all their preferred relays? i dont think i can message them directly so im effectively blocked

[digitalbase]

It doesn't work like that.

Your followers fetch the note from your relays. You tell the network where they can find your notes (self hosted relay) and their client will take the effort to find your content

[curtisblaine]

Relays are not coordinated. For every relay A that bans you because you say X, there will be a relay B that welcomes with open arms if you say X. If the recipients want to hear all the facets of discourse around X, they will subscribe to A and B. If they really hate X, they will subscribe to A but not to B. If they really love X, they will probably subscribe only to B.

Compare this with Mastodon, where your favourite server can decide to exclude other servers, so if A decides that X is toxic, you will never see X as long as you use A.

[vintermann]

Spam and content moderation are basically the same thing. In both cases it's hiding things from the user that the user didn't ask for or want to see.

Unless by spam you mean denial of service attacks. Which should probably be a point of its own anyway. It's the main killer of the decentralized internet currently.

[attila-lendvai]

the extra curve with spam is that it must be made economically expensive for the spammer. spam is more of a DoS attack than just content i'm not interested in.

[curtisblaine]

Yeah, true, but now you have to manage 5 accounts on the 5 major social networks, all with different rules, format, public, moderation guidelines. It can be done but it starts to sound like a job.