> it does not rely on P2P techniques, therefore it works.
followed by
> To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from
other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay.
I think p2p techniques are distinguished by being "serverless," that is, you don't publish content to someone else's device, you host your content on your own device and people have to connect to your device to get your content. Peers talk directly to other peers. In nostr and other client/server models like mastodon, you publish content on someone else's server and if you go offline people can still access it.
The difference with nostr is lots of redundancy -- you post your content to like 5 servers so that if one goes down you're not really censored, people still get your content and -- in your list of relays -- you replace the censorious one and then your followers update where they follow you at.
>We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people, it's with who does the censoring.
No, the problem is with censoring people.
You make it seem like censorship is a given. I disagree and feel no need to have a third party prune unwanted ideas for me. This will seem like a strange idea for some but I don't need a priest in between myself and God. I don't need a doctor in between myself and good health. Why would I need a censor in between myself and information?
No need for governments, no need for corporations, just me and my silly brain will decide what to digest. What a concept!
-
We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people, it's not with who does the censoring, it's people that try and normalize censorship.
Censorship is certainly necessary on some level. Child sexual abuse material, for example. Animal brutality material, rape/snuff material, and so on. I do NOT want this stuff shown to me, ever, and I don't want anyone else in society to have access to this material ever. Even just a short exposure to these things can be life traumatizing to people, as it has been to me.
Racism/sexism is a lot murkier of a topic. There's a lot of nuance there that I think we culturally haven't fully figured out. The whole "cracker" situation on twitch, for example.
> Even just a short exposure to these things can be life traumatizing to people, as it has been to me
+1. When I was younger I used to browse 4chan somewhat regularly. I saw snuff videos and other awful content that I still think about to this day. My life would have been better had I not seen it.
My life would have been way better if I had 1 million dollars at birth. Let's restructure society and sacrifice everybody's fundamental liberties to ensure a better life for me.
You're your own censor in this situation and that's probably what the sentence was getting at.
I censor myself all the time. There's numerous things I simply don't want to read or see, but I've made and own that decision for myself.
Here's a devil's advocate point of view:
Free speech/free press is an asset within a group when the following are true: A) members are acting in good faith which typically requires value systems to be not too divergent, B) members agree on how to arrive at the truth, and C) members are not confusing science (designed to be true), opinion (designed to be neither true nor false), and entertainment (designed to be false).
When one of these is not true, it creates liabilities that need to be managed. Social breakdown is the result of not managing these liabilities.
Probably an initial response will be: "well who decides X" ... if we've figured this out for engineering problems where lives are phyisically on the line we can figure it out for this. Any authoritative action whether it be laws or standards make some portion of people unhappy.
Censorship is a given for large online platforms. You can and should try to allow free propagation of ideas, but you also have to protect the forum from people who are determined to fill it with hateful commentary and pornography. 4chan isn’t a crazy special case, it’s the default destination of a forum where everyone knows there are no rules.
In particular, it used to be called "forum moderation" until that was deliberately conflated with censorship by far-right groups, angry at their loss of audience, starting I guess somewhere around 2010.
That's because forums generally have topics and rules. If we're in a forum about sports cars and you're constantly starting adversarial threads about city planning and parking, then mods would probably censor you to keep the forum on topic. Places like Facebook advertise themselves as the "town square of the web". Traditionally nobody was censored in the town square. There's a difference between purpose built communities and the general network of communication.
The term moderation itself often came from debate and discussion venues where moderators would police speeches.
> Traditionally nobody was censored in the town square.
This isn't true, it's just that the spatial constraints IRL mean there's never been a need to scale moderation of town squares beyond intuitive methods. Go to your physical town square and start screaming slurs and threats of violence at passers-by, and see how long it takes before the community "censors" you.
> screaming slurs and threats of violence at passers-by, and see how long it takes before the community "censors" you.
In developing and developed countries I've had (ostensibly) mentally ill people shouting epithets at passerbys and they're just ignored. So I think this is more about cultural norms.
Moreover, the case you mention is simple. If a spammer joins a forum and starts spamming, there's usually broad support to kick them out. Once the argument becomes ideological, that's when sentiment is a lot more mixed
The equivalent of "forum moderation" is removal of content by Facebook group owners, or subreddit moderators. Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin backdoors into the software so that they could censor other people's instances of it.
> Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin backdoors into the software so that they could censor other people's instances of it.
No it wouldn't. As big as Facebook is, they still only moderate their own platform, and there is only one instance of Facebook. Separate vBulletin instances do not constitute a single, collective "vBulletin platform." The narrative of "Big Tech" as an organized leftist conspiracy orchestrating censorship over all social media is simply right-wing propaganda.
That's my point. The reason vBulletin forum moderators aren't equivalent to Big Tech censorship is that you can run your own vBulletin, independent of theirs. Censorship of Facebook is bad because that isn't an option.
It absolutely is an option! There are open source social media projects out there that you can fork and start hosting today, if you want. Or you can use one of the existing alternatives. It's just that not many people use them right now, because Big Tech "censorship" has done a pretty good (definitely not perfect) job of just targeting bad actors. If a large non-toxic chunk of the population starts getting banned, non-toxic alternative platforms will become viable for the network effects that power social media centralization. Until then, the alternatives will look like Voat and Gab, and it seems like the online public doesn't love platforms that are dominated by the toxic castoffs from more mainstream platforms.
>If a large non-toxic chunk of the population starts getting banned, non-toxic alternative platforms will become viable for the network effects that power social media centralization.
Case in point: a number of Youtubers fed up with the platform demonetizing and delisting their content are advertising their content on other video platforms, or just hosting their own like Corridor Digital.
The web is one of the few examples of the free market actually working, but people have fallen for the defeatist and nihilistic narrative about the "centralization" of the web and "control" by sinister forces, insisting that competition with any big platform is simply impossible.
They said that about MySpace too and look what happened.
So you don't want doctors (or presumably any form of expertise,) or governments, or corporations. Just you and your brain thinkin' thinks.
I'm wondering where exactly you think all of this "information" you would be digesting would be coming from, absent the "censorship" of structures and systems needed to collect, validate and disseminate it?
Good luck reconstructing the last 8000 years of human progress and knowledge from first principles, naked and alone in nature with some crystals and potions before you fucking die of parasites and tetanus I guess.
You're attempting to steer the conversation away from censorship and now towards a scenario where the internet, medical journals, books were no longer available? In that situation, I would have a much harder time getting access to the information to make a decision.
Back to the original point - You're assuming that a doctor, government or corporation will make a decision for me that's in my best interests. In reality they're much more likely to make a decision for me that's in _their_ best interests. Lots of examples in the past few year+ with the pandemic.
If you want to come into my living room and shout Nazi propaganda, your ass is getting censored and banned from my house.
If you think that level of censorship is a problem, then we have a fundamental disagreement, and the bad news for you is 95% of people will disagree with you.
If you agree on that level of censorship, then we’re just arguing where the who/when/where line should be.
I think there is a need for "censorship" (if you want to call it that), but not for the reason the other people replying to this comment say.
Do you really want to censor racist comments, for instance? Wouldn't you rather know how many racists there are out there?
The real problem is possible use of a channel like this to support bad actions, not bad viewpoints. For example, someone could advertise to hire a hit-man to kill someone. Or a group might use the channel to organize a mob to go around burning down jewish businesses.
In the scheme described, owners of individual servers could block such messages, if they recognize they're there (a possibly hard problem). Perhaps this would be sufficient, while still leaving viewpoints uncensored, since there are, we hope, very few people in favour of serious criminal activity, while many favour free speech even for those they detest.
If I'm running a relay, and there's a possibility that somebody who dislikes me can upload something questionable and use it to make the cops show up at my house and make off with my computers... Well that's content that I'd like to censor.
I'm not taking a stand against the content itself, but as long as there are bullies that can be moved to action by bits on a disk, our protocols will need to either support censorship, of be zero-knowledge to the point where nobody knows which bits are on which disks.
These are all questions we've already seen from USENET; in fact, it's not entirely clear to me what the benefit to this protocol is over USENET, except it's new.
From what I know USENET is more like Mastodon. Nostr has similarities with Mastodon but it's much more flexible, scalable, not to mention the public key infrastructure.
It doesn’t seem like the relays on Nostr sync with each other and each relay operator can choose which content is hosted on it.
The link to the content isn’t global it’s still relay/post the client just searches for a given post within its list of relays.
The content is then served through a specific relay which hosts it so basically directly from a server.
So this isn’t a supernode topology or server P2P of any kind.
GNUTELLA supernodes were used to limit the number of peering connections that each client on the network had to maintain and organize the network into a manageable topology this is necessary from a technical perspective and any P2P network solves this problem in some manner that turns a fully meshed network into some sort of leaf and spine topology.
This is basically needed to ensure that any client on the network can reach any other client reliably and to ensure that the network can support large number of clients without needing to coordinate peering globally across the entire network.
If you build a P2P network where peering is just a randomized best effort mesh between all clients it would rather quickly break into a bunch of rather isolated networks as peninsulas and then islands would form.
I used to be a huge fan of censorship resistance, freedom and privacy, but I didn‘t appreciate just how much self-selection there was in the kinds of people who went to great lengths to access IRC in the times of dial-up modems.
These days, I have the feeling there are only two kinds of platforms left:
The clean ones with strong moderation, where any form of edginess and possibly controversial topics including breastfeeding, violence or discussing human rights can be banned globally or in certain countries.
And the other ones, where the Nazis, lunatics and scammers hang out.
There may be a third category for those with technical know-how, that tend to be like the early internet, since they apply the same selection bias. I'm thinking of things like Gemini and SSB. If SSB could work out the challenges that make it hard to implement in non-JS, I think it could become something like email in its ubiquity.
The internet has shown that free speech simply doesn't work if literally anyone has the power to broadcast whatever they want to thousands of algorithmically selected users.
Comparing "speech" pre and post social media is like comparing "weaponry" between knives and nuclear weapons.
I can appreciate censorship if I thought the authorities and experts had any idea what they were doing. I don't think that's the case anywhere at this moment. Seems a good time to create new alternative spaces.
"And the other ones, where the Nazis, lunatics and scammers hang out.
I‘m still not sure what to take from that. "
Probably because the Nazis, etc have been pushed off the mainstream networks and had to find alternatives and the rest of the people didn't and those new/smaller networks haven't been required to censor yet.
>If spam is a concern for a relay, it can require payment for publication or some other form of authentication, such as an email address or phone, and associate these internally with a pubkey that then gets to publish to that relay — or other anti-spam techniques, like hashcash or captchas.
Sounds like these anti-spam measures are not actually implemented yet.
Correct. Spam is not a problem yet because nostr is super new and no one uses it yet. But a few friendly bots have been released for it (since it's very bot-dev friendly) and DMs are open by default (and the branle client has no way to close them) so spam is basically guaranteed to come eventually.
Banning people is an upside. Setting boundaries of acceptable behaviour is necessary for having a space where people won't be troll-brigaded and hate-swarmed, and where the worst people on the internet don't drive out everyone else.
Seems like an acceptable position to take until you find yourself outside of the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
Personally, I don't mind having to manually filter/ignore non-conformant behavior in order to prevent that possibility for myself and any other minority group online.
Customized chains of trusts can be created too. Where you could choose either directly who you want to read, or who you trust to "whitelist" people, so you can have censorship but you can choose your own censors.
I'm using branle (https://branle.fiatjaf.com/) as my client and you can follow me with my pubkey: 22e804d26ed16b68db5259e78449e96dab5d464c8f470bda3eb1a70467f2c793.
You can find my pubring on my bio after following me.
There's no ability to discover others at this time!
> I'm using branle (https://branle.fiatjaf.com/) as my client and you can follow me with my pubkey: 22e804d26ed16b68db5259e78449e96dab5d464c8f470bda3eb1a70467f2c793.
It isn't too hard to improve upon the status quo in various ways when you just drop a key usability requirement (in this case, the need for human-memorable 'handles').
It is worth reading 'Why Johnny Can't Encrypt' (1999) [0], 'Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt' (2011) [1], and 'Why Johnny Still, Still Can't Encrypt' (2015) [2].
That's true, but you can disconnect those requirements on the server side.
E.g. a "name/profile to key/value" service would be useful for more than this.
If people want mastodon style handles, for example, it's easy enough to create a mapping that can leverage DNS for example to let you query for a matching pubkey in a cacheable and easily scalable way and without the need for that to be built into the messaging protocol.
That's only true if you choose to introduce a global namespace. There's nothing requiring you to have just a single such catalog of users as long as the canonical reference is the pubkey any more than the contact list on my phone requires you to name people the same on your phone.
(and in fact on reading the protocol specs, they do have a way for relays to publish mappings [1] . EDIT: and that would seem to make it possible for crawlers to crawl relays to assemble non-canonical catalogs fairly easily).
There are downsides to having multiple namespaces, such as e.g. that there's no guarantee that your client will be able to map a given pubkey back to a human-readable name and/or dealing with collisions between mappings from different sources, of course, but this is reasonably well thread ground.
Sure, you can have multiple namespaces, and each would have to be censored, but that's about as difficult as playing whack-a-mole with multiple domains pointed at an IP address.
If you can censor the catalogs you can censor the relays. Not least because the protocols allows the relays to serve up catalogs of name to pubkey mappings. Having this lookup functionality makes no difference at all to the ability to censor. If you have an issue with the censorship resistance of this you have an issue with the core concept of this project.
That's fine. But it's entirely independent of whether or not you provide a lookup mechanism for names.
No, you don't. You can have DNS-based aliases to pubkeys, and then people will follow pubkeys and interact with pubkeys, not with the DNS aliases. So if these users are censored later from the DNS then they still keep their identity, their contacts, their followers etc.
The analogy would be valid if IP addresses were permanent and DNS was only consulted once -- and then communication between these two parties was done directly through the IP forever.
Missing the point, which is that the lookup doesn't need to function or be available for anyone but the person composing the message at the time they compose it. It can be entirely private, entirely public, or a mix. What gets transmitted is the pubkey. Optionally the relay can provide a mapping, which may be globally consistent or entirely based in some private mapping.
Users just need a catalog which includes the keys of people they care about. The relays can backfill this information. You have little reason to know mappings for users whose messages you're not seeing, and if the messages are not censored the mappings won't be either.
You could even deterministically map pubkeys to handles with something like bip39. it won't be pretty but it will be unique, human-readable and uncensorable.
YJCE identified a lack of usable concepts as the root problem. Human-memorable 'handles' actually make things worse in that they add in another concept that the user has to learn about and understand. The idea that the ridiculously large number represents a human identity is very easy to comprehend and the user can not avoid contact with that number in a system like this. The number is the identity.
Usability and convenience are two different things. A system that is difficult to use might be easily understood by the user and vice versa.
the eth guys have solved this with ENS, you could add your public key address in your ens record if this ever becomes a thing. Then you just tell people to add me <myname>.eth
Lack of discoverability is often a weak spot of decentralized social networks that don't have a public firehose. Secure Scuttlebutt, Twtxt, Bogbook — and now Nostr — all suffer from this, and new users end up looking at an empty timeline and shouting into the dark.
> It insists on having a chain of updates from a single user, which feels unnecessary to me and something that adds bloat and rigidity to the thing — each server/user needs to store all the chain of posts to be sure the new one is valid. Why? (Maybe they have a good reason);
I assume this is so a relay can't manipulate your messaging by picking and choosing which messages to forward; they'd have to forward messages [0-N].
Edit:
> sig: <64-bytes signature of the sha256 hash of the serialized event data, which is the same as the "id" field>
Signed hash rather than a mac - might be vulnerable to an extension attack
I'm not associated with this project in any way, but your comment got me curious. It seems that since each message is signed with the private key even if you were able to perform an extension attack (which I agree it seems like you would be able to) you wouldn't be able to sign the message so it should be rejected by the relay. The signature is based on the message ID, which itself is the SHA256 of the rest of the message so by doing an extension you necessarily change the SHA256, which should invalidate the signature.
I like the intent of these types of projects but a serious question I have is: How do you get the majority of people to switch to something like this?
There are many examples but the most recent ones that come to mind are people trying to get their friends to use Murmur/Mumble instead of Discord with basically near-zero success. I've seen this in a few gaming forums. Anyone attempting this is basically laughed off the platform with the responses like "All my friends are on Discord" and "Discord can do x,y,z can your app do that?"
So in practical terms how would one make such a platform widely adopted?
> How do you get the majority of people to switch to something like this?
This is really the wrong focus.
Everyone should be focused on how to "mainstream" this in the minds of content creators, organizations, institutions, and media. The audience will find these subjects because they have a certain gravity to attract followers.
This is why, in my mind, if the federated open web wants to "succeed" (spoilers, it hasn't failed at all and it's a spectacularly organic ecosystem. Everyone's just using the wrong definition of success), it needs to start demanding for these mainstream content creators to publish to the open web by way of standardized protocols. Especially any groups that take public money or hold special permission to use public airwaves (licensing).
Why would a content creator, org, institution, and media use a new app with no users? All of the above publish to twitter because Twitter's "bizarre techniques to keep you addicted" and "doesn't show an actual historical feed from people you follow"
you know, there are a lot of interesting parallels with the early adoption of the internet.
I remember back in the 90s there was a time when no one had their own web site, but you couldn't listen to 15 minutes of news without someone telling you their AOL "keyword".
Being decentralized can't be the only reason (unless you're a part of a group actively being wiped from a centralized platform).
You need to do something better that makes people go "oh, this is neat". I had never heard of Murmur/mumble before, so I spent about 5 seconds checking it out. Nothing about the home page appealed to me... so I closed it.
Well, I feel like your example goes the other way. Discord does feel like it’s always been the default, but many of us old timers remember the days of 2015, when everyone was using Mumble and Teamspeak except a few people trying to push this Discord app that had just launched.
Takes time, a lot of marketing money, more time, more money. Look at what is happening with Telegram globally. It is used as a serious alternative to WhatsApp in some countries, but far from being a real global competitor still.
UI/UX also needs to be buttery smooth and non-technical, especially where setup/onboarding is concerned. The more you stray from that the more difficult it's going to be to bring in a significant population of users.
> So in practical terms how would one make such a platform widely adopted?
I’m not sure if can be…
- Developers working for free generally build things that they themselves want to use. If you look at HN’s opinions on eg Discord vs IRC (or Dropbox vs rsync+cronjob), you can see how the venn diagram of “nerd goals” (e2ee, distributed, federated) and “everybody else goals” (I want to communicate with my friends) is almost two separate circles.
- If you get paid by the users, nobody will use it (Remember app.net? Me neither)
- If you get paid by advertisers, you have the same economic incentives that created Facebook
Well, Twitter has been going into a series of serious banning recently. They even banned the president of the United States. All these banned people had to find homes in suboptimal platforms from which they can be banned again and so on. If that trend increases and Nostr can position itself as a viable alternative it might catch some chunks of mainstream.
But yeah, it's kinda hard. We must keep building though.
Lots of exciting work going on with this right now. I really like that I can open up websocat, and interact with a relay directly to learn how the protocol works.
The people who cry about censorship on big platforms are people who want to access the audience. They aren't crying for the censorship itself (they usually love when people with opposing views get banned), they are just using that word to complain about them losing an audience. Setting up a personal website doesn't meet that goal, and probably a thing like this doesn't either. Most of the nazis etc. are quite miserable in their "censorship-free" platforms, because they can't reach normal people there.
Indeed, in many cases the takeaway is that the greater public just isn't interested in what these individuals are saying. If it were, the personal sites and small uncensored platforms you mention would be sought out by it, but with few exceptions that practically never happens. Even with platforms with the potential for limited/no content moderation like Mastodon, the bigger nodes with less polarized demographics tend to be those that moderate their content. It's almost impossible to build a healthy community on a platform where anything goes.
It's sad, but not surprising, to see a question about how two protocols compare answered with insinuations about "people who cry about censorship", who supposedly "love when people with opposing views get banned". Any discussion of censorship-resistant technology seems to attract people who just love censorship, and hate anyone who doesn't, and it's not enough for them to express these views in a top-level comment, they even have to spam specific discussions.
What makes you "love censorship" is making insinuations about anyone who "crys about censorship".
As you yourself pointed out, neither RSS nor nostr do anything to help people find an audience, so this is completely irrelevant to the question of how these things compare.
barrier to entry. You can start broadcasting your thoughts within seconds with no infrastructure.
No need to worry about hosting content until you're big enough to be censored.
It's not decentralized yet but only potentially decentralized if a lot of people run relays. Currently there are only about seven relays powering the whole network: https://nostr-registry.netlify.app/
Luckily, relays are very lightweight and easy to run so maybe it will eventually get decentralized.
Open source Twitter ? We've had that for a decade.... nobody wants to run it's own, it makes no sense, you'll have no audience. If I wanted my twitter, I'd setup a WordPress....
Sounds interesting but my main concern is the anti-spam approach. It sounds good for general spam but what about a concerted defamation campaign from someone. How do you deal with that?
That depend on how you do it.
The client selects what you see, you can unsubscribe from accounts with spam, and your client will refuse to show posts from those you don't follow
This is not censorship resistant. Relays are external points of centralization. For all intents and purposes, they are federated service providers -- central services that can deplatform users by simply choosing not to syndicate their messages. Over time this will result in all relays being compromised by state adversaries. Legitimate "free speech" relays will be removed from the internet via ddos, legal complaints, and just general nuisance complaints that the SPLC and other organizations excel in. Both domain names, ARIN/RIPE/etc IP assignments, and BGP peering relationships are historically subject to revocation via a loud chorus of complainers when the speakers are politically unpersoned. Original nodes will then be replaced with adversarial ones -- sometimes on the same now-reassigned IPs or domain names that were taken from the original operators.
This could be reasonably censorship resistant if the first place people checked for the updates of users they follow was a hidden service that is innate to every client. Ricochet Refresh and Bisq are great models of this -- every messenger or trader client launches a local daemon accessible only by a hidden service that corresponds as its identity. Any kind of relay or pub system needs to be an offline-only gossip protocol that is only checked if the publisher's hidden service is inaccessible.
Secondly, this just does not scale, at all. The twitter firehouse is petabytes of content a day. If even a single city adopted this and used it like people do Twitter, running relays would be a financially and logistically significant enterprise. This is obviously nonviable. There are great ways for lowering the cost of UGC, namely serving it on some sort of DHT. You could use BitTorrent, or you could use IPFS. You are using neither, which means you haven't done basic napkin math on what being a Twitter alternative would mean.
But basically a real useful and actually decentralized and censorship resistant protocol would not be dependent on pubs or relays. If you want to contribute to something in development which actually has a viable model, I recommend Identia: https://github.com/iohzrd/identia
This proposed service has not confronted a single one of the actual problems of censorship or centralization in the subset of social media. You maybe should actually talk with people who have done significant anti-censorship work and ask them what the actual problems are and what needs to be done to solve them.
I think the good thing about Nostr is that all the network / account / content seems to be stored in the data, not on the servers, so if the relays become a problem at some point it would be trivial to add new channels to distribute the data.
>Secondly, this just does not scale, at all
I think it does very nicely, in the sense that because the network IS in the data you could have different relays only distributing some of the data for some of the users and by connecting to different relays you could still rebuild the complete conversations in your client.
This also solves one of the annoying things of modern internet: when a video or an article gets taken down all of the websites that reference it get a broken link that is very difficult to recover. This is one of the reasons many accounts respond to screenshots of tweets rather that no tweets.
With something like Nostr should be easier to recreate all the references in a post as long as at least 1 person has archived them.
Honestly, it's ridiculous that you claim that this basic client-server architecture "does not scale at all" and then proceed to recommend IPFS or "some sort of DHT", which are the things that were never tested at scale and theoretically cannot scale and will not scale past some thousands of users or tracked resources -- ever.
It's also ridiculous that you cite attacks at the infrastructure level that were not used to censor anyone so far -- because censorship happens always at a much higher level -- and then you just proceed to recommend an IPFS solution that is also subject to attacks at the infrastructure level, because everything is!
> Both domain names, ARIN/RIPE/etc IP assignments, and BGP peering relationships are historically subject to revocation via a loud chorus of complainers when the speakers are politically unpersoned.
Do you have any examples of this? The only deplatforming I'm familiar with is the removal of accounts from websites, though yes that may include a cloud provider's website. I'm not familiar with any IP address related or BGP based filtering by any actor that isn't nation-state funded (for which a system like Tor is necessary.) There's also the GNU Name System as a DHT based domain name system.
I think we have all seen what happens when a platform has no moderation whatsoever. And a good many of us feel like it goes too far on the platforms that do. Where’s the middle ground? Is there one? Maybe social media is just a bad idea—who does it really benefit anyway?
The protocol is nice and simple, but how does this prevent the issue that Aether has where running a relay just basically destroys your bandwidth and you have to store tons of stuff?
How is this different than Usenet GPG signed messages? Signing messages on Usenet is in practice right now and can be done with existing stable software.
So the client does the verification? Or is it the relay?
Also, I didn't mean impersonating a specific author, I meant generating posts that no one truly posted to it. So when your client lists the chronological most recent posts you get a bunch of fake manipulated content that was mass generated by the relay itself for example.
>So the client does the verification? Or is it the relay?
From the README:
> A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side
---
> So when your client lists the chronological most recent posts you get a bunch of fake manipulated content that was mass generated by the relay itself for example.
From the README:
> Each client can decide how to best show posts to users, so there is always the option of just consuming what you want in the manner you want — from using an AI to decide the order of the updates you'll see to just reading them in chronological order.
Peer discovery and peer suggestions are not implemented yet. People have been posting their public keys on twitter etc. There is a proposal for encoding a set of followers/followed in a message which your followers' clients can then use to display info about that on your profile. That should help with peer discovery once someone codes it up. You can also find threads that people are widely commenting on (e.g. someone might post a nostr thread on twitter) and follow people who post in those threads.
It's not so much peer discovery, rather the nice thing about Twitter compared with a newsletter or a blog is that you get a post and different people responding and interacting with it.
I guess some level of interaction will be needed to replicate the things people look for in Twitter. I guess a very basic functionality that that would cover this would be posting in your timeline "responses" to other posts by including the key of the other author and the cryptographic signature of the post. From that a client would be able to obtain the "parent" post and build a thread.
Yes, that's interesting. You don't want to replicate the addictive part of Twitter but you need at least to replicate some of the network effects.
There should be at least the possibility to reply to posts, so if you follow a guy regarding a topic you can find what other people interested in that topic think somehow.
You can reply to posts. Retweets and likes are not yet supported but they should be easy -- likes can be a reply with just a heart emoji and clients then display those via a counter. Retweets will probably be a new message that contains a link to a prior message and clients will then display it in a twitter-esque manner.
In this case the content and accounts are independent of the node. In Mastodon as far as I can see both the account and the content are instance dependent and will disappear if the instance disappears.
Yup. Cryptographically signed Usenet, so spamming requires the overhead of creating a new identity per... something. Unfortunately, creating a new identity is still effectively free, so spamming will exist.
Social problems need to be solved by social arrangements and supported by technical tooling.
Censorship is not that big of a problem in this age. That exact info will be available on someone’s server God knows where. Hell, moderation is very fundamental so any project not thinking about that is prone to fail due to low-quality/illegal content, driving away intelligent users.
Obstructing the truth by misinformation, spamming, etc is the actual problem. It is a much more effective way to target uncomfortable infos. During one of the Russian elections, voter fraud was caught on camera and was uploaded to Twitter, with #villageName. It quickly caught on and censoring was impossible at that point - so Russian bots instead started spamming #villageName posts with no sane content so anyone clicking on the hashtag to learn what happened was left wondering.
Agreed. What we need is a 21st century web of trust for reliability of information. This way those you trust could help you find others you trust. And if somebody you trust starts to trust people you don't, you can cut them out of your news sources. This might even be a way to validate trust in anonymous sources, without leaking their identity. Just, please, no more keysharing parties.
followed by
> To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay.
Sounds pretty much like P2P techniques to me.