Comment by quantadev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantadev | Hacker News Reader

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1) It's up to the relay and the software how much of the firehose of posts to present to users. Your client is in control if whether you see posts from your follows (who you follow), or the entire world.

2) One of the things Nostr did get [slightly] wrong was the hashing of the JSON. It's pretty straight-forward to sort properties, and remove spaces, to create canonical JSON that can easily be hashed, but (and I forgot the specific reason) Nostr made it where you can't directly store Nostr in IPFS (for example) and have the post hash/ID be identical to the IPFS CID of the canonical JSON. They missed that opportunity because fiatjaf was not well enough versed in IPFS, so he got that a bit wrong.

All that being said I am still a fan of Nostr. It is far better than other Social Media protocols imo.

I think they should have not reinvented the wheel ;-) and use dCBOR42, which has an actual canonical form. But somehow people like to use json in places where it's shown again and again it's a terrible choice.

The problem with CBOR is that once people relate it to IPFS their will be massive push-back, because IPFS is seen as too complex. I know this is true because I saw it happen. To these kids even XML is deemed "too complex", thus their love affair with JSON instead.

The reason Social Media protocols need to be kept simple is precisely for this reason. Getting developers to all agree on things is next to impossible. So the way to combat that is by removing all those "things", and go with the simplest design that's workable. It's almost like politics in that it's "The Art of the Possible". And to be "possible" in this context means universal acceptance.

Maybe you're right, that's quite sad. I found dasl.ing to be quite nice and simple as a foundation for dCBOR42, without needing the full ipfs craziness. Oh well.

ok. And you're right too that CBOR is the "correct" thing to use (despite what I said about acceptance), if we wanted to do it right. CBOR could be the only "complex" piece. Everything else could be Nostr-like (i.e. simple, and using relays).

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