Thread

I just realized there is an enormous database of people talking about RSS on the internet, teaching others how to use RSS, learning how to use RSS, talking about the advantages of RSS, conducting user research on RSS first impressions. All of this applies almost unedited to Nostr.

Replies (69)

↩ replying to Adam Curry
Adam, While I like Fiatjaf and appreciate what he’s built, he doesn’t speak for nostr. RSS is a beautiful protocol and it’s going to be awesome in conjunction with nostr. I don’t know what his issue is but most people I know understand RSS’ power. If he wants to invent something twice, let him. I’m not going to publish the Bitcoin And podcast twice every day. That would be stupid.
↩ replying to Séimí Mac Síomón
For the record, this is exactly what we do. All music uploaded through Wavlake is distributed to both RSS and Nostr. This is how RSS players like Fountain have been able to ingest our music feeds for boosts, while simultaneously being able to zap in an open source Nostr client, such as Wavlake mobile. Happy to see some of the RSS crew looking into further payment unification here 🤝⚡️
↩ replying to Adam Curry
Thomas Witherspoon's smartphone could do everything his ham radio could until his community got 20 years worth of rain in a matter of days. Nothing wrong with redundancy.
Fountain
Ham Radio Workbench Podcast • HRWB 221 - Thomas, K4SWL, On Hurricane Helene and Emergency Preparation • Listen on Fountain
In this episode, our dear friend Thomas, K4SWL, tells us about the devestation in North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Thomas share...
↩ replying to Adam Curry
Totally agree with the spirit.. don't burn what is not broken .. rss did exactly what nostr is trying to do ..though not as good a technology solution as nostr is ..but how does that matter .. I mean , we are not going to stop using email just because we have nostr .. Reinventing email and rss on nostr is a noble idea .. but it is not the same basket as Facebook , Instagram or X ..
↩ replying to Adam Curry
I love RSS and Atom. I'm an avid user for everything, I will not sign up for an account for subscription to things, period, if there's not a feed to subscribe on my side I don't subscribe. It has enabled a permissionless model of publication and subscription to flourish on the internet. What I said above isn't to rip on it, I love it. (Thanks for the work you've done to further that flourishing.) But, the published works live at individual servers. It's identity is the URL at which it can be found. This means that it cannot be censorship resistant. A person publishing their work can choose to publish it in multiple places, but someone subscribing to one might not know how to find the other. This is why I say nostr can do everything RSS can do but in a censorship resistant way. The content is simply signed, where a user pulls it from is of no consequence. A publisher can put it at several relays to be pulled from, the user hardly notices if it gets taken down from any of them. If someone wants to be able to publish anonymously, and in a way they can't be censored, nostr is a dream come true. RSS is still cool, useful, and you're right about all the infrastructure. But this censorship resistance, you can't beat it. I exclusively publish what I want to publish with Nostr, the identity of this voice is the key that signed this message. I won't host my writings on a blog, because it requires identifying myself to a data center, and having to watch what I say to avoid my site being taken down or blocked or something else. You should know, I'm working (very slowly) on a piece of software that enables publishers to share multimedia content in a censorship resistant way. Once I have it working and published, which is hopefully soon if real life can get out of my way, your average person will be able to publish audio and video with ease in a way nobody can stop, and even offload hosting to a trusted provider at their leisure also very easily. It leverages existing protocols and does not require any new infrastructure. Right now, nostr publishers have to host media at a URL and it is not censorship resistant. This is a weakness, I hope my solution is adequate for people.
↩ replying to Adam Curry
Absolutely - features are different .. in fact every rss client may offer different features just as Amethyst offers different features v/s Damus ! ..that said , I was talking more about the underlying philosophy - e.g. being able to get the content without having to subscribe (no KYC) . A website or podcast doesn't need to know who am I and where I am ! kinda .. Now here is the fundamental difference ... rss works on top of http(s) ..which means despite good intent (for anonymity of the subscriber), the construct is superficial .. means a hacker can find what I am listening to and where .. of course there are ways to protect but most users wont employ those tools .. http essentially drives centralization - as happened with the internet overall ... rss is kinda a sliver of goodness residing with in the pool of darkness :-) who is better than you to know how strong Apple and Spotify are despite all the good intent (of rss community) ... nostr (and bitcoin) is built on gossip protocol .. it obviates the need of central servers .. in that , relays are NOT servers . Server serves me based on my credentials stored with them, on the other hand , I can simply go to a relay and pick up what is mine - kinda like the difference between a sit down restaurant ( server) and a Chipotle ( self service) . Crude analogy but the point is in the "http world" a waiter (third party) needs to know what I ordered and where I am sitting (location) .. in "nostr land" all that information grab by middle men is removed by design .. In addition , what relays store is not the content .. it is simply the rss style fields .. a specific set of fields for an event type ... Thus nostr is simply a better core tech ... that said .. a podcast wouldn't be called a podcast if it didn't support billions of existing user .. we may call it a nostr-cast but that is a totally different product ..albeit a better one but without any user :-) .. just the way I would not call it an EMAIL unless it supports all the smtp and pop based email clients ..including mut :-) So the path is to build a better solution on #nostr and make sure it is backward compatible ... not only for podcast , but for email too .. and many more great tools crippled by http ,,and eventually the entire internet .. Disclaimer : My technology interpretations may be wrong for lack of research on my part ! This thread has ton of great devs to correct me !
↩ replying to Adam Curry
I think podcast feeds generate a lot of traffic in fetching the content ... which is more like a media server in nostr world .. nostr relays store only the rss type of info ( routing information ) ... we need to figure out how to fetch content from the exiting audio repositories eg podbeans .. while developing better ways to store content on individual machines or blossom servers .. we can't expect pod-casters to upload their entire catalog again .. unless we offer some automated data migration mechanism ..
↩ replying to Satosha
In your example, the rss podcast namespace payment splits are a requirement, as the current advertising based podcast industrial complex is built on opposing philosophy; namely knowing as much as possible about the end user of the download. Cracking the code of easy listener on-boarding to lightning thus requires custodial payment solutions that in turn require kyc This is the conundrum. Podcast content creators need to monetize, censorship resistance is not important to them.
↩ replying to Adam Curry
Spot on .. The revised saying is .. come for the (easy) #zaps and stay for the revolution 😀 Most creatives are naturally attracted to #nostr because of ease of zaps .. not only from end consumers but also to enable collaboration .. for example if I want to start a publucation today , I should be able to find producers, editors, writers and host of other roles here on #nostr and be able to zap them for their work (or set up splits on the final product ) .. aka #creative-economy I think there is huge innovation currently in progress ( with for example #Cashu ) to enable cash like features in a fashion that LSPs ( or #Mints in this case) wouldn't know the identity of zapper .. and it will be frictionless .. e.g. I won't be required to hop on to another browser ( or wallet) window to stream my #sats .. net net .. Zaps in the killer feature of #nostr ..and it is going to get attention of the very best devs .. I am very hopeful ! As far as the censorship resistance is concerned ... It is the foundation of underlying protocol that #nostr (and #bitcoin) are built on .. it may not be an immediate apparant attraction to the users ( or creators ) ..but in the longer run , this is what wins the battle against INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX .. time and again , we have seen if something could be centralized , it will be .. protocol(s) alone can't fight the battle but they can sure give the creativity better ammunition..
↩ replying to Satosha
on a way podcasting is alsocensorship resistant. We enabled over 70 apps and services to is ethe PodcastIndex, decentralizing away from apples index.
Podcastindex.org
Apps | Podcastindex.org
The Podcast Index is here to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem.
 I've never heard of a feed being taken down. But feeds could still benefit from being relayed through nostr.
↩ replying to Adam Curry
Absolutely.. that's the reason I am such a big fan .. 🙏 for leading the community.. And hats off to rss community - for doing it through sheer will and perseverance .. #nostr is an opportunity to leverage the superior technology .. .. the most centralized industry is "money" .. literally the nation states with huge armies ..... with #bitcoin, #plebs have a chance to crack open the big banks - at least a hope ..... I imagine similar technology leverage for podcasting , news publications , music , streaming , sports , retail ...
↩ replying to Adam Curry
So, right now, nostr can only be used for the feed fetching/notification part. Content delivery is all done over http, so multimedia content is not censorship resistant, only letting people know where to find it is. What I'm working on is a piece of software that basically uses bittorrent to deliver the multimedia content and nostr to deliver the message that the content is available. The infrastructure is already there for that, and paid seedboxes already exist, most bit torrent clients are already able to handle remote auth so paying for hosting is already a breeze. Censorship is nonexistent on the bittorrent network, monetization is solved with nostr. I hope to get this out the door Soon™, and am more than halfway done, but real life happens and I've got responsibilities I can't shirk. I think with this combination, there won't be a bandwidth boddleneck for content. If someone wants to ensure that their content is always made available, yes they'll need to self host or pay someone for that. That includes seeding and relays. It's probably a good idea to run a relay anyway, and for anonymity, to leave it open to others to use. But you should *always* publish to more than one relay, to ensure that your content is censorship resistant.
↩ replying to Adam Curry
I thought about IPFS also. But IPFS has a ton of problems and isn't very robust. There's massive maintenance overhead attempting to implement something with IPFS. Bittorrent is very, very robust. It's only real downsides are that swarms connect p2p and so share IP addresses with each other, and that it's mostly labelled as a piracy tool. But for multimedia delivery it can't be beat.
↩ replying to Adam Curry
This is cool, but from what I can see, it's still streaming the audio over http, right? Which is fine, that's how podcasting works, notify of new content with RSS, stream over http. It's currently not hard to share a link to your followers on a nostr note that has a podcast in it, a format where a podcast player can understand and play it the way it understands RSS (versus just clicking the link in your feed and opening it in an audio player) is cool, but it's not censorship resistant, which is probably the main problem I'm trying to solve.
↩ replying to Bryan Entzminger
Most of mine are from when there weren’t as many people running nodes (less nodes bigger piece of the pie). The person using IPFS podcasting picks the percentage of each Boost they want to share with the node runners. Here’s PC 2.0 for example. 5% of the Boost gets divided by the 46 nodes (that have a lightning wallet connected). I’m not sure what the threshold is but I think it has to be at least 1 sat after all that to send a payment to the nodes. What I did was go to the active feeds section and pin every feed offering a split. This is more of a proof of concept but I think it’s really cool even if I don’t get any sats for it.
IPFS Podcasting
Decentralized Podcast Distribution over IPFS
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