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Comment by fiatjaf | Hacker News Reader

Unlike what OP says Nostr relays are not dumb, they can have their own policies and to me they look like a better version of Mastodon servers. They can have identities, "themes" and policies as they wish. On Nostr it's totally fine for one relay to only allow certain kinds of content and block everything else. Users can just connect to multiple relays if they want to read/write about different things.

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What bugs me about it is their naivety to solved technical problems. For instance, they answer the question of “why this hasn’t been done?” with:

> I don't know, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that people making social networks are either companies wanting to make money or P2P activists who want to make a thing completely without servers.

Except it has been done. In fact, that’s literally what KaZaA was with its “superpeers”. And what they realized was that by making a semi-decentralized system, they just introduced the weaknesses of both systems (slow downloads via peer-latency and network limits + easy censorship by killing relays/nodes). In addition, this is exactly how IRC works, despite the fact that it’s mostly used with a few nodes these days.

I’m not against semi-decentralized systems. They’re great and help deal with some scalability problems; but they don’t solve for the number one issue most people moving to decentralized are seeking (anonymity, privacy and free speech), so it’s not fair to compare it to platforms/protocols that do offer those features.

I don't know about KaZaA but I remember it was very popular for a time, so it might have done some things right? What was its fate? Was it censored to death?

And I disagree very much that IRC is "semi-decentralized". IRC is completely centralized, it is just chat rooms on a server. You have to register on each server and each server has full control over its rooms and users.

I'm sure all the script kiddies who loved to take over channels in netsplits are gonna be disappointed that they never actually did that now.

More seriously, this is the second time I've seen someone on here characterize IRC in this (very wrong) way in the last day. Where is this coming from?

IRC networks are made up of servers that relay (hence Internet Relay Chat) with each other. You connect to one server and you can communicate both with people local to that server and people on other servers that are part of the same network (including ones that server is not directly connected to). Channels prefixed with # are shared across all servers in the network, while channels starting with & are local to that server (though rarely used).

Part of it is that for users IRC definitely presents as centralised. You don't usually connect to a specific server, but rather a network that did some load balancing in the background. Like you typically connect to irc.efnet.org and not one of the sixty servers specifically.

I think you may be confused because you decided to rely on this loose concept of "semi-decentralization". IRC providers may use multiple servers, but that doesn't mean decentralization. They are closed networks, not very different from any sufficiently big internet business that runs multiple servers behind a load-balancer.

See https://drewdevault.com/2021/07/03/How-does-IRC-federate.htm...

KaZaA was also a big spyware.

Scale is hard, but for small-to-medium sized clusters, you can use your own node, or a friends'. Now you have your own copy of the data, and control over latency. The key insight with nostr is the multi-master architecture.

They may be young and unaware of "solved technical problems," but they are full of energy, and every generation has to relearn the same things.

But as for peer latency issues or easy censorship by killing nodes, I don't see it. Nostr has fan-out, but not as much as RSS does and I don't expect superrelays.

I also don't follow you on the issue of anonymity or privacy. The guy who started it fiatjaf is anonymous. We don't know who he is. And you can be too. Just make up a key, create and sign an event, and push it into whatever relay takes your fancy... through Tor if that's your thing.

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