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Seeing so much LLM-related content on Nostr finally made me realize how leftists or other types of people must feel when they try to join but see so much Bitcoin stuff and adjacent stuff. Doesn't matter who is right. Relay-based segregation is urgent and imperative.

Replies (110)

Relay feeds and communities are only a partial solution. For example, Mastodon instances amplify left wing and Eurocentric views that a lot of people here dislike just as Nostr amplifies Bitcoin, North American pseudo libertarian MAGA content across relaus. Nostr’s early core culture will not change and will keep being hostile to outsiders. By itself, segregated relays will result in heavy handed, relay centric moderation trying to do the impossible. For example, trying to keep toxic BTC and MAGA antivaxxers and meat eaters away from crypto sceptic, left wing, vegetarian themed relays. It is a hard, tiresome battle. Bots will keep spamming. Script kiddies will attack relays and make running these communities a nightmare. We will end up with fairly empty and hard to discover communities, burned out moderators, domain level blanket bans, etc. Plus, being realistic, unlike the Fediverse, Nostr does not have the numbers to sustain this. Do not get me wrong, we really need some level of segregation, say, for “Welcome to Nostr” relays and thematic communities, but I can pretty much guarantee that, by itself, this will not fix the problem. What will fix the problem is a mix of things. Smarter relays are certainly part of this, better search is another, and client side tools to help users self moderate and manage their timelines are yet another. But IMO, the most important part, and likely what made you unfollow me, is that Nostr needs a 180 degree turn on the idea that “follow lists are not good”, and it needs transparent decision making so things cannot keep being broken by consensus. Organic follow lists are the cheapest, lowest effort way for people to cluster together and self select their timelines to the content they want to see across relays. Follow lists plus the outbox model == discoverability for all of those segregated communities that you want to see on Nostr. It is also a golden opportunity to improve discoverability and provide smart insights, say identify that a person follows many vegan influencers and engages with vegan content and suggestint other Nostr accounts that post about vegan topics. If people cannot even follow 200 others pubkeys because relays reject “big” events (priceless... Honestly fuck the lazy inner cicle of devs that think that this is acceptable or a minor flaw), and if everyone outside the BTC bubble retreats to small segregated “pyramid” communities that are not really visible, Nostr will go quiet for everything except the dominant content already present. Now, if people who follow me can see my activity on #startrekstr, and maybe even my activity in a write moderated Star Trek Pyramid relay, they will start clustering together organically, following each other, curating their feeds, joining those communities, and working together to curate, propagate and moderate Star Trek content. Follow lists must exist alongside smart relays and client side tools if Nostr is to have any chance of bursting its bubble. Also, what most folks don't want to hear is that this cannot happen without making the majority of loyal Nostr users unhappy because, by definition, Nostr has already self selected to deliver the content they want. Culturally, “Keep Nostr Weird” is a polite way of saying “outsiders, we want to keep our current bubble intact”.
↩ replying to Anthony Accioly
Here here. "Relay segregation" = "Mastodon with extra steps" Sure, you still own your identity under this scenario -- but if you can't effectively participate in the network without having a relationship to "someone's server", that effectively defeats the purpose of a decentralized network. I'm about 1 year in here, and I 2nd everything you say about the culture -- Nostr's great for anything about Bitcoin, and more generally privacy tech, but it's culturally "shallow" for anything else, like for instance #startrek , or other subjects that would have 10k+ people talking about anywhere else on the internet. All of that stuff I bridge in from Mastodon. Here's what works: Web of Trust. Either in the generic sense of, cultivate a follow list, watch who they boost / repost, add them... Unfollow people who don't add value... etc. Use tags to find new content, or relevant "news" outside of follow lists. I don't f with relays, or very little. I like @fiatjaf 's "trending" relay and some of the other single-purpose relays he's made, but other than that, I'm just "send my stuff to any relay who will accept", and vice-versa for specific npubs or tags I want to see.
↩ replying to Globe99
Aye, tools can't fix culture. Mixed and matched, they can help of course, but there’s no silver bullet. Nostr still doesn’t have the basics working as it should. It should encourage and make it dead simple for folks to find content and connect with each other. That’s it. This is what drives a social media network forward. I understand that Nostr is more than social media, but again, being realistic, kind 1 is most of Nostr’s content and one of the few things that isn’t totally broken, just… 35% broken 🤣. I think that devs, and even some users on Nostr, severely underestimate the power of curiosity and organic clustering: “I like StarCraft”, “I see a guy with a Wraith profile”, I verify if he is not a total psycho and that some of my own connections follow the guy, I follow the guy, I see who else he is following in the hope of finding more StarCraft content. Slowly we get to know each other. Soon we are running a Brood War team of a hundred people outside of Nostr. The more seamless this experience is, the better. Sure, I’m happy to run and moderate a relay for a zerg-only, expert 9-pool ling rush community and make sure that all Toss players are insta banned, but without people connecting to each other and slowly creating groups of mutual interests visible to the larger network, I don’t see the point of Nostr's social media aspect at all.
↩ replying to Anthony Accioly
Yeah, TBF, I haven't actually played StarCraft in years... I picked this PFP because I wanted something that was animated and referenced "20th century gaming"... 😁 But yes, that's correct, community building happens one npub at a time. That's how I've done it at least. We don't need to build walls around relays, servers, etc. There are so few people here to begin with, my problem has never been "I need a velvet rope to keep those people out", it's been "how do I find people to talk about things that interest me?"
↩ replying to Globe99
Haven't played myself either (well, an occasional StarCraft II match or another in the last decade, I never even finished the campaign). One way or another, real or fake, positive or negative impressions, this is the way to string connections and any sense of network value. I have to admit that my mute list is not exactly small (this goes beyond just being picky, devs and vocal folks often get target on Nostr), but other than a few welcoming spaces for beginners and enthusiastic thematic communities I prefer to do my own clean up instead of having a poor, overworked, likely volunteer mod doing this ungrateful job on my behalf. Still, I'm all for some of these grants to go for relay curators looking after some of the experimental relays that Fiatjaf and others are designing. I was hopeful a few times with some of these relays. That is, until the usual BS finds its way into those places and ruin everything (folks managed to turn even a relay with curared content about flowers, pets and gardening stuff into the usual BTC circle jerk with occasional touchs of anti-semitism imported from Twitter. We really need to pay folks to deal with this if we want a non toxic option for new accounts)
Relays are the best integration point for building feeds. Generic clients that can display a feed from a single relay and reply via outbox do not have to concern themselves with the UX of building these feeds.. Jumble was a gamechanger and shows this model works well and is performant. RelayTools-android is modeled after this with more list and nip86 support. Having a personal relay be your 'endpoint', gathering and computing this for you in the background is really nice. I've started modeling this in the lab, on a raspberry pi5 with strfry router. The content is there, it's just drowned out by lots of noise, which can easily be filtered by hashtag curation and web of access. Just look at wss://aquaticchickentheory.nostr1.com for an example of this working in the wild. The relays act as layers or filters themselves and you can source those into another 'personal relay' where you build your own ultimate feed. For example of a personal relay endpoint I am using github.com/relaytools/feedbuilder to construct an augmented follows+lists feed on my local network. It gathers everything I care about and I can read it directly without burdening my client with all these complex rules and connections. So yeah, it's not only possible, it's the best way to nostr imo.
Leftists are working on nostr and selling bitcoins ? There are things happening that the people do not see ? In bitcoin world you can buy and sell to communists, this is a crazy world. All without say that fiat money is a shit that mantain the bitcoin world. #CrazyWorld
↩ replying to Valentino Giudice
Segregation splits content flows and makes them workable, clients can mix them for the user. It doesn't stop spam it makes it easier to make a first step of narrowing things down. Hashtags don't split the flow, they just help you track something you're interested in. We're asking users to drink from the sewer (from the outsider perspective) and then telling them to use a filter straw. Users need to be able to find the likeminded crowd as a starting point. then get to know people, pick and choose, find hashtags they want to pay attention to, etc. none of that is going to happen if the startingpoint is a firehose of people who are all about some thing that you don't vibe with. They're just going to leave.
↩ replying to Valentino Giudice
No, the issue here is *purely political*. The word "segregation" itself speaks volumes.
Business Insider
Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to a project run by an anonymous dev — who turned out to be a follower of a fascist 'guru'
Twitter's cofounder Jack Dorsey personally gave $245,000 in crypto to a developer who's a follower and student of a well-known Brazilian fascist.
↩ replying to Terzi, "soldado" autônomo JUSTICEIRO 🧿
One great feature of Nostr (which you would understand had you spent more time learning and less time getting outraged) is precisely that fiatjaf has absolutely no power on what content is allowed on it. You have 100% freedom to post content that offends fiatjaf, or anyone else. fiatjaf isn't Nostr. The author of anything isn't the thing in general, but fiatjaf especially isn't Nostr. That being said, the post in question is most likely a response to Brazil banning X. By the same censorious token, it should ban similar platforms. Of course, I'm for free speech for all, I don't think any platform should be banned, anywhere. Oh, and another great feature of Nostr is that all posts are verified through a cryptographic signature, meaning screenshots are worth absolutely jackshit, only verifiable events mean something. Screenshots are for retards, stop using them, link to events: .
fiatjaf's avatar fiatjaf
How can we get Bluesky banned in Brazil now?
View quoted note →
What’a leftism got to do with Bitcoin? Also, they have reddit and bluesky. Leftists can join here though. People here seem mostly neutral, but i guess neutral to a leftist means far right but that still doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t use bitcoin.
↩ replying to John Satsman
From the moment the lead developer states that "Nostr needs Nazis and racists", but *contradictorily* calls for the banning of Bluesky, yes, there is a very clear ideological bias.
Business Insider
Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to a project run by an anonymous dev — who turned out to be a follower of a fascist 'guru'
Twitter's cofounder Jack Dorsey personally gave $245,000 in crypto to a developer who's a follower and student of a well-known Brazilian fascist.
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↩ replying to Dusk
Essa parte aqui ó: "@npub1n4st260vuvdsdev4tjm6t80fesld26dvv93ndvvkcah3lqfax7hqse4mvu [npub de Lea] is a fraud - one year ago and now is trying to pin his [pronome masculino] crimes on who caught him [pronome masculino mais uma vez], besides threatening two minor girls, me included [me? e no final diz que é o pai?] Sério, melhore. Isso tem nome em inglês, chama-se "Misgendering", que é diferente de usar o nome civil (deadnaming). Estude, sério. Melhore. No perfil de "Lucille" eu sou um "groyper" (ultra direita, em suma); no "seu", eu já pertenço ao "núcleo progressista". Sério. Busque ajuda, Ricardo.