I see a problem. I'd say a majority of the posts on Nostr are media posts (mostly images) and the network relies on Imgur and other image hosting services for all content. Not very decentralized in practice.
I agree that where we're headed, it seems like services like this will only continually degrade, that a huge amount of the corporate-run internet is undergoing radical #enshittification at an alarming rate, & the nation-states have strapped afterburners onto this hellbound-sled by starting to make the terms of use for these already imperfect the feudal- oops i mean corporate- data-keeps.
New age-verification identity-verification to post stuff has scaled up with shock & awe speeds, with Imgur just burning down huge swarths of the internet. So I guess yeah it has become a practical problem alraedy.
Oh and there's other signs of horror/intensification all about. Specs like Mobile Document Request opening up the Jevon's paradox of making it easier to request government id online are going to make a very shitty 203X's that greatly piss over the internet legacy we have. https://github.com/WICG/mobile-document-request-api/issues/6
But also... we have the saints of human history, https://archive.org, ticking along doing the good deeds. The more rag-tag ArchiveTeam folks. They keep saying it's not for archiving, but I really hope WebPackage / WebBundle specs take off, that we build a norm of take-away sites that we can retain. (Caveat: right now Chrome has zero interest in letting you use old snapshots, but I have zero faith this limited security totalitarianism will hold, given that Certificate Transparency lets us know that indeed this content did come from X site at Y time & had the right cert then.)
In general, it's all the web, so it only sort of matters that the thing goes away. We need to update the maxim, "Cool URIs Dont Change" (https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI). Sometimes the resources go away. But the URI remains. And we can spread backups, share the content, even when the hosts vanish, because the web is so cool like that.
It will be the day these image hosting services die (and they do, all the time). This setup separates the post content from the post itself. I hope that most of us remember what a giant mess hosting images for forums on free image hosting services (that were later shut down) caused.
Apparently there was a discussion just a few days ago about Imgur deleting images that are not associated with a user account[1]. Just imagine all the broken image embeds that will cause…
i already mentioned imgur. i already spent a while talking through how we adapt & deal with this. i tend to think the way forward isn't to change our user behavior or the pattern, but to layer user-sovereign resilience atop the web, which we already have wonderful examples of aplenty.
the Axioms of Web Architecture help us cope & iterate with emerging situations well, are a strong start for resilience layers. https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html
and reciprocally, i'm not saying it's a solved problem either.
Bluesky goes further with the AT protocol for more general data and algorithms iirc
NOSTR isn't twitter nor IRC, you can take your posts which can contain just about any type of data inside and build an art gallery, a forum or dump for meteorological information.
You can scroll back in the past. It is up to the relay if they have interest in keeping your data or not. If nobody cares about your data, you can still preserve it yourself without barriers for that.
As archivist, we both need to pick our sources manually at some point. Nostr is quite a good tool for archives, since its format is flexible (long term preservation) and can work even fully offline.
I've downloaded an app for nostr and I'm not very impressed with the posts on the main timeline. They mostly seem to spam cryptocurrency ads and bad memes, most of them carrying some kind of American right wing propaganda angle. If these are the kinds of people who are attracted to nostr, I can't say I'm sad to see the nostr project decide not to federate with ActivityPub.
I think it's more that these people are around on every platform; but most platforms create (simple, vote-based; or complex, engagement-based) algorithmic filter-bubbles, so that you can live in blissful ignorance of these people's very persistent attempts to get your attention.
(A good example of an already-established platform that doesn't have this kind of filter, is Discord. If you join Discord servers at random, you'll often get flooded by DMs from bots trying to shove this same kind of content in your face.)
As much as the engagement-based recommender algorithms of sites like Twitter encourage "hate-following" and "doom-scrolling", they do have the nice property of inherently filtering out this kind of spam: these "human spambots" post things that can be predicted by their content to receive literally no engagement at all (since everything similar anyone's posted recently received no engagement at all); and so these spam posts get dropped out of any feed they'd otherwise appear in.
Nostr inherently cannot have any kind of online self-tuning algorithmic filter-bubble like this; such algorithms are powered by a global corpus of "everything everyone is currently posting, and every way that everyone else is reacting to it." Nostr relays only see the "notes" that are passing through them; and they have no idea what downstream Nostr clients think of those posts. So even if someone wanted to build a "smart relay" that does algorithmic filtering, there's no signal to power it.
In any client you have the option to see "everything" that is passing, and it is a lot from just about every topic to the tab where you only see the people you follow.
Next time to a better effort to bad mouth Nostr.