Nostr is decentralized and censorship resistant, but the majority of the world doesn't care about these features until they need it.

Nostr has a value for value economy, but the majority of the world doesn't understand the concept or use bitcoin yet.

Nostr has a portable digital social identity, allowing you to be in control of your digital social identity for the very first time, allowing you to take your entire social graph with you, every time you use a different application from Nostr's ecosystem.

In general, at BTC Prague, while explaining Nostr to people, the digital social identity route was what clicked with the most people. From there, it's not a long stretch to understand building a reputation and web of trust either. These are all powerful points that people understand and use in their everyday lives.


I am so getting an ostrich costume for next year.


We try and highlight ways to empower individuals and organic communities on our Facebook page where we cross post what we post on nostr. We never get any reactions from our Facebook followers for any of this content, but this week we got our first like in this post. Also in in-person conversation with a software developer this aspect of nostr was the most intriguing.

nostr:nevent1qqsf4kwa23rvp906xhnfmm9udtg35egrfae3v8rtzghpzllg57wq0yspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsyg8p06dpsc6lsr289e45nk53pujy7tkhgdawc6ljylu9pysxd4n6dvpsgqqqqqqszkynyq


I was at nostr:npub167n5w6cj2wseqtmk26zllc7n28uv9c4vw28k2kht206vnghe5a7stgzu3r and it was eye-opening for me to learn about Nostr. I started during the Nostr panel to download the app!


Looks like promotoring digital social identity is the way now.
nostr:nevent1qqsp9d9rwnn5vkwhfe72lwhre7c85vmgsumg9kupjsy6amtaakr2gfgppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsr7acdvhf6we9fch94qwhpy0nza36e3tgrtkpku25ppuu80f69kfqrqsqqqqqpa3vypn
#siamstr


parole sante   🎯


Nostr isn't really that decentralized and is definitely extra-censored, not censorship-resistant. You need to think more


⚡ by nico@current.red


Anyway I can get a pamphlet/cliffs notes on those "powerful points"?


a digital social identity that is recognized and accepted in other platforms is one convenience factor that either attracts or forces people into a network.


nostr is definitely moving the needle towards the right approach, a public, open, permission less digital identity. which is not profitable or sustainable on the fiat standard.


How so?🤨


If you don't I'll be sad.


How so? There are a thousand relays and 100 clients, many which you can run locally. No one controls anything. If you think media is centralized with a dozen providers then you can run your own server. Please provide examples to show your argument.


What app did to download? 🥹


Serious question (I'd like to understand your perspective) - how is Nostr being censored?

(The only thing I can think of is each individual's "mute" list, but that's a personal choice...)

Would welcome your thoughts....


Using the same logic MySQL is also decentralized because anyone can run it’s own server. LOL

FACT IS: like happened to email ux, most people now use only the biggest relay as the trusted relay, and he is an easy target to any agencies or even Google/aws/m$s can outcompete them.

The truth is that jack wanted to capitalize over the plebs movements following the cyberhornet incapacity to deploy anything really good at speed needed by the customers.

That’s why we “gave up” on #matrix in “favor” of damus (ops nostr)

Question is: why he didn’t upgraded Twitter back then?

Answer: because they wanted to countertrade us using the biggest sentiment platform at time.

It’s not about the freedom of speak. It’s about keeping those with abilities under control (14 btc? Lol)

Ps.: I never saw a brand new OSS without any relevance being displayed at so many “relevant”(btc) events, not even 1 #matrix stand at any event.

Create the narrative —-> control the solutions

😘


You can try to create a random b0t who post every minute and you gotta see how it’s censored by yourself.

Let me know if you need an ELI5.


Incorrect. No applications exist to query all of the world's MySQL servers. This sounds like cope for some odd reason.


Have you never noticed your feed loading inconsistently? I don't get it.

When I tried nostr around a year ago my account got shadow banned hard on every relay people actually use. Banning me is the same as other platforms like reddit or whatever, but nostr is worse at this early stage because it's not even reliable to make a new account from a new IP address and device. Last time I tried onboarding someone to nostr face to face was earlier this year, we couldn't find a single web app that would actually let us message each other, new accounts can just be shadow banned by default.

It's gotten to the level where it's starting to be worth using lately. Fiatjaf admitting the issues are there probably helped. But the nostr protocol and network both have a long way to go before there's serious censorship resistance. The current phase is making people aware of the issue and just barely starting to attract users to fully uncensored implementations of nostr so they can start to be functional. The goal is restoring the old internet culture where a sysadmin's job was to make sure humans can talk more than bots, not call power users "spammers"


As I asked someone else in the replies - have you never noticed your feed loading inconsistently? Like, has every post always loaded instantly all at once for you? I don't get how you can act oblivious to this being an experimental platform with extra heavy filtering caused by not being finished developing into a public-ready product yet


I have never heard of a relay banning someone. Please provide examples?

Feeds are inconsistent because relay response times are inconsistent and web sockets suck if you have a large amount of relays. You'd have a better experience with only 8 or so relays.


Nostr is decentralized and censorship resistant, but the majority of the world doesn't care about these features until they need it.

Nostr has a value for value economy, but the majority of the world doesn't understand the concept or use bitcoin yet.

Nostr has a portable digital social identity, allowing you to be in control of your digital social identity for the very first time, allowing you to take your entire social graph with you, every time you use a different application from Nostr's ecosystem.

In general, at BTC Prague, while explaining Nostr to people, the digital social identity route was what clicked with the most people. From there, it's not a long stretch to understand building a reputation and web of trust either. These are all powerful points that people understand and use in their everyday lives.


Serious argument? It doesn’t sound technically accurate.

Let me explain: if “all the world” MySQL servers had internet open doors you sure could query all databases in the same way it’s done with websocket (nostr).

#nostr team seems unable to refute simple concepts. That’s keeping nostr very fragile and not resistant to any censorship.

We’re being gamed.


Uncensored queries, hell yeah brother

Can't wait to be able to message my friends and have them get notifications though

Remember the old days when cell phones were good? You could just call me and my phone would ring, that was cool

But we've got uncensored queries, fuck yes


But you can't. That's my point. No one is writing applications to that query the world's SQL databases.


If you made an account on reddit 2 years ago, even though reddit was heavily censored, I would have been confident you could message me and have me receive it.

If you didn't want to make an account, I would have been confident you could find someone with an account, have them message me, and have me receive it.

That wasn't censorship resistance, that was a heavily censored level of functionality on a long-zombified reddit years after Aaron Swartz died.

Now I'm on nostr, where I do not suggest expecting messages to get through to me, especially on the mere first or second or third try.

That is not less censored, it's more.

The nostr protocol is designed to have the potential for censorship resistance. It's also a design that gets there very slowly, from what you can see today. Not there yet.


Blocking spammers isn't censorship 😂😂😂


Deal. Next year I'm covering entertainment/ostriches around the hall, we will think about something awesome to wear in the Rockopera costume department. Will need probably passes for at least one burlesque ballet dancer (those with pretty huge ostrich feather fans already) and tons of flyers. Honeybadger will loose it, nerds will faint, Nostr is the way, baby!


This is how we #grownostr 🔥😂


Can I bring the fire spitting one? FR


Not always, but censorship resistance should include accessibility for both spammers and people who want to block spammers

Every nostr client web app seems to use JavaScript and stuff to function on-device and take load off the server backend, so when I have the nprofile link, every client could by default load every post a spam bot has ever made if it has its own relay for the web app to connect to. That would be censorship-resistant

Instead, even if it's a regular person instead of a bot, seeing all their posts might not work reliably across all apps. That's not censorship resistant


You are free to leave and go elsewhere.


Censorship and software issues arent the same thing...but I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.


Odd. I read your reply just fine.


Changing between different relays and web apps didn't help on my shadow banned account. I suddenly stopped being able to send and receive messages and my posts became very rare to actually see loading anywhere after being posted.

I don't feel like finding my account from a year ago and my old screenshots and stuff right now, and it has gotten better in the past year, so with my laziness and your hard work you're about to get some weaker more recent examples of it being hard to get text delivering consistently via nostr.

1. Yesterday I made a long form post and in Primal it linked to a Highlighter page that said "event not found" - so nevent link is not up to par with plain old DNS based link to habla.news which habla.news specifically told me not to use

note1dfv2ayrau90ztv4peuu6jmy8k2mwd56aeya4vnn9w6373guvfhnspw0u30

2. The other day I made a post about a crazy strong WiFi network from a new npub for a bit of anonymity (breaking that now for this discussion) and it didn't show up in search results except from the app I posted it from when I wanted to go back from another new npub to reply with additional details. It now shows up in nostr.band just fine

And a third example I just noticed - my njump.me page has out of date posts

I'm often paranoid about being targeted but I don't think these examples are me being targeted like I felt a year ago. Some of it could be me messing up my relays on my own end and there's probably work being done by people other than me to fix it. Slowly. But this tech still hasn't reversed the decay of free speech quite yet


That is a huge improvement over a year ago and why I'm all in now 💯


I'm speaking for the paranoid here, including myself. When posts aren't always going through correctly, saying "censorship resistance" makes the software issues and slow pace of improvement look extra sus.


No.


Thanks for the examples. This sounds like relay issues and client issues. Not censorship. Are you using the same relays on these clients and these npubs? Your different npubs need to have the same relays to communicate unless the client is using an Outbox model - many do not yet. I don't think Primal renders nevent or naddr events yet. Many clients don't.


Its cause of relays not sharing content. Just because you're unknowledgeable, that doesn't mean the tech doesn't work.


No one is going to have an open relay at 0 cost.

That’s why they block “spam”.
Any server maintainer want to keep only his opinion-like-minded “good spam”.

Neither MySQL, Mail or websocket (nostr) will relay anything without a pre-filter.


I think that’s just not reliable. That’s a whole different issue than censorship resistance.


Last time I configured relays I set nos.lol as my main one, and that one has seemed functional enough for now, so I haven't changed my settings, but I have been jumping around between different web apps on an old phone and not checking how each web app handles relays. I see it as real-world stress-testing.

I should put it like this, what I see with nostr is some censorship resistance, and a lot of potential for censorship resistance, but not enough censorship resistance.

People hype nostr's censorship resistance up like it's already hit one of these milestones when it hasn't yet:

* Clearly matching the functionality of state of the art electronic communications
* Clearly surpassing the rest, becoming the new state of the art in and of itself
* Pushing the state of the art back to where it was at the peak of human technology, like when Aaron Swartz was still alive at least
* Surpassing the most freedom of speech humans have ever had


Nostr is censorship resistant because you can run your own relay and run your own client. If a relay or a client bans you, you're not gone or banned. You just pivot and you're back in business with little to zero downtime.


I don't see that as censorship resistant. Internet infrastructure the public paid for doesn't serve the public and telling members of the public they're on their own fixing it isn't magically an improvement. Nostr however has the potential in the future to bring infrastructure back to where it was at its peak and beyond, that will be censorship resistance


Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. That's the problem here, obviously...


Using your same logic: blocking Ordinals, Inscriptions or any usage of #bitcoin to store anything besides #bitcoin value transactions is a SPAM and should be banned/censored/avoided.

Well, that’s the zuckeberg logic, or any VC logic of the benevolent dictator. Jack was an example of benevolent dictator and what happened when the CIA want take back his control? He moved out!

#nostr is heavily centralized into 3-5 very tiny servers. Very easy targets (individual server owner) and easily to outcompete by any competent tech company (Google has already said his intentions to run a nostr server).

Web2 protocols seems to not work for dex but I appreciate all the work done for the screens on android and iPhone done by nostr but all solutions proposed here seems to be trying to lower the #bitcoin expectations by a lot.


Yes. I agree with this. Ordinals and Inscriptions are spam. Filter them out!


Flexible Fees and proof of work are the only true battle tested technologies against censorship.

This websocket solutions (#nostr) looks like more #woke solutions.

Benevolent dictatorship like Ethereum can work or not but has nothing to do with decentralization.


Yeah now we can see clearer who we are talking to. Appreciate!!


Nostr is decentralized and censorship resistant, but the majority of the world doesn't care about these features until they need it.

Nostr has a value for value economy, but the majority of the world doesn't understand the concept or use bitcoin yet.

Nostr has a portable digital social identity, allowing you to be in control of your digital social identity for the very first time, allowing you to take your entire social graph with you, every time you use a different application from Nostr's ecosystem.

In general, at BTC Prague, while explaining Nostr to people, the digital social identity route was what clicked with the most people. From there, it's not a long stretch to understand building a reputation and web of trust either. These are all powerful points that people understand and use in their everyday lives.


I was wondering about that--if "too many" relays actually hurts performance...(I've been adding them as I discover more).

What would be helpful 😉 is if there was a way to assess performance of a relay, and to see if it "deserved" to be on your list...

"Relay Worthy" as it were (with apologies to Elaine Benes)...

Or maybe that already exists somewhere?


Very deep. The owned, portable social network could be indeed the very feature of nostr 🙏🔥


Didn’t see it being censorship resistant by being able to run a private server.

Or it isn’t a network. Just more centralized easily targeted by agencies tcp/ip.


Yep!


Onward 🫡


*portable* digital identity means you OWN YOUR IDENTITY and its not something a website, company or platform can ban, block or delete. You keep your identity and posting rights and reach to your followers regardless if you stay in a corporation's good graces.

IMO this is average person's killer nostr feature.

Nostr the first time free speech has ever truly been available to everyone.


That is the usp of nostr .. one ID for entire internet .. no more password vaults .. reset ID or reset password crap .. or two factor stuff ..


That is my route too.