The Bluesky team has an academic paper describing the protocol that’s a pretty good high level but somewhat technical overview. It includes how they see Bluesky compares to Secure Scuttlebutt, Nostr, Farcaster, and ActivityPub/Mastodon.
I think folks who are building Nostr apps or advocating for it in comparison to Bluesky would do well to read it to understand what they’re doing and how we’re different.
We should also write up one for Nostr.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239
@New_ Public is a research group looking in to how to make social media a heathier space for everybody.
They just put out a presentation on how to make local digital communties that work. I’d love to be able to build these communities on top of Nostr.
Here’s the slides: https://bit.ly/local-digital-spaces
A lot of their research is looking at FrontPorchForum.com , which is a social network only for Vermont, but it’s REALLY popular in Vermont… 80% of households and 50% of adults in the state are active on Front Porch Forum.
https://newpublic.org/study/3635/front-porch-forum
One thing which jumps out from this is how groups or community spaces need a steward for a community. Somebody to welcome newcomers, set norms, sometimes moderate, and generally be the welcomer. Just like physical spaces tend to have people who steward them.
New Public has a guide for strewarding a digital community: https://newpublic.notion.site/Creating-a-Flourishing-Digital-Public-Space-for-Your-Local-Area-6e563c345c494cceb1b95f6dfd282519
Right now we’ve got several kinds of groups, from just access restricted relays to a bunch of group nips… I think if we look at what works elsewhere it can inform how we build them on Nostr.
I think prediction markets are pretty neat. They were the primary way of predicting the outcome of elections prior to the invention of modern opinion polling.
In recent weeks the polymarket for the US presidential election has noticeably diverged from the polling. The polls have stayed flat, it’s essentially a coin flip as to who will win. The prediction markets have broke to Trump with a 60% chance of winning. Is this a real shift that bettors are seeing vs the polls or is someone manipulating the market. You could make the argument that placing bets on your preferred candidate is a capital efficient way of shifting the outcome. Journalists use the markets to shape their coverage and will start writing articles about momentum when they see the prediction markets shift. Elections are very messy so it’s easy enough to find evidence of momentum in any direction if you’re looking for examples to fit the narrative. And the narrative about a candidate pulling ahead will lead to more press and focus and is likely to help the candidate get more votes on Election Day.
All of this to say it appears one person is attempting to do this in favor of Trump.
https://www.cryptopolitan.com/bettor-trump-harris-betting-pair-polymarket/
You can but they permission access to the main net and if you run your own relays and appview servers then normal clients can’t connect to or see your content.
I’m really sad to learn that @wedistribute is stopping publishing and going on hiatus. They’ve been covering social media protocols for a long time and picked up a Nostr section last year to cover what we’re doing. We need organizations like We Distribute to make the social protocol revolution succeed.
https://wedistribute.org/2024/10/on-hiatus/
I asked a friend who’s been using Lens what’s happening over there. They’ve got a similar issue with one primary community of users to Nostr, except theirs is Polygon maxis and ethereum related web 3 folks.
First off, I think we’re in better shape than Lens.
“On Lens, however, there is no meaningful algorithm in place across the main front-end clients to perform this function. Whether you’re using Hey, Butterfly, or Orb, the content you see often appears randomly, without any logic or personalization. Even posts from people you follow frequently fail to show up in your feed, forcing users to manually check each profile for updates.”
That’s just bonkers. At least in Nostr our follow graph and chronological feeds work pretty well. And with DVM we do have some apps which support plugable third party algorithms.
But beyond that I encourage folks to read the whole piece. Because the author goes on to say that discovery for content creators is a major problem. If you join how do you build an audience. With Nostr you do it by commenting on other posts and eventually having folks with an audience repost your content. It works, but not well, and mostly pushes folks to post about bitcoin and nostr instead of posting about other stuff just using bitcoin for zaps and nostr for publishing.
https://app.t2.world/article/cm1yqjrly57217420mcprv6us4l
Ugh you don’t win the war by killing every Russian soldier. You win by making the cost of continuing the war too high for the Russian government. Soldiers getting asylum in France is likely to undermine the Russian military’s ability to execute in a more systematic way than just killing more soldiers on the battlefield.
One thing I love about having left the US is not having to stress out about crippling medical bills and struggling to get insurance companies to pay for my health care. The NZ system isn’t perfect but it works a hell of a lot better than the American system.
https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/s/6I8zIZoUPE
Ambulance, 10 days in the hospital, surgery, etc… $98.
https://i.nostr.build/ZRzv45eHOCXSsUfH.jpg
I’m not the OP just saw that on Reddit and made me think of all the social media posts I’ve seen of American hospital bills. I’m fine and in fact in Wellington the ambulance is free so the bill would be $0. Which means you don’t get a bill to share online. I’ve had to learn to call an ambulance or go to the doctor without worrying about the cost. Last week we called one just because my partner was feeling faint, turns out it was low blood sugar, but there was no cost and the EMTs were happy to be there to help.
My taxes went down when I moved from the US to New Zealand and I got the free healthcare and education. Pretty good deal. All you have to do is stop supporting massive military and health insurance industry. You can get both low taxes and health care plus education.
Primal does it with a custodial wallet provided by @strike and direct sats purchases for those wallets from ApplePay. It’s a nice experience but even though it’s open source it isn’t something you could easily run on your own.
It’s quite pricey and complicated to do the strike integration. Plus it’s custodial and means that if you rely on it then the app loses its ability for users to build and run things themself aspect of open source. I suspect the second reason is why @jb55 hasn’t done it.
I’m writing something new. A kind of summarize your nostr feed for the day newsletter. I want it to show up in mentions/ notifications for the person in question but not for everyone else mentioned so it doesn’t spam people.
I’ll post the code on GitHub when it’s less of a work in progress mess.
Yeah my goal was to limit mentions to avoid unintentional spamming of people. It doesn’t need to be private but also everyone doesn’t need a notification that someone is reading a summary of their posts. :)
Yes but newstr does it with a focus on what outside of nostr content gets linked to by multiple people you follow and I’ve been trying to focus more on keeping up to date with threads and conversations from your nostr feed.
I’m pretty lefty myself and what I’m doing with protest.net is a leftist project. I think you’re right the the dominant ideology here on Nostr is right leaning. If that’s the only space which can exist on Nostr then it’s a failure. The protocol needs to be able to exist with many communities who don’t need to agree or even see each other.
I get it. Authoritarians use the term collectivism for a kind of top down control of other people in a way that ends up abusive. What I mean is you’re voluntarily able to choose what collectives you want to participate in as a way of solving problems, organizing work, and resources together. In this case often this is the informal social labor of sustaining an online community like inviting people, welcoming them, setting norms, and in cases where it’s needed moderation. In the case of a fediverse server you end up stuck, they own your content, connections, and identity itself. That’s not voluntary because you can’t leave or fork the community. With subreddits you have a bit more agency but there’s still the issue of the mods being whoever created the subreddit or their self appointed successors.
With Nostr we can have groups and communities which exist as something more than a network of individuals, a collective as it were, but where participation in the larger network is locked open and permissionless. If you don’t like a group on Nostr you can much more established fork the group, or make your own relay. The awesome thing is users who want can put the same post in both the original and forked group.
I use the example of the meth users and anti-woke meth users subreddits. 99% of posts are just about using meth, and should easily be able to exist in both places at the same time. But some posts might be about politics and should only be in one or the other. In Nostr we can do that. Plus we can also make encrypted groups for people who want to have some privacy with then do their illegal drug advocacy and mutual aid.
I really appreciate your contributions to building nostr @hodlbod because we’ve got really different political views but know that to build nostr we need to make it for many different kinds of people and groups to manage their own affairs.
@xdamman the founder of OpenCollective who’s returning as CEO to run OpenCollective Inc is here on Nostr. One of the points of contention was different opinions about crypto and payments systems. We should expect the new OC projects to be much more open to decentralized tech. :)
Not every day should be a productive day. Our lives shouldn’t be a process of constant optimization for productivity. We need balance and being lazy is part of the balance.
You mean bitcoin mining or mineral mining? I would be curious to see opinion polling about bitcoin mining specifically. Antidotally it seems very polarized, people either don’t think of it at all, think it’s fine and no big deal, or ecosystem destroying stupidity. Almost all the positions are held based on adopting the views of others in whatever community they are part of.
It’s become a culture war issue and that’s not a good thing for anyone.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/
And there were Indymedia like projects in the 90’s like the CounterMedia center at the DNC protests in Chicago in 96.
http://www.cpsr.cs.uchicago.edu/countermedia/
Nothing new and important appears out of nowhere.
Ending a player’s career for kneeling during the national anthem is hardly fine with political protest. You’ll get farther if you build coalitions instead of attacking people who support your political views.
So what’s the deal with trigger warnings? Do they actually help? They clear are a culture war fixture. But where do they come from and is there any scientific evidence behind them?
Because they first got public attention at liberal arts universities in the US I assumed that it was the popularization of academic research. That’s not actually what happened. It was students who pressured schools to adopt them. Where did the students learn about trigger warnings? Early social media! LiveJournal, Tumblr, and most especially fanfic sites had trigger and content warnings on their content and lots of students had used those sites in high school and liked the idea of trigger warnings.
Search Engine is a great podcast, and they did an episode about the origins of trigger warnings.
https://www.searchengine.show/listen/search-engine-1/what-do-trigger-warnings-actually-do
This gallery is like cat nip for me. I love that it’s the creation of a collective of artists selling their own work. They do some of it there on site while talking to folks who wander in. The Argentine artists who were there correctly noticed my Uruguayan accent. The difference from a Buenos Aires porteño accent is subtle. Then every Spanish speaker I talk to is very confused when I explain that I’m not actually from Uruguay originally.
https://i.nostr.build/BvEhu7XXP4hHGP2I.jpghttps://i.nostr.build/cYn39OUnJx5C77wF.jpghttps://i.nostr.build/PSFJAbn1prRAHkP3.jpg
Has anyone sent sats to a non-nostr lightning affiliated wallet from primal?
The number selection only shows up when you try and send to a nostr user. When you paste in a lightning address and or scan the QR code.
Am I doing something wrong or is primal sending directly to wallets beyond nostr just broken?
@miljan ?
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by rabble | export