Oddbean new post about login | logout What ever happened to these discussions around storing files directly on relays (those who choose to accept file upload events)? @fiatjaf @jb55 @Vitor Pamplona @Mike Dilger @Fernando Bittencourt @semisol @novacisko @hodlbod https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/719 https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/345
Waiting for a solution to be adopted by the community and become standard. So far there are only prototypes and tests. I don't know of anything working on a large-moving relay.
It works really well for files under 100KB. We are waiting for new Relay codebases to better manage large blobs. I think this is inevitable. But it doesn't work well on any of the current relay implementations.
One thing I remember hearing somebody point out is that the second you accept anything other than plain text you take on a whole new set of responsibilities & risks. Not that I'm in any way knowledgeable enough to advise development, but I personally like the idea of relays being text only by default. Keeps things lightweight, and sure there can be bad things with text but the real bad stuff always needs to stay off Nostr infrastructure.
Very true. That’s why i think if this sort of thing is implemented, it should be in the form of specialized relays that accept file blobs, that way it can be an explicit decision of whether or not to accept those kinds of events.
The idea that binary payloads add risk is not correctly understood. First of all, you can transfer virtually any binary payload via regular text events. You just need to encode it in text first. There are multiple ways to do this, but in practice, if you are afraid of binary payloads, you should be afraid of regular text payloads as well. There is no difference between the two. Criminals can use text encoding to transfer their binaries in plain sight. Legally speaking, the relay operator is as liable with text as with binary payloads. Pretending that this is not the case is not good legal defense. And second, we already transfer many binary payloads. NIP-04 DMs are binary. Private zaps are binary. GiftWraps are binary. Private lists of people and bookmarks are binary. If binary itself was the issue for an operator, he/she shouldn't accept any of type of encryption, which will break significant usecases in Nostr, like private chats. So, binaries by themselves shouldn't be the source of any extra risk . The problem is more related to the software and hardware infrastructure each relay operator decides to run. I don't think there is going to be a silver bullet type of relay that solves it all and thus specialized operators will become more common as we move Nostr forward.