Thread

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol "SMTP" ended up being rather captured/centralized toward an oligopoly over time in an effort to manage spam. Here's another #asknostr for today: What aspects of Nostr's design will make it more resistant to that fate? The social graph web of trust element?

Replies (33)

I went to see if the word "spam" was rather an acronym for a phrase rather more telling and... "... a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly." If its annoying for Vikings God praise Nostriches a better fate
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We tend to defer too much to corporations and influencers (which are icons of centralization) smtp didn’t fail. People are short sighted. If nostr fails in that direction, it won’t have been the protocol, it will have been the people.
It's very simple For example The government provides security but we all have to take security precautions to help ourselves So everyone should learn how to protect themselves, identify spam account report them to the protocole and everyone can block them individually Like there should be like an hashtag #nostrspam or #spamid #spamsupport
Definitely the close association with payments (zaps and Cashu tokens). Must easier to impose a cost and/or generate revenue. Also, keeping the relays as dumb as possible, similar to dumb internet routers that can’t inspect packets.
Web of Trust is old. Nothing about Nostr indicates Web of Trust will work today if it didn't work before - and by work, I mean scale to meaningful adoption. There are both UX and incentive problems, and both lead to a Web of Trust naturally deteriorating into a centralized model where users trust few monolithic authorities. Which is exactly what we already have. It's exactly what YOU USED to log onto Nostr, @Lyn Alden, you relied on that certificate, which is completely centralized in its distribution and authentication, to get onto Nostr. I'm happy you are pushing decentralized tech, and that you haven't been led astray by 'shitcoinery,' but people running Bitcoin and Nostr nodes as a hobby is not going to get us far past this.
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Like some P2P kind of "Web of trust". Because it's more important to me what my immediate online environment considers trustworthy than anyone on the other side of the globe or people who I'd never follow to begin with. There used to be a good approach called FOAF (Friend of a friend), which was pretty decentralized at the time, hosted on your own web server. Technically it was XML-based, but today it could be represented in a NIP or in JSON. View quoted note →
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It doesn't. Everyday people will not run a relay. Just like many people don't run a node. The market for NOSTR is very niche and based on idealism, not practicality. If NOSTR is going to stay a sub-sub-sub-sub-culture within a sub-sub-culture, then it needs more users: - Running relays - Improving UX/UI for NOSTR as a whole - Avoid VC funding - And not relying on AWS for storage and backup
People complain that "not everybody will run a relay", well, why is that? Because the architecture of the network and the UX of the software doesn't automatically do it for them. Why is running a relay not automatic when running a client? It could be. Every client could be a relay.
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↩ replying to makeasnek
Yes, but what does it mean to have a relay? If you mean a full relay, where users can connect to you, great, but I imagine it would have to be through Tor. Also, keep in mind the size, hundreds of thousands of daily events take up a lot of space. However, if you mean a personal relay, where you are only connected to your relay and it bridges the rest of the relays, wouldn't the result be the same?
↩ replying to Robot
If we assume x number of events per day on the network, the more relays, the fewer events each relay needs to store. Text events are tiny, you can fit all of wikipedia's text on a DVD. If we integrate with other P2P networks like #IPFS, #Freenet, #Hyphanet, etc for storage of media, then space isn't much of a concern. Tor isn't needed, NAT punching protocols exist and are mature, plus IPv6. Think of it this way: Can your phone store all the text from all your social media posts? What about all of your 10 closest friends? Yes? Then this can scale. But you don't need to take my word for it, look at existing P2P technologies which have been doing this kind of routing for years. There's no need to centralize around relays.
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↩ replying to makeasnek
This way it seems very feasible to me. I am not familiar with NAT punching protocols. Also, if we think about it we could save a lot of requests to other relays and thus make them smaller. It makes sense as you put it. If as a developer I can help in some project like this it would be great. Since having your own relay would make custom filtering of information much more feasible. I'm not talking about a filtering based on likes like traditional social networks, but a fully customized and configurable filtering.
↩ replying to Robot
Nostr is pretty far along and already well committed to the whole "every user is not a relay" paradigm. Which is fine, it's probably "decentralized enough". One of the key pressure points coming up is going to be the cost of hosting media for relays and the tendency for relays to centralize a bit as the average relay hosting cost increases due to increased users and particularly increased media. If we integrate a P2P way to store and to distribute media now, we can avoid much of that. For example, we have a NIP for associating a pubkey with a LNURL (lightning address). We can also have a NIP for defining a link to an "external media" which is downloaded via Freenet, Hyphanet, IPFS, etc. Let the client do the work of downloading and re-sharing media content while the relays are responsible for text and links to media. At least for Freenet, you talk to it via your web browser via a localhost port. So a nostr client can easily make links to, upload, and download through it without ever needing to leave the browser. The only thing that needs to be true for that to work is for the user to run the freenet client in the background. Unfortunately, they don't have a client for Android or iPhone, but proxy services (like currently used for media) can help with that. IPFS may be another route, I am less familiar with it. If you're doing nostr dev, this could be something that I think would be on the easier side to implement. I'd gladly contribute to a bounties for it, this is something I'm passionate about.
Is the list of people you follow also a list of people you trust? Mine isn’t… Ring 0 is me. Ring 1 is people I trust enough to help me recover my life savings. Ring 2 is friends and family that didn’t make it to ring 1. Ring 3 is people whose opinions/memes/shitposts I’m interested in reading. Right now, none of my ring 1 people are on nostr.
I'm more interested in taking that control back. It centralized due to cost, not spam. Spamassassin is a very effective open source tool. The problem now is everyone blocks port 25 (cloud providers) so we're forced to "relay" through sendgrid/mailchimp. These days 1GB of storage costs $1/mo. Anyone should be able to run their own mailserver and block spam.