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So what’s the deal with nostr, should we migrate, why should we use it, what’s up
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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There will be bridges to allow exploding-heads content to go to and from nostr. So you never have to migrate. We could run a migration and make everyone on exploding-heads a nostr user. With Kapow's help. But we need to wait a year about for communities to be finished developed on nostr. Nostr works very differently but I think I could write the migration. I'm very good at databases and could move all post, comments to a nostr relay postgres database. Then generate a private key for each user, make them write it down on next login , delete it server side, and change the ui over to a ui that works on nostr. This is very doable. It's not yet known if the experience will be as good at first. So we shouldn't rush it and wait for projects to get more mature and then Kapow can decide later what he wants to do. You can always use both.
Why should we use Nostr?
Pretty much because Nostr takes power away from admins. They no longer control your user. You exist as whats known as a public private key pair. Think of it like a password that you MUST keep secret, and a public key that you will share with everybody for them to find you.
With a little math and computer science clients, websites take your private key and signs messages. Other clients can take the message and your public key and prove mathematically that only you who owns the private key could have signed this message.
this is very old and well understood cryptography. Computers are very good at doing it.
The way the fediverse works now is you login to Exploding-heads, you post something to Kapow's computer, then Kapow's computer sends a message to other servers like lemmy.world. Lemmy.world and others saves the message to their computer so that users who log into lemmy.world can see it too.
But wait... Whats that you say? As we know, lemmy world blocked EH. Gaaay! so all of lemmy world's users have without all of their consent been blocked from reading your messages.
They do not have the option of personally seeing your messages while everyone else stays blocked. They cannot individually unblock you.
Could we add those kinda features to lemmy? Sure, but lemmy admins are still gonna be big gay globo homos. So it would be better if they didn't even have the power to stop their users.
In nostr, instead of posting your message to only Kapow's computer, your web browser will post it to Kapow's, lemmy.world's, and every other server you want. And anyone who wants to see it request your messages from kapow, lemmy.world and every other server they want. All of the servers that you sent your message to that doesn't hate you sends it back to that requesting user. The user only sees the one post. It doesn't matter that one or two servers blocked you. Because you can send your post to infinite servers. (resources allowing, realistically like 15) And users can pull from infinite servers.
Globo homo admins will continue to be globo homo admins and Reeeeek across the fediverse, but user's will slowly migrate away to nostr because it is user centric and not admin centric. When given a choice between freedom and no freedom. People will pick freedom. They can continue to get the same moderator experience on nostr but if they want to see the dirty, no one can stop them.
The technology behind nostr is free speech technology. So Admins have less pressure to censor. Globo homo admin's users can reeek all they want but every admin won't ban you. And so all the users get to hear you if they want. All the users that want to that is. As long as their is one based relay everyone gets to be heard.
The nostr ecosytem is already being developed by libertarians, bitcoin bros, and generally people who hate the government instead of people who want communism. AKA more government.
The biggest problem with lemmy from the start was it's creators are anti free speech. So what they effectively developed was one giant censorship machine that can hook up with other censorship machines with the excuse that you can pick what ever censorship machine you want to login to.
Naturally users migrate to one or two servers with lots of resources because it runs smoother.
But this has not worked out well. The biggest reddit migration was all done with no defederating. After 90% of the users signed up then defederation started on lemmy.world and others.
It was coordinated by a few people too. And I see people on all those servers complaining about defederation.
Nostr will de-globohomo the decentralized social network experience.
I still don't understand where my data will be stored if I use Nostr. Does every user have to run a Nostr server/relay? Who hosts the relay? Doesn't the relay host have the power to censor?
Some of your data is stored in each message. Like what your preferred relays are, a username url to give your public key a easy to remember name. user icon url.
Some of it is stored on the relays you publish to. That data can be stored on your local client too. It has built in mechanisms for other users to find where your data is stored. Like what relays you use.
No, users share relay's just like users share fediverse servers.
Similar people to the fediverse.
Yes and no. We need to compare it to the current model to understand why, how it works, and why it's better.
When you post to exploding heads, your post only goes to exploding heads. Then exploding heads pushes it to other servers who requested it. That way your post exist on multiple servers after exploding heads pushes it and after those servers accept it.
Nostr works a little differently. Instead of pushing to one server you push to multiple servers at the same time.
Why is this better?
Here The server admin can delete your account and all your post will be dissociated from you forever. All your followers, all your communities gone, forever. You have to start over.
Here 1 server with 100,000 users can block all 100,000 users from seeing your post on this instance by defederating. That is not possible in nostr. all 100,000 users are serperate entities.
In nostr, 1 server can block you, but you don't push to just one server. You push to multiple servers. If you look at the default server list on iris.to it's pretty long.
Below that they have a much longer list of popular relays you can add. So you can push all your post to all of those at the same time. Your followers, friends ect only need to find one that has your post to read it.
Lets say something extreme and unlikely happens and all of them block you. You can very easily host your own and everyone who wants to hear your voice can pull from it without changing accounts, without changing instances, without finding your new username they can use the same public key. 1 relay admin has zero power to stop them. The act of them pulling your data is not done on their relay but distributed through lots of relays. As long as 1 relay exist who accepts you your data will persist and people anywhere can get it with their original username!
Yes relays will need moderation powers to keep spam bots at bay but we won't see the massive fragmentation in nostr we see in the fediverse.
That seems a little better than Lemmy, but the relays still hold too much power as you still have to go through someone else's relay or host your own (just like with Lemmy instances).
I wonder if there's a way to make it completely decentralized like Bitcoin so that it's on blockchain?
Blockchains are a poor database for social media. They are extremely slow, overly complicated. And it's Just a immutable data structure. That's really why every attempt to use one for anything but currency has failed.
They don't really offer anything a Nostr relay doesn't either.
Both of them work off private keys to verify ownership.
Both of them are decentralized. But Blockchain sizes are huge. Each node is terribytes in size
Unlike block chains, nostr is super easy to develop for and can scale very well.
You could make it more decentralized by adding in some peer to peer tech. But even torrents need trackers. Which is basically a relay.
Gotcha, makes sense
I don't even know why I was getting all excited anticipating to answer this post. I knew you were going to be all over it LOL but I mean you could better explain it than me to anyways cuz you're a developer I'm just a regular asshole LOL
"Private key"
Looks something like this and is long as fuck
nsd10mkl6fes2p9hm40wr1k8df5nl
Yeah it's annoying moving that thing around. But Tools will be built to help with that. You can still put it behind a password protected two factor authentication server hosted mechanism. Or you can just keep it in a text file all to yourself. It's a little sloppy but the freedom it gives is worth it.
Yea im really loving the freedom nostr has vs the fediverse
The last sentence 🤣🤣🤣