Oddbean

Alright, folks. Published my #Nostr for Dummies article over on Medium (I didn’t actually title it that lol), so let me know what you think and add any comments that might be helpful to new Nostriches. 🤙 You can read it here: https://medium.com/@jmchasteen/the-nostr-protocol-social-media-3-0-2c23e290bcb3

Bravo! One thing that is really important to mention is that on Nostr, YOU are responsible for YOUR posts, and you are also responsible for what YOU see. If you post something other people don't like, they won't follow you. If you don't like what someone else posts, don't follow them. If a post is flat out illegal, the authorities will go after the person responsible, NOT the platform, NOT the nodes. Personal responsibility is making a comeback. And that can only work on an open protocol. No Big Brother. Just people. Oh, and NO ADS!

> If a post is flat out illegal, the authorities will go after the person responsible, NOT the platform, NOT the nodes. Governments are sovereign. They can go after whomever they wish, within the limits of their own laws which they can make and change to fit their needs. Indeed, Nostr is censorship-resistant in a way that mainstream platforms are not, in the sense that it protects us from corporate censorship. This is good, we shouldn't filter what we read and write through the erratic whims of a few billionaires dictated by their selfish economic interests. But Nostr doesn't stop government censorship. You are right when you say authorities can go after the poster. But authorities absolutely can go after Nostr relays within their territories, too. I hope it won't become a problem and, if it does, it can probably be solved similarly to how mainstream platforms solved it, but Nostr doesn't prevent governments from going after relays.

great stuff! I'll throw in here another excellent article wrote by the good npub1cj8znuztfqkvq89pl8hceph0svvvqk0qay6nydgk9uyq7fhpfsgsqwrz4u https://www.btctimes.com/news/what-is-nostr-how-does-it-work-why-does-it-matter 🫂

Some comments. > and my privacy settings (i.e. ‘hide notes tagged #NSFW’) It should be noted that both tags and the "sensitive content" flag (NIP-36) are set arbitrarily by the poster. There are no global "social" standards in the Nostr community and there never will be. If there were, there would be none to actually enforce them. So do keep that in mind when trying to avoid certain kinds of content: you can get a decent heuristic at best. > The variance in number of Followers Look up NIP-02. It's trivial to fetch what users an account follows, but when fetching the accounts a certain user is followed by, the client need to receive each one of them individually, and count them. It's not dissimilar to fetching all replies to a post. > In general, all clients use a very simple algorithm to populate your “home” feed I don't think it's the case for all clients. Also, new strategies can be designed. Any client can do what it wants and users can use whatever client they want. > In this way, these clients can almost mimic current social app functionality like you might see on TikTok or Spotify or Medium, pulling only from Nostr data that meet certain note-type criteria. It's worth noting that, while long-form notes are Nostr-native through NIP-23, music, videos and images are usually simply stored as links, typically to old-style centralized services. There is still an advantage in sharing links trough a censorship-resistant system, but it's still worth noting. > The other interesting thing about relay operators is that they are the only ones in the Nostr-verse that see all notes’ IP addresses. This was designed to help flag spammers and bots. No, it wasn't. This is simply how the Internet works. When your device communicates to a relay, the relay necessarily knows your IP address because it couldn't send you a response otherwise. It isn't a decision by Nostr authors that relays see your IP address, it's just how the network works when you connect to a server. > If my TikTok account gets banned, I have no recourse to get that data back This isn't false of centralized platforms, but, just as a side note. If the platform you are using is GDPR-compliant, you will be able to get a copy of all data about you which they have, as long as you are a user.

Wish I had found you a week ago!. I learned the sign up process a more difficult way. Thankfully, found Primal from jack post and worked like a charm 😄. Sure glad that you wrote this to benefit others coming in! It will be a big help 👍🏻 ❤️

love this, and the tik tok video. You have a nice way of putting things into perspective. Many speak abt publicity, but you went ahead and did it, and that made all the difference. Btw 'The other stuff' is another interesting part of nostr where you can build anything on, devs like pablo, artur, jeff work in those areas, hope it adds more value to your content. Thanks Jessica for what you do.