It explained all the traditional approaches, which are all able to help discoverability and shareability of data between servers, and then says "the solution is relays" and then describes something that doesn't seem to be relaying anything. It sounds like a single dumb, untrusted message store on a single server that doesn't relay anything anywhere. It even specifically says "Relays don’t talk to each other, and users only need to join a small number of relays to gain autonomy—at least two, and certainly less than a dozen".
Not sure where the less than a dozen relay bit comes from. Are they expecting clients to do all the relaying between the relays? If so, wouldn't you get every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message. It sounds like the complete opposite of what you actually want. The article seems to just stop short at exactly the point when it should say how what they're proposing actually works.
Why would "every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message"?
Relays get one client pushing one message. That one message is pushed to multiple relays. To your own preferred relays, as well as to the preferred relays of others who are involved in the conversation, as well as to a couple of global relays for easy discoverability.
These global relays are useful, but are interchangeable and totally replaceable. As soon as you've connected with someone you can retrieve their updates, because you know their preferred relays, and can query them directly.
In this way Nostr has the benefits of centralised networks for discoverability, federated networks for communities, and private individual web site for p2p and archival purposes.
Because that is the obvious thing that would happen without further implementation details. A few large relays taking the brunt of the vast majority of the network. It isn't an inherently scalable architecture.
Of course you can do other stuff in addition and thereby achieve scalability. At least arguably. But then a relevant explanation needs carefully walk through those additional non-obvious details.
- You publish to, say, 3 relays.
- I follow you or want to browse your content for any reason.
- I connect to your 3 relays and fetch your content.
If I want to follow someone else and they publish to other relays I fetch their posts from those relays.
If some of your relays start censoring you you can move to other relays, or run your own, and I'll start fetching your content from those.
There's an interactive animation demo at https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/#/outbox that explains it.
And "Nostr can't be censored" is, of course, a statement identical to "Blockchain solves all consensus problems" and "AI can do anything better than a human."
Nostr is so simple because it handwaves away the fact that everybody seems to use the same small set of relays and there's nothing stopping them from censoring the network. I'm also not aware of any incentives for the relay operators either.
Also, beyond just no positive incentives, there are nontrivial negatives... they're hubs for an entire network, which can be a lot of traffic and bandwidth if peers are sharing anything other than text. That's a potentially significant cost for literally just being a dumb router. The idea of charging for this doesn't make sense... you don't choose a router, it's automatic based on location, so there's no incentive for quality. That ends up being a race to the bottom, which there's no room for arbitrage; prices are driven down to near-zero profit.
Abuse-wise, the model is fundamentally flawed. Economically, the idea kinda works so long as hub traffic is low enough to be swallowed in background noise for whoever manages the hub. Beyond that the model breaks pretty quickly.
You cannot censor Nostr.
Also, check out how zaps work, and relay authentication. You can charge for relays if you want.
It also seems like this is sort of reinventing email.
The innovative concept is that npub/nsec along with sending notes is trivially simple. The content does not need to encrypted, there is a huge value on publishing clear text messages that are crypto-verifiable. You also didn't had this feature on groove and others. I'd argue that NOSTR has indeed pioneered them into mainstream.
You could say that if Nostr was successful but it isn't. Nostr has <1% the DAU of Bluesky.
Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to a VPS. No luck. I quickly understood that self-hosting email was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I have been fighting back out of pure spite, obstinacy, and activism. In other words, because it was the right thing to do.
But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.
(After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel, Carlos Fenollosa, 2022)"
From the article, quoting this other article
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-...
As I have said in other replies to this post, read up on the outbox model. Global relays are useful, but are interchangeable and totally replaceable. As soon as you've connected with someone you can retrieve their updates, because you know their preferred relays, and can query them directly.
And there are incentives to running a global or community relay. Read up on Zaps. With Nostr, you can give real value via the lightning network, and it is built into the protocol. This allows you to charge for usage if you so desire. And then there's all the other reasons why people run community web sites or global services.
Should likely be called a "database server" since it's main purpose is to host user data and perform queries over it. A relay is something connecting two devices and makes a best effort to get out of their way.
Nevertheless: NOSTR is the most exciting social network that I've seen in the past 20 years. The concept of owning the keys without a blockchain associated enables not just decentralization, it also permits a complete offline functioning to login, view private messages and so much more that isn't possible from any other popular social network predecessor.
NOSTR "accounts" are meant to trivially generated and used outside the context of micro-blogging. That is the reason for being popular, the npub becomes a signature that validates texts and there is value in that.
AT always feels like mastodon meets RSS with US-centric political moderation on top.
> N^2 scaling: if every fed has to talk to every other fed to exchange messages, the number of connections will scale exponentially
No. That's quadratic growth, which is a fairly mild form of polynomial growth, which is much much much slower than exponential growth.
k k^2 2^k
1 1 1
10 100 1024
100 1e4 1e30But yes i agree its really sloppy for them to say exponential. I'd actually call it linear since what matters (mostly) is how many connections each node has to do, not the total number of connections in the system.
Nonetheless imagine if email worked by making a connection to every computer in the world to check if they had mail for you. It would obviously not work.
1. Content discovery
2. Spam
3. Content moderation
I can see relays offering unique solutions to each one. But now they are more than just dumb servers.
You get to the point where you might as well just write posts locally then submit them to X, Facebook, etc. You get the same result. And if you include a cryptographic signature with each post, you can prove you are the same person across the different platforms.
Boom. Same as Nostr, but with existing platforms
NOSTR was a response to the situation where virtually all other social media platforms could basically block your identity and delete all your posts. There is no such drastic possibility at this platform. Sure enough that relays might refuse to receive messages from a user and delete notes from their servers but they will never be capable of silencing that user and he can continue sending his (verifiable) messages to any other relays out there in the internet. Followers of that person will continue to read his texts without disturbance, which is quite relevant when not long ago you'd see large groups of people de-platformed when refusing to inject toxic substances on their bodies.
It is a world of difference between centralized/federated platforms to NOSTR where your freedom to write messages as yourself can never be taken away.
Spam is basically a solved issue. There's both proof of work and paid relays, not to mention web or trust. It has been at absolute worst a minor annoyance.
There's plenty of ways to discover content on Nostr, from hashtags to channels to location based chats to just following some interesting people. It's perhaps not as frictionless as X, but imho that's a feature not a bug.
This is easy to say when there is little adoption and attackers don’t care about the network. It doesn’t mean it’ll remain true if that changes. Proof of work is much less effective when people are willing to use botnets and paid relays complicate life for regular users so there’s a cap on how aggressively that can be used.
Every large relay has the same problem
Unless by spam you mean denial of service attacks. Which should probably be a point of its own anyway. It's the main killer of the decentralized internet currently.
Maybe like... the author thought a nostr is similar to, I dunno, a pack or tribe or something?
(Whether the author is convincing on the other hand...)
Or if you really care about the crypto piece, then freenet.
It's crazy that some functionality on e.g. the IRS website requires me to verify my identity using a private company (ID.me).
For all the faults of current Fediverse software implementations, it at least gives more options than nostr. If you don't care about controlling your own identity, you can use someone else's server. Nostr doesn't give you that, it's all or nothing.
Private companies are bad enough, but at least they won't declare you an undesirable for your political beliefs or religion or ethnicity or gender identity or sexual preference or whatever and shoot you in the head over it.
Except where governments and private companies collaborate, which of course happens (looking at you literally every American social media platform.)
Passports have had keys in them for a while now (so-called "e-passports")
A wallet is easier to lose than a bank vault, but it also holds less money for the same reason. Crypto keys can be designed the same way, with high importance keys managed by safer means like m of n schemes mixed with traditional "hard" storage in geographically distributed safe deposit boxes or whatever, while less important keys can be treated in a more relaxed fashion.
yes because if you lose your house keys you don't lose your property, precisely because there is an entire legal and governmental apparatus securing it, the exact thing the crypto people first try get rid off and then reinvent (shoddily) when they inevitably discover that nobody wants to live in the jungle
Your local locksmith would beg to differ.
So i think there are viable solutions here. It mostly just means having an app to manage the keys for you.
The opposite is the case: WhatsApp and Signal manage the keys for them, mostly in the background (unless you actively verify identities).
You can try it yourself: Turn off your phone, ask a friend to send you a message, throw your phone into a volcano, reactivate your account on a new phone without entering any secret keys. You'll still receive the message.
I personally think that most of Signal's and even WhatsApp's tradeoffs are reasonable for a product with an adaption of hundreds of millions, but it's decidedly not cryptographic self-custody.
sneak’s law: “Users can not and will not securely manage key material.”
"Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" — it simply recognizes that different people have different morals and preferences and each server, being privately owned, can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please and users are free to choose what to read and from where."
Their statement underlines the fact that nostr is a stream of dirty sewage and they want users to submit their valuable user-created content into this sewage. Then they turn around and say that the sewage is not a problem because you can filter it and even use it as drinking water later on!
I don't see how a person with real-life social rank and social capital will sign up to something like this, or be willing to maintain a technical interface to the "stream of different morals".
You'd need to put immense trust into the "filtering" process so that you are not involuntarily exposed to rubbish. And on the other hand your valuable user-generated content could be showing up in another context with your name attached, directly next to some extremely degenerate trash created by "people with different morals" as nostr calls it. Advertisers have big problems when their brands are advertised next to problematic topics, it is the same with people.
How can you rationalize this as a good value proposition? People want to impress an audience with their user-generated content. And you only want to impress someone you look up to.
If I could sign up to a social network of people who can put a nail into the wall, take a daily shower, brush their teeth, and live in a democratic country I would immediately do so. If I want to get exposed to "different morals" I just open any of the other existing social networks. Until then I'm stuck here :P
Doesn't this same line of thinking apply to the Internet as a whole? Couldn't your question of "Why would anyone use Nostr?" equally be asked for "Why would anyone use a web browser?"
A relay is a stream of stuff you then have to filter
It's really like apples and oranges, web pages or blog sites is probably a better thing to ask about than web browsers
To give an example on how I think moderation should work. If I follow you and you follow me on some nonexistent platform Y. You see the content I upvote, and I can see the content you upvote. So we'd start with block all by default, with transparency of why something is in one's list.
I pitched a P2P platform like this years ago to NLNet (taking heavy inspiration from I2P's Syndie app, minus the funky UX), though I didn't manage to get any funding due to missing clout as a public developer; to lead such an effort.
Now nostr is actually much bigger than "twitter-like" app, including powering app stores, chat apps, collaboration, podcasts, music player, etc.
DoS on the infra is a different question, though.
> showing up in another context with your name attached, directly next to some extremely degenerate trash
Check out police bodycam footage on youtube for real world examples of exactly this.
The economies of scale for creating sewage in social media are basically unbounded. Tens of thousands of people have a 9 to 5 job which consists of creating sewage content just to steer people towards a certain narrative.
I think their audience for that page is people who want to implement those filters. It's not like you can log into nostr and start browsing any more than you can log into https and start browsing.
I don't appreciate the content either but a protocol that doesn't create high value targets for corruption (e.g. certificate authorities) is useful independent of the regrettable vibes that its fan club has. You're not going to catch their cooties if your public key is database-adjacent to someone else's.
in fact, the further mainstream social networks evolve, the more social rank it started to bring not to be there, and/or having been booted. it's early on this path, but i started to notice the signs.
I think the point is that "opening all other existing social networks" to get a rounded point of view has immense friction, especially in an enshittified world. Even with supposedly non-enshittified solutions like Mastodon, for example, you have to subscribe with different users to distinct instances that allow only a subset of the network and manage that for you. They can alter their banlist behind your back, for starters, so you have to manage that as well.
The proposal of Nostr is that you can follow as many relays as you want, in the same app, with the same user. Compare to having separate accounts for Facebook, X, Threads, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, <woke-friendly Mastodon instance> and <reactionary-friendly Mastodon instance>.
My experience on the internet does not reflect this, this is a very pessimistic view of people, bordering on perl-clutching.
Most raw user generated feeds are not great sure, but it’s mostly mediocre jokes and mildly provocative takes from bored trolls, and that’s usually a loud minority. Most people either lurk or make a modest effort now and then, particularly in niche communities like this where most people aware of it will already be fairly deeply immersed in tech. People have better things to do than to constantly be aggressively offensive, I imagine it gets old fast, and you really need to go out of your way to write something that legitimately hurts an adult.
Sure of course there are corners that are cesspits of hate, but they tend to band together and it is quite hard to bump into them accidentally. And when you do, you just feel slightly disgusted for a second, turn back and forget about it.
Some moderation is critical, but it usually needs to only be enforced for a few bad apples, most people act with decency and common sense, even when anonymous. And yes including people with lesser means and/or from shitty countries. People from different cultures are mostly the same when you peal away superficial customs, and I find much more in common with someone of my age with similar interests from the other side of the world, than with a grumpy old neighbor frankly. At least that’s my experience.
The problem with reddit's panopticon moderation, with its ill defined, nebulously (and now AI) enforcement of sitewide policies, ends up repressing a negative behavior rather than refuting it, and, when people move to a similar off-reddit site, they are itching to start taking part in discourse they weren't allowed to before.
The end result is that people who are used to policing their own speech to avoid the panopticon rather than because it's the right thing to do eventually lose that moral code that was previously shaped by discourse and pushback from their peers rather than anonymous opaque moderation.
All the "downsides" of a superpeer (as the article says - "centralisation with extra steps") but without the benefit of dynamic peering thereby resulting in incomplete routing.
i.e. by its nature Nostr results in a fragmented network, which ends up looking very much like the federated network, albeit more interconnected.
Thats not necessarily a bad thing, but its a bit of a confused article, IMHO.
Users you follow can also advertise relays behind the scenes, so it's more probable that, if you follow a coherent set of users, you will converge on a coherent subset of relays that doesn't really feel fragmented.
Disagree though, people manage keys just fine, or they can be thought.
But even if there are people in the world that never get it, it could be outsourced to a central identity provider that manages your key and messages. For the end user they would have a user/password combo they can reset.
If the network becomes more popular someone will definitely build something like that.
The technical capabilities (remote signers, bunkers, ...) already exist
I think the blogosphere is the most succesful distributed social network. People just dont like viewing it that way.
it's only the storage infra, though. but it stores content, nodes, and messages in the same DHT.
A step in the right direction for sure! But I don't feel like Nostr is the final target that nature is shooting for here.
That said - maybe (total hypothetical) the reason one relay becomes really big is because a lot of people think it provides really good service, and maybe it's difficult to convince the majority of the network to route around it. This would create a similar problem to what we see in more well established federated chat networks.
This is NNTP.
Sounds like REST. The original REST, not the botched CRUD that companies pushed for.
https://roy.gbiv.com/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dissertation...
> The combination of layered system and uniform interface constraints induces architectural properties similar to those of the uniform pipe-and-filter style.
See also Figure 5-8.
The dissertation is all about deriving that network style.
Activists, in this case, are people with a social mission that they deem it's more important than any other considerations: they think ideology K is dangerous and they are trying to prevent as many as possible recipients to be exposed to it. They will report you on Threads or Facebook to ban you, if you speak in favor of K. They will send e-mails to your employer. They will even send bomb threats to venues where you gather to celebrate K. If they are moderators, they will not only ban you if mention K in a positive light, but they will try to avoid other people from hearing K-speech as well. If they run a Mastodon instance, for example, they will have a ban list of other instances that are K-friendly, and they will make sure that, if you are using their instance, you can't see any posts about K. If you're curious about K, now you have to do the inconvenient dance of switching between two instances that in theory should be federated, but in practice are two different networks that don't speak with each other. This is good for activists, but bad for you, if you don't want to take sides on a culture war you don't really care about.
A relay-based architecture makes the work of activists a bit less relevant: they can still run their instance and ban every mention of K, of course, but now you can subscribe to their instance AND another instance that doesn't ban people who speak fondly of K, and they can't limit or control that in any way. In theory (and everything is a bit theoretical at the moment), relays that heavily censor certain topics are less preferable to a generic public than relays that don't do that, so activist moderators will pay their effort to shape discourse with less participation from users. Of course, if relays ban something universally considered bad, such as spam, they will have more success than if they ban some heavily divisive point of view that 50% of the public shares. In theory, these controversial actors can even advertise friendly relays without you knowing, and your client can decide to follow them transparently (the intent is "I want content from this user", the behaviour is "follow relays they advertise behind the scenes"). Of course they have to do that before they're banned, but the point is that, for every activist relay that tries to remove K from public discourse, there will always be one or more generalist or counter-activist relay that welcomes K, and you can choose to follow both at the same time, with the same client and the same identity, and nobody can do a damn thing about it.
> Of course, if relays ban something universally considered bad, such as spam, they will have more success than if they ban some heavily divisive point of view that 50% of the public shares.
You can add CSAM to that. Also, legality always trumps any other consideration: if you're doing something illegal in your country, you should expect your country's police force to come and get you, there's obviously no relay architecture that can prevent that.
My point applies more to situations where K is not illegal, but heavily divisive.
Same thing over and over again.
Nostr is a very simple protocol that could have been invented in essence in 1995. There's a reason it wasn't invented until recently, because it's difficult to build robust protocols with good guarantees about discoverability and reliability with a foundation that is as limited as it is.
You post to your own preferred relays, as well as to the preferred relays of others who are involved in the conversation, as well as to a couple of global relays for easy discoverability.
These global relays are useful, but are interchangeable and totally replaceable. As soon as you've connected with someone you can retrieve their updates, because you know their preferred relays, and can query them directly.
Everyone can announce to the network where they read/write from. Clients can figure out (based on the people you follow) from which relays to get the content.
I've been using it like this for nearly a year. It works
It is inefficient, but the inefficiency seems to lie at some fundamental problem with p2p. Centralized systems need to do the same synchronization, but between fewer actors, and may outsource some of the verification for an exponential increase in speed.
- how well does such an ecosystem resist enshittification? Given some of the other comments, Nostr itself would not. However, is that true for every relay networks?
- does the Willow protocol have the same basic constraints? I know willow works with user-owned keys, but can it also organize as something similar to relays?
- local-first apps organized this way would be an interesting ecosystem
- how well would this work with keyhive? (Local first access control)
On the other hand, what're the economic incentive to run relays? If there are economies of scale, we swiftly go back to the oligarchic model.
FUD. I and many others on HN run our own email servers with essentially no delivery problems.
I’ve never sent any kind of bulk email and I suppose my host has a good IP. Everything I do depends critically on email deliverability, often to addresses I’ve never sent to before, so if I had a problem I would certainly know about it.
And what they’re about to become is going to be something more like political yard signs.