Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

I develop for NOSTR and use zero cryptocurrencies because the communication aspect is what matters, especially the account with npubs which are basically universal entry cards to avoid anyone having to create separate accounts just to use some website or app.

Same thing with email that you've been using for decades, doesn't get simpler than that.

No. You can write a client that does not use popular relays and it will work fine.

Let's not. Decentralization of power is not the same thing as accountability. They are alternatives that can achieve some of the same goals, but in significantly different ways.

My working definition is that a system is decentralized to the extent that a person cannot be banned from it.

I assure myself of a bed to sleep in in a decentralized way: there is a bed in my bedroom, in my house, which I lock with a key, so that nobody can sleep in my bed without my permission (or my wife's). Or I can go to a hotel, if I can find one that is willing to accommodate me, or to a friend's house. I am not accountable to anyone for my bed. If my bed has boxes of books on it and cannot be slept in, nobody will hold me to account. Not even my wife; she has her own bed. It is impossible to ban me from the Bed System, other than by arresting me; even if you took the bed out of my house, I could go over to my friend's house and sleep there, or I could get a new bed from a store, or from someone who's selling theirs.

This is somewhat inefficient. For example, tonight my wife is visiting her parents, so nobody will be using her bed. This kind of thing results in the community in aggregate needing more beds than people.

If I were staying in a homeless shelter, I would instead rely on accountability. If I arrived at the shelter and there was no bed available to me, I would complain to the staff. I would attempt to complain to the manager. I might at some point write a letter to their funding agencies. Depending on factors like my social status, I might or might not obtain some kind of alternative accommodation, and homeless shelters that systematically failed to provide accommodations to their clients might be shut down, or they might not.

If the homeless-shelter system in an area is completely centralized, accountability is all I'd have, and banning me from that system could be done at the stroke of a pen. But if there's some degree of decentralization, I might hoof it to another shelter, and perhaps find accommodation. Otherwise, I'm stuck either looking for a place to sleep on the sidewalk where nobody will steal my shoes, or maybe trying to find a bus ride long enough to permit me to nap in a seat for an hour or so, because I am significantly vulnerable to the centralized power of the homeless-shelter staff.

Despite its efficiency, this is considerably worse than my current actual situation, in which I really don't have to worry very much about having a bed to sleep in tonight, considerably lowering my stress level.

So accountability is very different in practice from decentralization of power. And that is why we prefer the Bed System, and most other necessities of daily life, to be decentralized.

In the case of Nostr, the idea is for relays to enjoy economies of scale without enjoying centralized power, in particular because they don't coordinate. There's always some tension there; if one neighborhood store stops carrying Sugar-Free Speed Energy Drink, you can go to another one, but there's no guarantee they carry it either. So the power enjoyed by the shopkeeper is definitely nonzero, even in ordinary commercial transactions (not to mention if they accuse you of shoplifting, which other shopkeepers might notice).

It's still much less power than that enjoyed by a big-box supermarket in a neighborhood with no neighborhood stores, and often economies of scale tend to drive neighborhood stores out of business when a big-box store moves in.

As an alternative to trying to decentralize your food retail system in neighborhood stores, you could try to centralize it and make it accountable, with a food co-op. If the co-op members don't like the food buying decisions of the staff, they can vote in a new board of directors that will fire the management, if necessary, in order to ensure better food buying decisions.

But this is very different from the decentralization of a diversity of neighborhood stores. Among other things, the food co-op can ban someone.

Decentralizing power means that many people are made powerful in their own respects.

Accountability means that one person or a small group of people are made powerful, but there are checks or mechanisms on that person's power.

These have vastly different impliciations for how organizations and groups of people develop and grow and interact.

this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with.

there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.

That statement is false and if you disagree: please provide a source.

There is no such restriction on the NIP (protocol guidelines). I have been writing NOSTR software since years and there was NEVER such restriction in place. In fact, wouldn't even make sense because some relays (e.g. Primal) are super-aggregators for smaller relays.

> users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays

This is a false statement. NIP 65 provides a list of which servers the users declares to be using. This way readers for that user know at which door (server) to knock and ask for updates.

Isn't this true of any protocol (to a greater or lesser degree)?

The idea of nostr is that you can do whatever the you like. An open protocol. There is no forbidding of anything

And how do you exactly envision enforcement? Ohhhh, you copied some bits, you going to jail!!

Did you read the actual protocol or are you just making things up on HN?

The reason people might care is taking ownership of how they filter and curate their feed. Instead of outsourcing that to some algorithm owned by a company, having a federated network allows you to pick and choose or even implement your own filtering if you self host. It also gets advertising as the primary revenue mechanism out of the way and that removes a conflict of interest between what users want to see and what advertisers want them to see.

Of course the drooling masses on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. seem to be perfectly happy to have their endocrine system manipulated by self tuning algorithms. But there are some legitimate concerns about whether that's actually healthy for them. Federated social networks provide an alternative to this.

Whereas in ATproto you have to find a place to register an account, say a domain for yourself or use someone else's domain, in NOSTR creating an account is nothing more than a public/private key that is generated on the fly.

Then is the storage of information. Whereas in ATproto information is stored in plenty of different formats and specific folder configurations which are easy to miss, in NOSTR is all JSON from a single base template file.

Third is the absence of global moderation and islands. Whereas in ATproto only a few (I think 3 main providers) exist, you can be kicked out from them and effectively stop reaching your audience. In NOSTR if a relay stops receiving your texts it is a bummer but there are hundreds of other volunteer-based servers to where you can send your texts, so it is very difficult to block people from reading texts of the authors they are interested.

Simplicity is the key. NOSTR is the first and only network that I've seen so far where content/authors are truly disconnected from the servers hosting their data.

1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM) 2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos 3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff 4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read 5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues 6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group 7. Like twitch with live video streams 8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)

Truly awful to have decentralized freedom.

> Pro-censorship: The protocol is ownerless, relays are not

> Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" — it simply recognizes that different people have different morals and preferences and each server, being privately owned, can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please and users are free to choose what to read and from where.