Reading the comments below make me feel like I should maybe be expected to already know what nostr is. But anyway, I don't and reading this article, it felt like it just suddenly cut off at the end.
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.
> Why would "every relay getting pummeled by a load of clients simultaneously, all trying to push the same message"?
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.
Nostr is one of those thought-terminating cults, you know, identical to "blockchain solves this" or "AGI solves this".
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."
P2P with end-to-end encryption over relays existed in 2001 (e.g. Groove, Mojo Nation) and wasn't invented by Nostr.
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.
This exactly. Worth mentioning that "censoring" can occur in any of a number of ways; blocking select traffic, slowing select traffic, "forgetting" specific nodes, redirecting other nodes at will, performing MITM attacks (if the protocol isn't secure), etc etc.
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.
Read up on the outbox model and zaps. Also check out Bitchat for a real world example of Nostr being effectively used without even requiring Internet connectivity.
You cannot censor Nostr.
Also, check out how zaps work, and relay authentication. You can charge for relays if you want.
You are correct that it existed well before, the difference is that it was always complicated to use. Heck, we have been able to send PGP emails since almost 30 years ago.
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.
"I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web+email server at home, paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first-class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much.
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)"
considering most people today only use 3 or 4 big email providers i can see the exact same happening for nostr, the p2p part seems more like a gimmick than a protocol requirement
Nostr has the benefits of centralised networks for discoverability, federated networks for communities, and private individual web site for p2p and archival purposes.
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.
I tried nostr once and I was very impressed by the speed of loading up the timeline, including the pictures. I wasn't interested in the content though, which was mainly about cryptos, so I didn't pursue more
Nowadays a NOSTR "relay" isn't exactly a relay any longer, is it?
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.
I've been looking at that for quite some time, even met teams members developing the product. Sorry to say: both are fundamentally different technologies and philosophies.
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.
In fairness here, when it comes to large distributed networks, this type of scaling is generally unacceptable.
But 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.
Every social media platform needs to a solution to:
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.
NOSTR is built to behave like existing platforms when desired. You are forgetting the fundamental difference that brought NOSTR to life: your identity and your texts being verifiable as yours.
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.
No, they're verifiable as having been signed by a key. You can still call yourself "Michael Jackson's Ghost". This is the only identity verification people care about, the big bad "send us proof you are who you say you are" gate.
"Boom. Same as Nostr, but with existing platforms" - Except without the ability to give and receive real value via zaps, and at the risk of being censored, and losing your entire audience at the whim of the network operators.
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.
> It has been at absolute worst a minor annoyance.
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.
> Except without the ability to give and receive real value via zaps, and at the risk of being censored, and losing your entire audience at the whim of the network operators
Spam and content moderation are basically the same thing. In both cases it's hiding things from the user that the user didn't ask for or want to see.
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.
the extra curve with spam is that it must be made economically expensive for the spammer. spam is more of a DoS attack than just content i'm not interested in.
Yeah, true, but now you have to manage 5 accounts on the 5 major social networks, all with different rules, format, public, moderation guidelines. It can be done but it starts to sound like a job.
For who might be pulled in by the vague title, not knowing what a nostr is, thinking this article has anything to do with evolution - it has nothing to do with evolution or nature. Not one example of nature trying to evolve a nostr is descibed.
Maybe like... the author thought a nostr is similar to, I dunno, a pack or tribe or something?
It's clearly a tongue in cheek joke about the progression of projects with similar goals that reach imperfect outcomes, with the implicit assumption that Nostr represents the ideal solution.
There was a “nature keeps evolving crabs” meme that was floating around a while back, I think it is a reference to that. I was also disappointed by the lack of nature, evolution, and crabs in the article.
Readit News
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.
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.
But 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.