Edward Snowden Joins Nostr | Hacker News Reader

Edward Snowden Joins Nostr

twitter.com

24 pointsKoftaBob21 comments

Tweet text: "One of the cool things about Nostr ("Notes and other stuff transmitted by relays", a new decentralized protocol that replaces things like Twitter and Instagram)—beyond censorship resistance—is that you aren't limited to 280 characters."

Sounds like Usenet. What will it do about spam?

>What will it do about spam?

It seems that would depend on, or change according to, each individual relay.

>If spam is a concern for a relay, it can require payment for publication or some other form of authentication, such as an email address or phone, and associate these internally with a pubkey that then gets to publish to that relay — or other anti-spam techniques, like hashcash or captchas. If a relay is being used as a spam vector, it can easily be unlisted by clients, which can continue to fetch updates from other relays.[0]

[0] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

It will most likely be overwhelmed by spam and scams, like telegram or like usenet itself (sadly). Until I got fed up and deleted telegram, I was randomly added to at least 1 investment scam promotion group every week.

Not necessary to delete it, just limit who can add you to the group

> The default settings allow for this, so you will want to change them. To do so, open the app and head to Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Groups & Channels and check off My Contacts instead of Everybody. You can also exclude specific contacts (or include specific users who aren't in your contacts).

https://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/977460

I was getting zero value from the app so it was a joy to delete it tbh. But that's good to hear.

They claim to defeat spam, but only mention payments as the way. I am not bullish about nostr

Proof of work is integrated in the protocol. Either relays or clients can require arbitrary difficulty to relay/show messages. You just drop messages that their hash doesn't start with the required amount of 0s

That sounds unpromising. Spammers will throw more computational resources than humans are willing to tolerate. They have captcha farms after all. Spammer bot with a server farm (maybe using stolen AWS credentials) will always outcompute a legit user with a mobile phone browser who is only willing to put up with a few seconds of latency.

It's using SHA256 hashing - so ASICs spammers will easily outcompete handhelds or even desktops. It'll need to upgrade to a more CPU friend hash like RandomX for this to have a chance of working.

> What is Nostr?

> A decentralized network based on cryptographic keypairs and that is not peer-to-peer, it is super simple and scalable and therefore has a chance of working. Read more about the protocol. You can also reach us at our Telegram group (while we don't have a decent group chat application fully working on Nostr).

Telegram really has captured quite a role as a functional forum / irc channel.

Discord too.

I wish people would use open tech like matrix more. It's perfectly suitable for this also.

I don't mind Telegram so much but Discord wants a lot of personal information through its PC client. So I don't really use it even though some open source projects unfortunately do (like Home Assistant)

I’m looking forward to twitter. When they start hosting video in a serious way and also long documents that will be very interesting. I think it’s ironic because all the people defiantly switching to a decentralized platform are just making twitters success more inevitable by drawing attention to platforms that will fail regardless rather than one of twitters serious competitors. The real decentralized system has been in front of us the whole time: the market. Only nerds will ever use federated, decentralized systems, only nerds will ever accept the trade offs that come with them. Regular people don’t act on principle, especially on things they don’t know anything about. Centralized platforms like twitter will continue to dominate because huge numbers of people will use them and feed them with the breath of life.

Nice try, Elon.

> Only nerds will ever use federated, decentralized systems, only nerds will ever accept the trade offs that come with them.

Yeah only nerds will ever use email :P

This actually holds true. Email as a way to keep in touch is def not mainstream. Everyone uses Facebook, WhatsApp. Services that are much more streamlined and consumer oriented. And centralized… I think it demonstrates my point.

How will it be different from Facebook, other than cosmetically?

Does radio ring a bell?

https://youtu.be/fs-YpQj88ew

Tell me how David letterman was wrong and I’ll tell you how you’re wrong. You got triggered by my comment and went through my post history. That’s pathetic

No, it doesn't. I asked you how Twitter with longer tweets and long-form video would be different from Facebook, which already has long posts and long-form video.

I am not watching your video as it would be a waste of my time, I have been extremely online since before the WWW existed. I did not get 'triggered' by your comment and have no interest in your post history, and have never interacted with you other that this one question above. You seem to be mixing me up with someone else, and/or imagine yourself to have psychic powers.

Under your logic, the internet never should have existed. In the video, bill gates says you can watch sports. Letterman says you can do that with television. Bill gates says you can watch it on demand. Letterman says you can do that with a tape recorder. And there isn’t really anything bill could say in that moment that letterman couldn’t have retorted. And you’re letterman and I’m bill. The answer is in the nuances and unfortunately it doesn’t sound very convincing. If Facebook offers longform video, why does everyone use YouTube? If they offer longform text then why does everyone use sub stack? The difference between Facebook and twitter is that Facebook sucks. Twitter has unfragmented leadership, bureaucratic agility, and a cleaner and more straightforward monetization scheme which will lead to vastly fewer bots and spam. It also doesn’t censor people for trivial bullshit. Overall it’s much more fit and will threaten not only Facebook but YouTube, substack and others.

Ranting in walls of text is not an effective way to communicate. Please get help.

You are a pathetic loser. Why don’t you follow the way of adolf hitler and shoot yourself

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