Flare, a video sharing site built on Nostr
njump.me
njump.me
Login button: 3 times I see the word "Nsec" without any explanation, that would lose a lot of youtubers from transitioning
But a bigger issue is that googling about nsec tells me it's a very bad practice: "Some argue that the user should never enter their nsec into an input field at the risk of being compromised by the service. Given the nature of nostr, users cannot recover from a leaked private key and must take greater precaution than they would with a username/password combination." https://nostrdesign.org/docs/how-to/sign-in-sign-up/
(also pip for some reason stops playing when I switch to another page on the site)
This is a complete dealbreaker for any end-user product. I don’t understand why crypto/blockchain fans still think it can work.
I am aware of efforts to improve on this though, for example https://snort.social/e/note1crl44xk24yc2ym5xlyyfjdeumxueyguz... - essentially the equivalent of a custodial wallet, if I'm understanding correctly.
Nostr hasn’t grown up to that yet, and pointing out that pasting private keys is a bad idea is fair game.
But implying that public private key cryptography can’t be used to log into web apps is just silly given that value worth billions is being moved around daily using such web apps.
Both of these do a challenge-response style authentication with a particular website, and wouldn't really work as part of a decentralized system.
You could use the same signing key ordinarily used to sign authentication challenges to sign nostr notes, but then you're back to square 1 really.
Edit: slightly better passkey info here https://developers.yubico.com/Passkeys/How_passkeys_work.htm...
That greater compatibility came with some UX trade-offs though. Now that passkeys exist and are widely supported by web browsers there's really no need for SQRL anymore; passkeys are a far more polished version of the same concept.
Why not offer both, the easy one for normal users and an option to use the more secure option.
Couldn't there be a few-step UI similar to "Sign in with Google/Facebook/etc"?
The only thing that bugs me about is that is actually all your identities are still tied to same master passphrase, so if that gets compromised all of your identities get revealed.
A short guide, assuming a mobile device:
1. Install MetaMask, next, next, finish to create a wallet.
2. Open app.uniswap.org on your favorite browser. See if you can figure out how to ‘connect’.
You can of course use the MetaMask built-in browser, but that’d be cheating.
If you already have MetaMask/Phantom extensions installed it’s easier than email verification.
Im working on https://github.com/VnUgE/NVault as an option for more paranoid users that want a self hosted networked approach. But there are others listed here https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/07.md
Finally, I wholly dislike the practice of offering an option of entering an nsec. Use a signing extension!
If someone stole your key, then they could've done anything to your house while your away, just like with a digital key, right?
Experienced Nostr users will understand this, but I totally agree with your point about making it easier for non-nostr users. Also, they should (at least) strongly encourage people to use a browser extension / wallet instead of pasting their nsec, and provide a guide on how to do that and why.
Something that put me off a bit was immediately seeing bitcoin influencer content after loading the page.
I can totally see how that’s off putting for normal people though.
Beyond the "crypto grift," a blockchain-based social network might offer some benefits:
- permissionless - (no moderation)
- means for auto solvency - (we are not the product)
- interoperability - (multiple clients, forks, etc.)
- privacy
"no moderation", massive problem. I'm not hosting my (admittedly limited) content on a platform that lets my videos get posted in proximity to scams, CSAM etc. If I'm going to ask people to go to somewhere to see my videos (again, admittedly limited) then I'm not going to want them to be stumbling across that stuff.
YouTube isn't getting it right, they're allowing bad shit (poor quality, scams, excessive shrieking) and taking people down for spurious DMCA takedowns, but the answer isn't "no moderation at all", that's not the problem.
As a user I don't sign up to somthing because it allows anything, doesn't take anything down, I sign up beacause it has the things I want to watch. I'm not a character in cryptonomicon or snow crash.
You can moderate at client level whatever you want.
There could be shared lists of non-acceptable users/content based on your world views (like AdBlock but for users).
It's like whenever there was a reddit/twitter/etc alternative some years ago following outrage, it'd get flooded with some of the worst people on the internet. Voat comes to mind as a pretty competent reddit clone that had potential, until it got overrun with nazis/racists and other kinds of losers. I was very close to releasing an app for that one, but abandoned it once it became clear the direction the userbase was going.
For example, coin shaving (difficult to quantify without a scale), counterfeiting (tungsten wrapped gold), fiat central banking with zero reserve (due to poor portability + above) which transfers enormous wealth from entire populations and countries to the bankers?
Or maybe its scarcity? The amount of above-ground gold doubles every 50 years (which halves its value).
All weaknesses that bitcoin has solved BTW
You may try to pretend it is not your content and explain how the protocol works and all that but as long as you will host a frontend and own the domain name you will be considered the one to sue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
And that is without even mentionning child porn.
You can have a local client that connects to N relays and supports a few NIPs.
And if one of the relays goes down for whatever reason - you will still be able to get updates from the others. Including information about new relays.
there's an "nsec" field which i have no clue what it is
there's a "connect with nsec" button which again, i don't know what it is.
and then there's "login with extension" button which does nothing.
Ever heard of blockchain ? And don't tell me its a very precise case, blockchains are used for a lot of things
Yeah? Like what?
Only if they have basic it skills though
Federation has a few pros for sure, but avoiding moderation isn't one of them. If anything its harder to know who is doing the moderating and where to look if you think things may be quietly being banned or buried.
A channel on youtube can't just decide that they are unhappy with the moderation by youtube and replace them with an other moderation team. They can leave youtube, but then they also loose access to existing subscribers on the site.
Youtube users can also not decided they are unhappy with the moderation of youtube and whitelist videos or channels that youtube have blocked. They can leave youtube, but then the channels also need to leave or the user will loose access to videos.
The distinction between centralized power and decentralized power is how much power each actor has in the system. In a decentralized system the user control who they want to see, the content creator control who can access their content, and the network control what content the network will advertise to users. In a centralized system the network control everything, and neither the user or content creator can overrule the network.
Here’s an example of some privacy activists:
https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2016/04/07/couple-hosting-tor-...
Maybe you’re super ideologically committed to providing a privacy service and willing to take the risk, but you still want to soberly consider those risks and think about the impact if it’s harder to defend yourself than you thought. It’s not a casual decision.
I don’t think Nostr is like blockchain where you cant remove or mutate data. Although a spammer might make it hard.
What’s going to happen after that is going to depend on what they’ve found and how innocent/unaware you look, and your reaction. They don’t raid Dropbox’s hosting center because it’s unlikely that a large business is a secret criminal front operation and they have an established practice of sending warrants and getting information or takedowns but if you’re a single person or small business there’s more room for doubt and they might be more aggressive. If you do look like an innocent whose service is being abused by criminals, I’d expect the initial impact to be only blocking that material / user and turning over all of the information that you have about their activity. If that keeps happening, or you tell them that you don’t keep logs, etc. that might change to them thinking you’re actually trying to help their targets, and the next time it happens might be less charitable.
Anyone operating a relay should think about how that’d look sad what the damage could be: don’t run it on hardware you couldn’t afford to lose if it’s seized as evidence, your business partners and people you live with need to know & accept the risk, and you want to think carefully about the personal impacts of any investigation. For example, if you work at a school or church running a Tor exit node is probably a bad idea because even an investigation finding nothing could have significant damage to your reputation since there’s always that “what if he just hid it well?” question which can’t be un-raised.
I'm pretty impressed by this thing called 'the internet'.
Submarine cables are owned by companies, T1 ISPs provide the majority of routing and you really cannot prevent any of this.
Centralized control is somewhat required because submarine cables cost money and transit costs money and small companies simply do not have the capital to do that.
Just look at Mastodon. The issue is not the crazy content you get from time to time. What’s annoying is waiting for media to appear on your timeline and explaining newcomers that they must choose a server and the double @@ thing.
The second is a one-time thing at signup and perhaps surpassable. The first is a deal breaker. Anyone used to Instagram and TikTok’s timeline would just dismiss it as broken on the spot.
What do you mean by this?
Part of the “job” that software like FB and YT and Gmail for that matter perform for users is to make so-called graphic content a non-issue.
That to me is working at scale, and all the “what ifs” you’re referencing have happened to Bitcoin, but it is still around since 2009.
Edit, as someone else commented - we are also all talking via the internet, at its core a decentralized technology of combined infrastructure, routing protocols, and DNS tracking. The presence or involvement of centralized entities doesn’t count against that fact.
- Build it without crypto
- If you build it with crypto, base it off Bitcoin.
Anything else might as well be a product based on a pump-and-dump shitcoin. There is only one cryptocurrency, and Satoshi is its prophet.
* as fine as an alt-YouTube ever does
But, regardless, how's this better than PeerTube?
Nostr is interesting because it's not actually P2P, just decentralised - whether that's a good thing is open to question.
For bandwidth intensive usage such as video, it will probably be "paid relays" instead of free ones. Click on url in the "Popular paid relays" paragraph to see examples:
Nostr is popular with the cryptocurrency community so the payment mechanics seem to favor Bitcoin and/or Bitcoin Lightning.
The media is hosted on regular web servers and it says you can host it anywhere. It seems like most of the videos are hosted here: https://nostr.build/
Which is a paid service backed by AWS S3
As for community it is heavily based on bitcoin/lightning enthusiasts and a lot of content revolving just around that - probably won't attract people outside the circle/general public (which may not be the goal or preferable outcome!)
For the future, might be good to register the domain a little while before the launch to avoid this.
:P
Or you can just disable it, they don't need to delay launch just because some guy has his DNS configured that way
Oh, this will become another lair of hate speech, conspiracy theories and all kinds of content noone will want to touch with a stick, eh?
> Because Nostr accounts are based on public-key cryptography it's easy to verify messages were really sent by the user in question.
If you think asymmetric encryption makes anything easy, you're missing the point.
If you have a reliable way to know other peoples public keys, and there's a way to repudiate them, asymmetric encryption can make things somewhat secure (that is, until private keys get stolen and after the theft has been detected), but that's a very big “if”, and getting a decent UX generally involves some kind of centralization, be it keybase or Certificate Authorities.
[1]: https://nostr.com/
I disagree that you need a "reliable way to know other peoples public keys." I think this puts the cart before the horse. And doing it that way, public certification authorities who say "I certify this key belongs to this person" can't be trusted anyways, so it doesn't really work (and as people do trust them for practical reasons, but shouldn't, they have enabled widespread TLS MitM by governments). It is rarely the case that you know someone and then you discover someone claiming to be them and you need them to prove their identity (which is BTW totally possible in nostr already). What usually happens is you learn the key first, and over time learn who that person is and develop intuition and trust about them through experiences that occurred via that key.
It doesn't matter that there's no algorithm. It is just interesting to me that outlandish Christian conspiracies about the end of the world/angels/etc. are almost immediately being uploaded to a brand-new platform.
That has nothing to do with how content is delivered?
In case you think nostr is saturated with "outlandish Christian conspiracies about the end of the world/angels/etc", I've been on nostr more than a year and have encountered exactly zero of them.
It's the way the users of this pattern want and like it.
Ah, right. Too much content moderation is the biggest problem with YouTube. /s
More specifically not YouTubes moderation itself but the way in which its systems can be abused.
I think it frustrates many stereotypical “tech bro” types that there exist problems that are difficult or impossible for technology to solve. Content moderation is a messy business. But it’s necessary business.
But controlling what you see is easy! Just don't watch it. As opposed to controlling what you can't, which you are at the mercy of YouTube to provide.
Or is it that you want to control what other people see?
This can be said for so many situations:
Most people does not want cars to crash into Christmas fairs either.
But the solution is not to ban cars.
Most people does not want kids to be bullied at school.
But the solution is not to ban schools.
Etc.
You can say we have laws about cars. Yes, but those laws aren't enforced by Ford or Volkswagen. Edit: or by Shell or Exxon for that matter.
There will be laws about content on internet even if Google can't willy nilly remove the channel of Warthog Defense because it hurt some russians feelings.
Right! And the solution also isn’t “fuck it. Too complicated to do perfectly. No discipline in schools / no traffic laws”.
To moderate any system, there must be affordances for moderation and someone(s) accountable to the users of the system. As far as I can tell, like most blockchain projects, the Nostr project has effectively stripped (nearly) all affordances for doing moderation. Given that the Nostr audience seems to overlap considerably with crypto enthusiasts, I think their stance is basically the same: no moderation, no "censorship", etc. Given that there's literally child porn stored on the Bitcoin blockchain right now, I don't think your argument holds that "decentralization" can just Jeff Goldblum it and "find a way" without explicit affordances / accountability.
No, it means that the people will tend to congregate around the relays that work according to what they expect/want to see.
You are thinking from the assumption that things are only acceptable if total compliance is enforced. Even on the highly-controlled and regulated Internet there is still abhorrent content out there, why would you expect that from the alternative?
The interesting question is: do you think that the majority of people don't see this side of the internet because of how effective the centralized control and policing is, or just because the majority of people are not interested in seeing this content in the first place?
Both! Most people don't want to see beheading videos and would be very upset if one came across their Youtube recommendations. Fortunately, YouTube's "CENSORSHIP" is pretty good at not showing such videos (even though they're completely legal content!)
However, there is a significant long tail pool of people who are totally into watching such abhorrent content (e.g., 8channers), and could easily cause a deeply offensive content to find itself in the unmoderated "Democratically trending" video feed, as it's demonstrated in the Flare example walkthrough.
Maybe that's your point? Platforms like these will necessarily be used pretty much exclusively by people who like or will tolerate seeing extremely offensive content because everyone else will be put off by the occasional display of horribleness.
Libertarian "DON'T CENSOR ME, BRO" havens like 8chan, kiwifarms, daily stormer, etc. already exist. They're not particularly popular, when compared to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. But they're certainly popular enough to draw millions of users. And every one of them would be delighted if they could post their inflammatory nonsense on Facebook or YouTube to reach a wider audience. And Facebook and YouTube have wider audiences because they moderate content.
In a previous life I worked building popular social media apps that included user-generated content. And I saw first-hand how horrific content moderation is. The shit people post to social media sites is as vile as it is vast. I'm certain most "anti-censorship" people's opinions would be changed if they'd watched an actual content moderator do their job for 30 minutes.
Why expect everything to end in "trending" feed?
Telegram has solved this problem a loooong time ago.
Those who want beheading and castration videos subscribe to russian and arab channels.
Those that doesn't goes elsewhere.
And if one of them shows up in the comments of a sane channel we report them and they are gone.
The problem I am taking with your view is that shows a not-so-subtle hint of totalitarianism. It tries to use the abuses caused by people with freedom to justify that we all should lose our liberties (or accept that global subjugation to a common set of rules as inevitable.
Yeah, currently all platforms that promote "censorship-resistance" are predominantly used by those who got affected by large -scale censorship. Yeah, most of these people are doing or saying despicable things. But that should not be an argument to make the case that centralized platforms and worldwide gatekeepers are the best solution.
To repeat: you keep arguing like the enthusiasts of decentralized platforms are "anti-censorship", when in fact the fight is about claiming back some sense of autonomy and agency to let people be able to do the moderation/curation themselves (or to someone closer to them who understands their values and social context better)
Yes. I agree that this model can, and does, work. Mastodon and old school web forums were the examples I gave upthread where they do work. And I believe these work because forum owners / mastodon server owners have the capability and necessary incentives to moderate content posted on their subnetworks. As I understand Nostr's design (relays / clients), and its explicit citation that Mastodon's model is bad because "3rd party (server hosts) can censor you", I do not believe your success model is applicable. Nostr relays lack the incentive and accountability needed to moderate content much the same way Bitcoin miners do.
> The problem I am taking with your view is that shows a not-so-subtle hint of totalitarianism. It tries to use the abuses caused by people with freedom to justify that we all should lose our liberties (or accept that global subjugation to a common set of rules as inevitable.
Holy slippery slope, batman! Global Totalitarianism! Believe it or not, there exists a middle ground between total "LIBERY!" freedom! Moderate yourselves, nerds! and endorsing a Global Cabal of Media Reviewers.
What I completely reject is that the primary problem with YouTube, Facebook, and the like is that they're arbitrarily censoring "views they don't like". The handful of examples of this I've ever seen have been comically obvious censorable material, or actual very difficult decisions that it's completely reasonable to understand why the decision was made. I have many other concerns about these mega-tech companies that I find infinitely more troubling than their current content moderation practices. At the end of the day, these companies are accountable. If nothing else, you have the option to leave! See Twitter. Embracing decentralization for the sake of decentralization only complicates this accountability, potentially to the point where no-one has any appreciable accountability (a la Bitcoin, again).
What I also reject is the implication that this is a simple problem. The Paradox of tolerance is a thing, and it's just plain complicated. And not something decentralization—or any other technology—can solve.
> To repeat: you keep arguing like the enthusiasts of decentralized platforms are "anti-censorship", when in fact the fight is about claiming back some sense of autonomy and agency to let people be able to do the moderation/curation themselves (or to someone closer to them who understands their values and social context better)
I think you and I actually have a lot in common in that respect. I'm a big Mastodon fan, run my own #HOMELAB to reclaim ownership of my data, do the whole POSSE thing, etc. I'm all about all of this stuff. What I reject is this perverse idea that the biggest problem with big tech is that they're just haphazardly censoring ideas they don't like (it's always conservative ideas). It's little more than a conspiracy theory that's led to virtually every social media platform today happily platforming actual Nazis (because of the free speech, you know?) and forbidding such taboo things as sex workers, critics of the CEO, etc. These are decisions. And platforms like Flame exist for basically one reason: to further propagate the conspiracy that big tech (like the mainstream media, colleges & universities, etc.) are just completely and irrationally biased against poor old conservatives who just want to, like, share their opinions, man.
And this issue is not just about moderation. Let's say that you have been a model citizen on a server, but one of the moderators woke up in a bad mood, found something they don't like about you and kicks you out. Now you are locked out of your account and can not even migrate it away. FYI: not an hypothetical, this happened with some of my friends who were working with crypto.
> the biggest problem with big tech is that they're just haphazardly censoring ideas they don't like
To me, the problem is that they are too big, plain and simple. Too big, too powerful and too far removed from their actual customers to even care about the individual customer or anything that slightly deviates from the norm. I don't like them much like I don't like the EU-style of bureaucratic government.
What (I hope) nostr is trying to build is something where the centralization is outright impossible first, then come out with the mechanisms to tackle content curation/moderation.