Oddbean new post about | logout
 Of course in many cases there can't globally be truth but you may care/weight some groups as having better signal with respect to what you care about. Wide open is a great first step but i know the optimal is to have more community and themed relays where individuls are more likely to enjoy interacting with each other.   if i want to learn about the technical side of nostr development  i want credible sources from developers who know what they are talking about with some technical proficiency, WOT doesn't solve less credible or external to the domain even if their trust is high.

Humans typically are not great with a fully connected friend/association network (everyone sharing the same relays could be viewed as a fully connected community even if they aren't followers of each other, but because they fish in the same pond. I'd expect that most of the time humans had most heterogeneneity was during and immediately after war. There were individuals at the edge who crossed boundaries (merchants, performers, etc)

there is an ongoing "problem" of big relays centralizing nostr. What is going on however is that those on nostr are quite likely to aligned on some principles. We get some others that expect different and leave because they don't want to deal with the extremes.

believe it or not, those on nostr are not a shrunken proportional representation of humanity. We are actually a single community with a smaller portion at the edge because they are in the wrong community. They have no other community because there is no framework which aligns for them yet.

more segregation is benificial because that is how niches grow. The fundamental architecture however allows individuals to connect to different communities that they align in a whole spectrum of possibilities. This is a  magnificent but underdeveloped aspect of nostr - relays with various levels of openness and themed community values.

It is a well known phenomena that natural networks generally are not fully connected because there are physical constraints that exist (neurons - metabolic and spatial density, circulatory system, tree networks) where paths have fractal throughput - they are scale free and are small worlds (groups of nodes with many connections, sparse connections across groups, efficient navigation). The internet generally doesn't have that constraint (beyond POW as an acknowledgment) and think that we should have the all to all connections. 

we need a framework to tweak the knobs of exclusivity on relays. You shouldnt be obligated to continually mute what you dont want to see. This falls straight into the harassment problem which ill save for another note. Regardless, this framework will: 
1) help the network and individuals will have a higher probability of connecting with individuals they value
2) traversal between groups (proportion out your posts to different relays/communities)
3) you'll have a lot less to worry about in terms of fitting a too general WOT curve, or mass reporting/muting individuals you want out of your feed.

I love wikifreedia, but we need micro wikifreedias where there is strong social concensus about the ideas within a homogeneous groups and a framework for discovery and traversal (apply, show credentials, pay fee, pledge qualitybcontent). We shouldn't want a nostr (& wikifreedia) where all ideas are shown evenly. Both classes of users - highly specialized, highly diverse and hetergeneous should be able to flourish.