Oddbean new post about login | logout I started a community in the current implementation (librearts) so I'm familiar, but people are working on community specific relays. These would let relay owners moderate their own relays more completely. The makers of nostr all have talked about smaller vs bigger relays being the focus. They don't want a system with just a couple relays that everyone's on because it hurts the decentralization and sustainability, but what that means in a global view is that you're not sure who's going to see what you post similar to the issue with mastodon, and that problem extends to the current implementation of communities. For global view this is less of a big deal since you are generally just posting very general things out to anyone following, but for communities, you want to rely in the fact that the whole community can see it including strangers who don't grow you. Community relays fix this issue. People subscribe to relays/communities that they want that can then be smaller relays (or groups of relays for redundancy), but can also be sure that everyone in that community will see the post. And the reason we would want an app is to create the best first experience where you are seeing things you like, and also it would be needed because it's a totally different app concept to the Twitter-replacement app that we're on now. This would be an app more akin to Reddit or Lemmy but with proper architecture where each community can govern itself, be a paid relay, or complete with another community. And an app would just help people sign up and pick topics/communities they like, and then they would immediate have a main feed of strangers posting about things they actually are interested in. The communities could assist choose to be secret and not report to any people running a directory/app. It solves the problem of too big relays, helps the problem of discovering things you like from people you don't even know to look up, and makes them onboarding process easy to get an app tailored to your interests.
The point of using multiple relays is censorship resistance. For censorship resistance to be a thing, the same post need to be on multiple relays and any two people who want to follow each other need to use multiple relays. > These would let relay owners moderate their own relays more completely. Why would you want any moderation whatsoever at the relay level? > be a paid relay That'd lead to even less adoption. People don't generally pay to be on social media. Not even very very little. Mainstream platforms handle this by having a business model where the non-paying users are what paying users are actually paying for. > And an app would just help people sign up and pick topics/communities they like, and then they would immediate have a main feed of strangers posting about things they actually are interested in. But what's of this that can't be achieved with either Nostr Communities or hashtags? > The communities could assist choose to be secret and not report to any people running a directory/app. To me this seems to be the only usecase of this. Why are big relays a problem?
I wholeheartedly agree with everything here. Another issue I foresee with topic-specific relays is one of the problems Mastodon has, confusion about what to do and where to go. Not to mention, given how nostr works, there would be a LOT of unintentional cross-topic-relay posting that theoretically would result in bans and a bad experience for the end user. Moderators should only step in when there is something that violates the law in the jurisdiction where the relay is based. Big relays are only a problem insofar as big relays get all the new users, and as smaller relays die off it centralizes power and authority, which runs counter to what nostr stands for. Even if it's unintended. Paid relays on the other hand? No clue. Never subscribed to one, nor have I seen people say if they provide better content or not.
> Moderators should only step in when there is something that violates the law in the jurisdiction where the relay is based. Personally I don't have an issue with moderators also blocking: - Content which is illegal in another jurisdiction when the IP querying it is from that jurisdiction (this is to prevent the whole relay from being blocked and legal liabilities has any ability to still take some actions against the admin). - Straight up spam (not trivial to define, but easy to recognize, and some attempts have been made to define it). It's not much less clear than the law, actually. - Untagged content of certain kinds. This might also be useful to avoid some liability. - Content that abuses the relay by using it for purposes other than social networking. You shouldn't upload a huge amount of data to a relay and use it as a backend for free because it's not the purpose of the relay and it can't support it. Also, not all relays need to support all kinds of event (besides kind 1) or everything besides NIP-01. Ultimately, different relays will block different things, depending on their needs. This is ok. As long as we promote a culture of freedom of speech, practically anything will be hosted by some relay and we have censorship resistance. Promoting this culture shouldn't be done by shunning anyone, really, but simply by having the notion that censorship resistance is the goal of Nostr and that users should act as to remain able to talk to each other. > Big relays are only a problem insofar as big relays get all the new users, and as smaller relays die off it centralizes power and authority, which runs counter to what nostr stands for. Even if it's unintended. But that's not necessarily a problem if there are many big relays and people use all of them. It's not like Mastodon where each person chooses one server. Here, two people need to be on the same relay to communicate (roughly), but one person can use multiple relays (and indeed they should). As for paying. Personally, I have no issue spending money if the purpose of the payment is that other people, who maybe can't pay, won't have to. This is why I wouldn't want to "pay", but rather to donate to organizations that have freedom of speech as a goal. Ultimately, if Nostr becomes mainstream running a big relay, and I really think the best scenario is one with many big relays which almost everyone uses, will be expensive. Which is why we'll need organizations.