[lovvtide]

So I've been building of one of the nostr web clients ( https://satellite.earth ) full time since December last year - I agree partially with all these points and will try to add something from my perspective of being perhaps a bit too close to this.

1) With regard to message replication/ordering, the relays are supposed to reject messages that are received with a timestamp that deviates from the server clock beyond some max delta, but it's not clear they always do this. Nostr in its current state (multiple relays hosting everything and letting clients sort it out) is optimizing for redundancy over efficiency — as the ecosystem matures I think this will get sorted out. I have one idea in particular that I think could really help, but it's beyond the scope of this comment.

2) In the very early days you had to copy/paste your key into some clients, but this is not the case anymore. There are several web extensions now that hold your key securely and expose a limited interface for clients to sign messages.

3) You're right - there are too many NIPS (that's "nostr implementation possibility" for those unaware). But fortunately the only required NIP is NIP-01 which is basically just a standard for how to sign and exchange json between clients and relays. I don't think any client implements all the NIPs. In fact, there has been a lot of talk on nostr about 'microapps' (apps that specialize in a narrow use case) and that's fine — maybe because nostr was birthed in the context of being a Twitter alternative we've been thinking that all clients need to support the whole protocol, but I don't really think it will turn out that way. Since all apps are interoperable with a shared user identity, it's possible for clients to be complementary to each other in a way that hasn't previously been incentivized.

4) Regrading blob storage — that's what NIP-94 was created for. You can in principle create a "file" message containing whatever metadata you want. This can be a torrent magnet link or IPFS cid or whatever.

For what it's worth, I've personally never had as much coding anything than I have working on nostr. There's a core group of people that are very excited about this, and it's really motivating to get immediate feedback every time I push an update. No doubt the whole thing is very messy compared to a corporate-sponsored project like (for example) Bluesky. My bias is toward ecological systems tending to win in the long term. We'll find out.

[evbogue]

All good points!

I believe Nostr is doing way better than Bluesky at achieving the goal of being a distributed social network.

[michaelmrose]

I checked out a community that on the tin is about learning coding and found Trumpers, bigots and antivaxxers. It reminded me of pro free speech fork of Reddit. It wasn't a bad idea AT ALL on the face of it but in practice its front page was never without a racial slur and no decent people stayed long.

If everyone cares about privacy then privacy focused places ought to be full of on average smart people having intelligent conversations. If few people feel the need to bother you end of serving largely the paranoid and the odious and this can easily be a self re-enforcing trend as bad drives out the good.

I feel like the space could use some innovation if its produce communities worth attending to without strong centralized moderation. Instead of bubbling up the top 100 things the community as a whole thinks are worth reading or the top 100 things that someone thinks I might be willing to engage with including 60 things selected because they are liable to make me angry or succeed in wasting my time why not have a personalized analysis done on MY side or on a computer I rent to pull in 10,000 things and figure out which 100 I actually want to engage with based on my own aims not advertisers.

I would probably pay for that especially if it could be plugged into a lot of common platforms to filter out the crap.

[plagiarist]

Social media is crawling with the bigoted anti-reality Trumper crowd. There are plenty here as well.

Maybe running a local spam filter on one of these decentralized platforms is the way to go. I wouldn't mind running LLMs and removing all the content from Trump crime family fans. Would be nice to detect and reject LLM-generated adtech bullshit while we are at it.