[1] https://damus.io
The UX for key management should be monstrously different between shitposting and the instantaneous loss of money, for starters.
Its nice you live in a country with a stable currency that doesnt hyperinflate. Not everyone has this luxury. Zimbabwe and Venezuela come to mind.
It's just game currency essentially for the social app. When I think about it like that, it makes me less nervous.
[0] https://account.entropiauniverse.com/account/deposits/#:~:te....
I think people just need to be lead to greener pastures. Right now the alpha geeks aren't cooler & better, don't have great & obvious advantages for being out on the frontier trying cool shit. The Tim O'Reilly "Follow The Alpha Geeks" advice is rarely wrong, in my view, for the alpha geeks mostly want to expand capabilities & power & enable, in ways most consumer efforts are too bounded & limited to go for, but we keep forgetting this wisdom's words anyways.
Once the alpha geeks are unqualifiedly better than the mundane normy-nets, the tables will start to turn. I think the geeks are doing the good work, are putting in the right effort.
Dogfood your way to success. Do what empassions & excites you. Don't worry about l-users. Focus on being really good & powerful. You'll be out competed if you do what sigmoid10 says & compete to be the lowest common denominator of social networking, and your product will suck as bad as everything else we have.
Truly good works market themselves. Places where genuine authentic people (and creative fun bots) mix & share themselves in are what we are searching for, is the authenticity that the engagement-loop corporate networks break & burry. There's different races here. I do think the broader we are searching for better more open pattern en mass to replace the walled garden networks (a challenge many distributeers reject), but the path to victory is assymetric competition, is tapping into different sources of value & raising it up in different ways.
Do you believe in humanity? Or do you think synthetic gloss shit forever & ever will always win?
The protocol is surprisingly simple to read [1], many relays and clients exist already.
I exchanged messages with a friend of mine who was using a very different client and it just worked!
Personally I like the fact that you can 'like' posts by sending a couple of sats via Lightning. I think it is a great motivator to write thoughtful, quality content.
Currently nostr is radical, weird and unpolished. The Amethyst client is slow at times. But the pace of development is incredible.
[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md
Adding because Nostr seems to be marketed as something more decentralized than that, and I'd like to get a deeper understanding.
Coming up with a protocol is not that hard. The technical side is fun to work with, but I guess technologists don't realize that the human side is way harder to do.
After I muted a small number of people and used some paid relays I don’t see spam or bad content.
Coolest feature is that you can switch clients while keeping the same relays and all your data stays with you.
Plus a bunch of clients have this auto translate feature so people are talking to each other regardless of the language they speak. I started following some people in other languages - very unique social media experience.
Congrats on your first comment by the way.
Why would you need to deal with anonymity?
Nostr is all based on anonymous cryptographic identifiers, so it seems like you have some special definition of anonymity that you are looking for, as it seems nothing if not anonymous. Having a stable identifier allows relays to know who to send versus who not to send, and allows connecting data together. Users are free to sock puppet up to their hearts content, if they wish to further diffuse traffic.
The appeal? The appeal here is that this is an incredibly malleable & comprehensible low level tool for messaging. Competitors like AtProto or ActivityPub involve complex protocols to exchange/syndicate data around, as much as the payload of the messages themselves. They are high level visions for what a network is. By compare, Nostr's low level approach is organic & searching not a refined final product, but a thriving ecosystem of expanding ideas.
Nostr has extreme elegance as a protocol by being focused primarily on messages themselves, which start as very simple & understandable self signing devices. The transport & exchange of messages is almost incidental, and indeed, Nostr over shoebox or carrier pigeon is possible. This allows a lot more flexibility with how the network can form distributed connections, allows great offline capabilities, allows creative relays & creative/selective distribution mechanisms to form.
Nostr is an excellent base layer. The base specs are quite short & direct. It's a protocol one can happily implement in a weekend.
Nostr has incredibly wild applications, because it is a simple extensible base. There's a wide variety of interesting capabilities that have already need accepted as Nostr Implementation Possibilities, NIPS, that grow & build on one another. Nostr base protocol is just a start, just the seed of an idea, one that's meant to be iterated on & expanded, and it's so easy & direct to do so. This is the biggest advantage by far; I cannot stress this enough. Not trying to do absolutely everything & making a modular simple protocol to start building & iterating from is all the wins, is the Bazaar to the ambitious Cathedrals. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
Nostr is by far the most malleable, most open set of possibilities, the most grow able, of the social networks we have. Everything else seems to have been designed to arrive somewhat fully formed, ready to go, but Nostr's strength is that it doesn't purport to know every use case & to have a total picture of what it is. It's a much simpler idea, with much more focus on finding out the uses.
Jack Dorsey is a co-founder, that's it. I feel like "nostr.com" has been showing up on the HN front page, with no context, at least once every week.
1. Nostr is not a social network - it's a protocol on top of many social networks can be built. 2. Nostr is not limited to the social use cases - and I think that is the killer advantage here. With Nostr, you can integrate various other types of apps to facilitate not only chat but content distribution AND payments. One click payments with zaps. 3. Zaps are going to open up a floodgate of use cases that have a significant advantage over legacy ways of doing things. For example: if you have a music app with multiple recording artists, any time someone zaps or streams their song, all artists involved could get paid instantly. 4. Nostr is a discovery powerhouse that enables content to be easily discovered across platforms without gatekeeping. For creators this is great news because they can just publish in one place and be in all (willingly) participating clients/apps. This alone is a huge development that I don't think too many are grasping just yet.
Yes, it is still clunky at times, but the UX and UI is getting better over time. The development model makes it easy for anyone to jump in and build. You are not limited to any particular way of doing things and can create a custom experience for your audience while having access to the entirety of the protocol.
Some resources for people:
Beyond the marketing barf, what makes this a "discovery powerhouse"?
From the description, it doesn't sound any different from Mastodon, or having an email newsletter, or publishing your own website.
Someone should really change the marketing CTA.
"A decentralized social network with a chance of working"
I can see why people would think this.
Since that I got an invite (thank you, Sam!) and I'm even more bullish now (though I'm not much of a social media poster myself).
Compared to Nostr it seems like there's a first-party "base" app that most people can use, which has UX very similar to Twitter, with the assumption that people will be able to make their pick of app/moderation/feed/... later based on merit, not lock-in.
It seems like in the recent days/weeks a lot of non-technical various public figures have onboarded Bluesky, thanks to this ease of getting started. Folks that I wouldn't expect there for a while yet.
To any Nostr users - how's that developing there? Based on my cursory look onboarding looks quite a bit more daunting.
Anyway, the Twitter blue checkmark seems to be a blessing for decentralized social networks.
EDIT: Since I already got an email about it 5 mins after writing this - No, I don't have any invite codes, sorry.
> No wait list for this decentralized protocol.
This should soon be the case with Bluesky as well, iirc, since federation seems to be the main thing they're ironing out right now (alongside moderation).
As with all tech protocols, there's potential for more sophisticated things to be built on top of them, but I didn't get a clear sense that Nostr people are interested or serious about product engineering to make this a "Twitter killer" or some other popular buzzword.
There was an interesting discussion on how to limit spam in distributed networks, the primordial problem of any social web endeavor. The two poles seem to be relying on "financial incentives" vs "identity gatekeeping". For those that believe in the power of the free market to regulate tricky social problems, I think Nostr has a lot of promise.
🫂
If you want to solve social issues at a protocol level, there need to be social mechanisms in the protocol. That would honestly be kind of interesting to see. But Nostr is just a reinvented networking stack.
Nostr will be more like Mastodon was before Elon ... a smallish place for enthusiasts of decentralization, albeit following a different protocol than Mastodon, of course.
Bluesky is already the new Twitter, you can tell. The cool kids all want to be on Bluesky. In effect, the very low rate drip of invites approach they are following, coupled with a virtual megaton of almost entirely gushing, breathless positive stories from the tech press are generating a high pent-up demand and a sense of virality even while it has a tiny userbase. The people running it are very clever, and are clearly doing everything they can to become the alternative for disgruntled Twitter users that Mastodon, Nostr and others are not (and arguably never were trying to be ... Bluesky is, by contrast, trying like heck to be exactly that).
Does this mean Twitter dies? No, I don't think so. What I think it means, though, is that, like the MSM, we will have likely two microblogging platforms that are broken into socio-ideological camps, like we have with most of the other media. It's new for social media, of course (not that there haven't been wing platforms before, but they have been small), but not new for media in general or the internet in general. And one could say that it's actually somewhat surprising that it took so long for this kind of split to happen in social media as well, but it kind of "feels right" that it's happening, given the very divergent ways that people have reacted to Twitter over the past year. It seems "right" that there should be separate services for people based on the kind of ideology and views they prefer, since this is how pretty much everyone rolls in every other aspect of the media already anyway.
Mastodon always presented some dealbreakers for the "clout-seeking" demographic, since ActivityPub doesn't flatten the space into one high school class ranking(basic KPIs for this goal like numbers of likes don't synchronize across instances), and instances that behave badly are treated by the broader network as "nails to be hammered down", for better or for worse. And nostr likewise centers visible exchange-of-value which is too grubby and nakedly commercial for the upper crust. So I agree that Bluesky is "it" in the realm of attracting Twitter users, for the moment.
But any of these three could absorb features of the others in time. That tends to happen in tech.
The first one is that there's no such thing as left and right. Two left wingers can have completely different opinions on nuclear and covid. So what political topic do you split the services based on? People seem to unite based on who they are against, but does that really work in the long run?
The second is that with newspapers, you're fluid and jump around. With your social circle, you build it to keep it. I'm following people from 13 years ago on Twitter. It works because social circles don't focus on politics. I can discuss fitness with my PT, programming with a university professor, and racing with a driver. Losing out on half of the population because you disagree on topic X seems crazy to me.
Bluesky will never gain any more traction than Rumble, Truth, Gab, or Mastadon. It will fade into obscurity before even launching just like Clubhouse. Because offering the same exact service, with seemingly no visible changes, does not matter to most people.
They obviously do care about Elon's shenanigans. Celebrities are leaving Twitter, politicians are leaving Twitter, companies are leaving Twitter, news organizations are leaving Twitter. These are the people Twitter should be concerned about because they have the followers and people will go where they go and they are currently going to bluesky.
I imagine a device like a router or an Apple TV, that you connect at home. Then, you own it, everything you post is on your little device. Maybe you pay a few bucks a months so you can upload an encrypted backup in the cloud somewhere.
There's obviously downsides to it, but I think I would buy such a device.
Normies use keypairs every time they connect to an https site. They just don't know it, nor is there any reason why they should.
I don't understand how moderation or handling the large transfers of duplicate data between relays and clients will work.
Federation frees individual users from key management (a trivial issue for HN users, but a big pain for less technical users).
Instance admins can handle spam and abuse for entire communities, and what is acceptable varies between communities.
Data can be aggregated per instance instead of independently fetched per user. For example, previews for external links can be cached per instance, since you trust your instance. In a fully distributed system it'd be either vulnerable to manipulation (since HTTPS doesn't offer a way for others to cryptographically verify data originates from a URL, without contacting the origin server) or every user would have to fetch a link preview themselves, which has DDoS potential and tracking risks.
Going through and implementing the nips for nostr is really fun. You can make a mvp version of a client in a afternoon.
No need to dig into a black box protocol concept and implementation hiding in the corner of the ‘net
yuck.
As long as there is no real value in the real world it will remain inflated by confidence, which reeks of scam. And no one pizza place here or a bitcoin atm there does not make a difference. So far the only real goods and services crypto has traded at scale are on an illegal black market.
I'm not interested in being blasted with prophetic bitcoin nonsense 24/7 on every thread or on any conversation I have with people.
I opened a random web client and saw too many 'cryptidots' on this nostr thing.
No way this will grow.
