jonstaab

If you're looking for an alternative, I'm building flotilla.social, a self-hostable chat app built on nostr, which uses cryptographic identities to prevent identity capture.

FOSS, optionally self-hosted alternative built on nostr: https://flotilla.social/

In contrast with Roomy, Discord does provide for non-public community spaces.

https://itsfoss.com/roomy-discord-alternative/

> With our unique financial rewards model, scale matters. The more justice you unlock, the more monetary compensation you receive.

> In fact, we pledge to distribute to tippers $200 million out of every $1 billion we collect.

What? Donating 20% of profits is great, but this sounds very weird. Is the only thing that drives this revenue donations? In which case, why do we need a rent seeking intermediary? Nostr has bitcoin tips built in, and you don't have to pay anyone to send money to whomever you want.

Couldn't agree more with this. Another way to describe this kind of honesty is as "integrity", or in other words the coherence of your inner and outer lives. Hypocrites are always in a contest against themselves, which is a kind of self-sabotage. Insisting on personal integrity forces you to align your stated values with revealed preference, sharpening both.

It was (and still is) deployed in a number of places, so it's a valid criticism in that context. That said, it's mostly dunk.

Going back to the site, I see what you mean. Very fair criticism. The site appeals to a bunch of implicit ideals without defining its terms.

My point is that question is sort of a category error. It's like asking what type of business the internet is for, or what the use case of smart phones is.

Here are a few things built on nostr, with specific use cases:

primal.net is a twitter-like client with bitcoin micropayments and long-form articles (also see coracle.social, nosotros.app, jumble.social, Amethyst, Damus, yakihonne.com and many others); zap.stream is a twitch-like client for live streaming; flotilla.social and chachi.chat are group chat clients; dtan.xyz is a client for torrenting on nostr; satlantis.io is sort of a travel ratings thing; zap.cooking is a recipe website; yakbak.app is for voice messages; nutstash.app is a cashu wallet built on nostr; cashumints.space lists cashu mints that advertise themselves on nostr.

What's neat is that all these clients can do things the way they want to, but remain interoperable, which means that new developers can create an app and immediately have access to all existing nostr users and their social graph.

Nostr is essentially a compromise between p2p and traditional web architectures. It cuts with the grain of the internet by using web servers, while reducing the dependence users have on servers by using keys for identity and digital signatures for authenticating data.

The effect is that users have "credible exit" (among other things), which has been discussed for years. This doesn't really create any new "use cases", which is why the use case is often described as "whatever, it's the new internet".

What it does do is introduce a very different set of trade-offs which favor user control over platform control (with the attendant UX trade-offs (or at least a different set of UX idioms)).

The reason the focus is on social is because that represents the majority of applications that do exist, the original motivation for building the protocol, and a value proposition (censorship resistance) that lots of people can relate to.

The criticisms are either implementation dependent (not checking signatures, which defeats the entire purpose of the protocol), or based on a very early proof of concept encryption scheme which has since been superseded (by NIP 44, which was independently audited). There's nothing substantial or actionable here (any more).

The cryptography was thrown together in the very early days as a proof of concept, that reached some level of adoption because of how nostr suddenly grew at the end of 2022. The community has since largely switched to a new standard (NIP 44) which has been independently audited, although there are some popular clients that haven't yet transitioned.

It's very unlike mastodon in that server operators have minimal control over user identities and content. Spam control is still a work in progress, but has come a long way through web of trust and more responsible relay operation. I invite you to give it another try!

Very thoughtful points. One thing about nostr is that it does tend to balkanize due to the technical architecture, allowing for different groups of people to use it in different ways (different relay policies, client features, filtering, etc). But the tradeoffs you list are real, and enforce real constraints (the biggest of which is bare keys as identifiers). Many of these constraints can be designed away, which keeps me optimistic. We've had 30 years of research and development into password management, but far less into end-user key management. Even if nostr itself has some fatal flaw, I think a lot of interesting ideas are coming out of it, just because it provides a very different set of affordances for digital spaces.

Alternatively, you could use nostr, have your users pay for the database, and get access to rich content types, an existing social graph, and application interoperability.

Not to mention that it's interoperable with other software, like https://chachi.chat

OP and developer here, Flotilla's not quite primetime-ready, but I saw the Revolt post and decided to proffer my own alternative. Happy to answer any questions.

I'm also building a FOSS Discord alternative, but this one's based on nostr: https://flotilla.social

It definitely has bearing on the indexeddb complaint. If I was sending proxies over fetch, I would never have noticed. But I would expect the callbacks/props thing to be pretty annoying for any app that uses portals.

I wish I had stuck with clojurescript. I found clojure in 2013 or so but could never justify putting it in production. But that would have been a good 12 years of frontend development bliss. The clojure team has the right mindset.

Yeah, I opted not to talk about that in my post, but runes do tend to infect all of your code if you use them as intended.

This seems promising. I agree observables are probably the right way forward, although I haven't used them much beyond svelte stores. Observables via hooks might be a good way to eliminate the bad parts of hooks too.

Funny, because I love svelte stores and use them as much as I can over the compiler magic. But that's probably because I've never taken the time to learn observables properly.

Oops, you're right, here's the other issue: https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/15325

That should shed more light on my problem, which is not just due to proxies, but is also a result of props being getters under the hood.

This is something I didn't cover in my post, but I feel that's a bug, not a feature. Using runes instead of stores (which did the same thing in svelte 4) implicates the svelte compiler in every source file. This is ok if you're married to svelte, but it makes vendor lock-in even more rigid, since you would have to refactor all your regular utilities too when moving to a new framework.

consider the nostr protocol

My point is not the current size, it's the eventual size if bluesky succeeds. Facebook ingests 100TB/day. Self-hosting a bluesky relay isn't (won't be) a thing.

For a more relativistic approach, built on nostr, see wikifreedia.xyz, which allows everyone to maintain their own version of any article, fork, vote, and merge as needed.

Rule #7: Use a social media platform that lets you own your identity and social graph.

Social media has certain benefits that your own website doesn't. Public key cryptography, self-hosted servers, and an open protocol make it possible for your followers to actually follow you, regardless of what app they use to access the protocol. This is what we're building on nostr (in contrast to bluesky and farcaster, which are nearly as closed as the legacy solutions). It's not always pretty, but it works better for sovereign social media than anything else.

My pubkey is npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn, feel free to send me a DM

https://coracle.social is the one I work on, and I think it's pretty good. It does more to surface relays as a first-class thing than most.