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I'm not sure I should write down these thoughts right now while I'm not sure about them, but if you are reading this apparently I did. I think nostr may already be doomed for two reasons. And as a result of that, if I conclude as such, it would make sense to start working on a successor protocol. I've been taking some notes about what we should change if we started over, but that's the extent of it, I'm not working on a successor protocol. I'm only working on nostr. So don't misinterpret this note, which just represents some thoughts I've been having. Reason one is the misaligned incentives of note copying. The incentives are to copy your notes to every relay you can, blast them out everywhere, to get more reach. That incentive doesn't go away until and unless all the clients do the outbox model. But they don't have an incentive to change, and there are people who don't give a fuck about fixing this and argue against fixing it and argue for note copying, and there is no way in a free society to make them care. So we can never fix this, and nostr will always be centralized in practice and never what it could have been. That means nostr is doomed and unfixable and we should make sure to start differently next time so this doesn't happen again. Reason two is that the seed culture of nostr was far too monolithic: bitcoiners. What a culture develops into probably depends on how diverse its seed was. It's quite hard to get people onto nostr unless they are at least very bitcoin tolerant. Most people (yes, I think most) are put off by so much bitcoin promotion and related posts. Certainly people can follow anybody they want, and make their own independent cultures, perhaps even on a disjoint set of relays. But this isn't likely to happen due to the law of large numbers - there are far more ways for them to encounter and interact with the nest of bitcoiners then to not encounter and interact with them. These are thoughts I'm entirely unsure about. Maybe I'm wrong in both cases. These are my worries.

Replies (27)

I don't see point 1 as a structural problem and I believe it will be solved in practice. I wholeheartedly agree with point 2 though. I think one of biggest contributors to that could have been "zaps". Before that, nostr and bitcoin were totally decoupled protocol wise. It should never have been a NIP. It forever cemented nostr as a "bitcoiner" thing.
Mike Dilger β˜‘οΈ's avatar Mike Dilger β˜‘οΈ
I'm not sure I should write down these thoughts right now while I'm not sure about them, but if you are reading this apparently I did. I think nostr may already be doomed for two reasons. And as a result of that, if I conclude as such, it would make sense to start working on a successor protocol. I've been taking some notes about what we should change if we started over, but that's the extent of it, I'm not working on a successor protocol. I'm only working on nostr. So don't misinterpret this note, which just represents some thoughts I've been having. Reason one is the misaligned incentives of note copying. The incentives are to copy your notes to every relay you can, blast them out everywhere, to get more reach. That incentive doesn't go away until and unless all the clients do the outbox model. But they don't have an incentive to change, and there are people who don't give a fuck about fixing this and argue against fixing it and argue for note copying, and there is no way in a free society to make them care. So we can never fix this, and nostr will always be centralized in practice and never what it could have been. That means nostr is doomed and unfixable and we should make sure to start differently next time so this doesn't happen again. Reason two is that the seed culture of nostr was far too monolithic: bitcoiners. What a culture develops into probably depends on how diverse its seed was. It's quite hard to get people onto nostr unless they are at least very bitcoin tolerant. Most people (yes, I think most) are put off by so much bitcoin promotion and related posts. Certainly people can follow anybody they want, and make their own independent cultures, perhaps even on a disjoint set of relays. But this isn't likely to happen due to the law of large numbers - there are far more ways for them to encounter and interact with the nest of bitcoiners then to not encounter and interact with them. These are thoughts I'm entirely unsure about. Maybe I'm wrong in both cases. These are my worries.
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I know your concern. I'm sure most people would worry about the second point. The first point is not a problem, it is just that you are the faster client developer. Other developers are catching up. The second point I think is the unique advantage of Nostr. I've talked to most of my friends and the people who haven't been censored and the people who hold shitcoins don't care about decentralized censorship-resistant social networks at all. Only Bitcoin holders pay attention. Bitcoin talent is Nostr's strongest foundation. We are now building censorship resistant networks that are easy to use. Just like Bitcoin in 2009, very few people paid attention at first. We're just getting started, but we're already growing a lot faster than Bitcoin. I think there's something else we should be worried about. How can we create a client on Nostr's decentralized network that is different, but better, simpler, and more engaging than traditional social networks? That's the hard part, and that's one of the things Nostr should be breaking through. The average user does not choose Nostr because it is censor-resistant. That's what we need to work on.
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The second one resonates with me. I’m orange AF but I’m trying to spread other interests because Bitcoin enabled me to do what i love. The crowd here is narrow minded in a sense and it’s hard to find let say other travel enthusiasts ( just one example). The network effect in the #bitcoin world kinda happened but that’s it. Feels like mastodon: full of lefties crying wolf about Twitter - just from the other aisle.
thanks for your worries πŸ™πŸ½ nostr can feel like a never ending loop of bitcoin/sovereignty related content, but isn’t it so cool we’re all here for the same values? i think proper community outreach helps with discovering other types of content. it really, reallyy, helps to browse universe for pages to follow. just push through the weird stuff and mute lol. for your first reason, i’m not a dev, so i can’t tell you much about helping w the relay thing, but it’s important to put trust that these tools are being built. we just need to support our devs, and inspire more to help open this protocol to what it will be! πŸ€™πŸ½
The bitcoin and nostr circle jerk is wild. If you mute the words "bitcoin", " lightning" and "zap" the content becomes sparse. You can't mute "nostr" without wiping out nostr. build stuff. I like bitcoin, I nostr, but I'd like to hear about other things. I just haven't seen any signs of that happening. I think the alleged TikTok influx was made up bullshit.
while bitcoin monoculture is not great Im more worried it will over time become onlyfans spamming culture and then... die for real for anyone else who isnt constantly excited by this montenous crap. However... please.for the love of anti social engeneerung we see everywhere else ...don't start the usual invites by insert group this or that here. Because if we start pushing various groups to join ... then the wars about meaningless garbage start. and they usually don't end until the platform is dead too. At least with bitcoin monoculture it was a natural one and therefore feels at home.
If we start investing now on clients that are dedicated to relays as first-class citizens, community relays, niche relays, then things might change and we might see more of these relays popping and more people organizing themselves around relays and less around the big generic feed. The big generic feed cannot die and must not be abandoned, and the outbox model is still a crucial part of having that work correctly, but semi-closed communities around relays is a natural thing that may solve the two problems you raised.
It's likely that clients don't implement the outbox model because it's expensive to do so. And there are no (or at least very few) open-source libraries, APIs, or other such tools that solve the problem in a way that's reusable between clients. I'm working on a solution by developing a C++ SDK for Nostr clients. In time, other devs will likely do the same for other languages. In time it will support the outbox model. Nostr needs infrastructure like this, and we need to find a way to monetize it effectively. There are only so many people who will do the work for free.
I disagree. You say nostr is centralized but its not, its distributed with many relays. You say nostr is monolithic (ie: bitcoiners). First of all its not, many people join nostr who dont care about bitcoin or are not interested in it. Also, Bitcoiner tend to understand the concept of decentralization naturally, what better group spearhead adoption? We already have experience with naysayers and who to waste time on or not. nostr is doomed? its the first distributed social media out there we ever head. Dont have so much anxiety about nostr. Nostr will be fine. Worry about getting fresh air and staying healthy :)
Let's start working on a successor protocol. In doing so, we may figure out the flaws that nostr have, or things that can be improved. I have been meaning to write about what I would do if I were to reinvent nostr from scratch, but we can do a proper protocol specification itself. No one needs to implement it of course, it will just be an exercise for us
↩ replying to Basanta Goswami
My advice: Take notes. Don't work on it. Sure, there are a dozen things I would do differently if starting over including using a different elliptic curve, pushing for binary packets, giving relays identities, negotiating new features in-protocol, event kinds being bitflags, having slightly more composibility in some places, etc. But nothing about the way it is now breaks things signficantly. If you think there is going to be a successor protocol, would you pour your heart and soul into the next nostr project? Probably not. I don't think nostr is broken, so it doesn't require fixing. I'm all-in on nostr, including starting a new project soon.
Reason 2: is a false construct. The seed culture is not bitcoiners. The seed culture is people who understand freedom, open source, and technology. Which is a subset of Bitcoiners *only incidentally*. It is the only seed culture that can be. Anything else would also be a 'false construct,' some attempt to represent what isn't for people who aren't.