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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

My previous Mastodon instance (mstdn.plus) broke this week, the administrator MIA, leaving 4500 active users including myself unable to move their followers to new instances or even archive their data: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html

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Mastodon is essentially centralized — you just pick who you trust with full centralized authority before they have a change of heart, fail, begin rent collecting, whatever.

Nobody seems to understand how difficult it is to make a system that can guarantee its neutrality within the protocol. (Sorry HN: it requires crypto.)

Crypto meaning cryptography yes it's needed. If you a referencing bitcoin like technology used for money no they don't help here. Please enough with this "crypto" ignorance

Think of cryptos more like “incentives to rational behavior” than “money” and it starts to make sense. You can incentivize, for example, data availability with cryptos and that opens the design space for distributed systems that don’t need to be controlled by one entity (like Twitter, for example).

Nostr already has bitcoin payments for incentives. Please example one concrete example where a blockchain is needed for nostr protocol itself

There are two places where a blockchain would be very useful in this context: guaranteeing completeness (allowing you to confirm whether or not you have downloaded all the posts ever created by a user), and preventing timestamp forgery.

> guaranteeing completeness

SSB has something like this but it requires a user to download another user’s entire post history before being able to see one post. Makes the experience very slow.

You wouldn't want text messages on a none scalable blockchain.

Timestamping is already possible using the bitcoin blockchain. No token scam or new blockchain needed

You sort of moved the goal posts here from "no crypto" to "doesn't need something other than bitcoin"...

Crypto movement does not relate to bitcoin. Bitcoin was about preventing money printing and crypto is about every VC having his own private money system he sells token of

I didn't say decentralised timestamping is required for a social network or any blockchain needed

That is a laughable claim. What happens if no one pays?

Does it? If so, what do the bitcoin payments incentivize?

How do you guarantee data availability and avoid double spending without Byzantine fault tolerant consensus (that is, blockchain crypto)? If you have an answer you will be onto something huge.

What? Double spend a twitter message you sign? Please example your logic here and use of the technology

Then host your own instance. Your definition of "centralized" as "optionally requiring any trust at all" is pretty broad, and sweeps up even email.

ActivityPub is a protocol designed for decentralization, but the Mastadon software itself really is not a great option for self hosting. In practical terms, for non-technical users (i.e. the people you need for broad adaptation) self-hosting it is a non-starter.

The same is definitely true for email. There are many providers, so "centralized" is a bit of a loose label, but running your own email server comes with non-trivial pitfalls that keep most people away.

Use Pleroma instead of Mastodon, it is quite easy to host and only takes a fraction of the resources Mastodon does - it idles at 165 MB on my test instance (single user logged in, no activity). From what I've seen it should possible for non-technical people to self-host it as long as there is a possibility for remote-access assistance (and there's your business model, sell wall warts with self-hosted services with optional remote assistance).

That said I do prefer a mail-based system like Delta Chat [1] over these ActivityPub-based things since everyone already has a mail address and there is a wide range of software to choose from.

[1] https://delta.chat/en/

The `nostr-rs-relay` package is a simple self-contained rust application with a sqlite db that can run in a docker container. Super simple to self-host and if just using it to save your own notes is more than enough.

https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay

This is why I installed my own Pleroma instance (immibis@social.immibis.com). It's not very difficult. I hear Mastodon is much more painful to install.

It may need cryptography. I think the majority of HN likes cryptography. When you say crypto, and apologize for it, I assume you mean the stupid coins and all the nonsense that comes with that group of fools, and that is not required.

It seems to me it does require cryptos. Which luckily are based on cryptography so we all get to like the path forward :)

Do you have a particular use case in mind which cryptocurrency enables here? Care to give an example of how they help solve a issue?

Gateway operators are paid to successfully process data (which they can do if they stay online, have a fast connection to the Internet, and so on - not a shitty Raspberry Pi)

Gateway operators are paid to store data

Gateway operators are paid to mix client-side encrypted messages and shred message metadata

Gateway operators are staking their nodes to ensure cryptographically correct operation

If you want to see more, spend some time reading how blockchain-based networks with incentives work.

Two uses cases that would both be beneficial to nostr:

Decentralized namespace registries - see Farcaster.

Autonomous and decentralized mechanism that rewards & incentivizes users to run nodes/servers - see Ethereum staking, Filecoin.

No need for any of this elaborate noise. You can just charge money for services rendered like hosting your media or notes.

That describes most centralized services on the web today. Nostr and other decentralized protocols aren’t aiming to recreate the Twitter and Amazon model.

There already exist nostr user verification service providers that charge a fee for a purple checkmark, similarly to Twitter Blue.

These services exist outside of the protocol and depend on a few centralized and trusted authorities.

Another solution that is arguably more resistant to capture and censorship would be to use a blockchain to manage user name aliases - like Farcaster is doing with fnames.[1]

[1] https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol#22-farcaster-names

How do you guarantee data availability and avoid double spending without Byzantine fault tolerant consensus?

Consensus isn't a fundamental requirement for social media or a communication protocol. Email doesn't require a blockchain and doesn't care about 'double spending' or whatever.

The previous comment didn’t ask for consensus for a social media or communication protocol specifically but rather was two steps ahead and was referring to the infrastructure that those protocols run on. Under the hood, there are various consensus mechanisms in current day social media or communication protocol infrastructure systems and those systems are needed to make sure (user) data is available. In order to run a data availability system, there’s a consensus required somewhere there. If you want to have the infrastructure provider run it “honestly”, in a protocol sense, then you need incentives for them to do so. If you need incentives, then you need kind of transactional system in a payment and accounting system sense. And that’s where you then need to care about “double spending”.

Did email ever manage to become largely decentralized? Most people use centralized services like gmail, and pay for it with their privacy. It's not viable for the majority to have their own servers

Is this the equivalent of that "MongoDB is webscale video"? Why are those issues important in a social plataform

On Nostr, just the migration is easier, but you still need to have your data stored on your device or somewhere else. In turn you communicate with a lot more servers (privacy), those servers have much less incentives to moderate, even if you pay them, or earn its communities trust - hence all the ads and tracking already in place.

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