I will off course link to you site. It’s to illustrate a point about my blogspot blog haha…
I’ve been looking to switch over to something else. But I’ve been actively blogging since 2006 and I haven’t found a good enough way and platform to switch over to.
>I’ve been looking to switch over to something else. But I’ve been actively blogging since 2006 and I haven’t found a good enough way and platform to switch over to.
I am surprised that the comments on that blog don’t menstion Nostr as a solution to the given pain points.
Unlike traditional federated systems, Nostr is built around a protocol where users have a single cryptographic identity not tied to any particular server. This means that when a user shares a post, anyone with a Nostr client can interact with it—like, comment, or repost—regardless of which relay (server) they are connected to, solving the “can’t interact across instances” problem.
Moreover, Nostr posts are identified by content hashes and public keys, not by server-dependent URLs. This makes posts portable and resilient: if a relay goes offline or a user migrates, their content and identity remain intact and accessible via other relays, addressing the “post portability pain” and “migration pain” described in the article.
And because Nostr clients can register themselves as handlers for Nostr-specific links (e.g., nostr: URIs), clicking a Nostr link can automatically open the post in the user’s preferred client, improving the user experience across different devices and apps.
I read your post after posting my own. Yeah the lack of any mention of Nostr shows a genuine ignorance about the Social Media Protocol landscape or else an intentional dislike of Nostr, and thus not wanting to do any shout-outs.
Nostr isn't something special. It's just currently in the phase where we dream about the possibilities and don't have enough practical experience to see the problems yet, and ignore the theoretical problems because we haven't encountered them in reality yet. Fediverse also went through that phase. So did centralized social media.
Nostr has 1) Identity as a PublicKey, 2) Posts represented as hashes. That's all we need. The mechanism for pushing those chunks of data around the web is almost irrelevant. Nostr uses relays. IPFS uses a DHT. The possibilities are endless, but Nostr is special because it has [mostly] exactly what we need at it's core, and makes every other feature optional. I invented something identical to Nostr several months before Fiatjaf did, and I think he may have actually gotten many ideas from me, just like I contributed very heavily towards the Blue Sky effort, and got them to accept most of my ideas. The "Personal Repository" concept was mine for example. I invented that.
Neither of which is anything new, and neither of which helps you actually get the content. You have to have the whole system or you don't have a system.
IPFS's DHT is extremely slow by the way - on the order of 1-10 minutes to look up a new item. That's one of those things about it that the people who insist it's the solution to all problems won't tell you. I assume there's some such problem with nostr too (probably not the same one). Every system has them.
Has nostr experienced a takedown, crash, corporate takeover, or overload of one or several major relays yet, and if so, how did that go? Did enough users find out about the problem through out-of-band channels, then manually enter new relay URLs, to keep the network mostly connected? Has anyone important had their private key stolen?
The version of Nostr that I happened to invent about a year before Fiatjaf invented his was about the same as Nostr, except for the fact that I chose a true IPFS CID as the identifier, which Nostr cannot do, making it completely incompatible with IPFS, unless you have TWO hashes (both a CID and a Nostr ID), which I found silly.
You're right about the fact that IPFS never could scale to the level of Social Media with everyone posting even 10 messages per day, but decentralized systems NEVER DO scale in that way. That's why Blockchain has Lightning as you know.
However inventing a NEW CID format in the IPFS era is a foot shoot, that can be avoided, and should be. Can the other problem (of how to push data efficiently) ever be solved perfectly? Maybe or maybe not, but Nostr does work, and it is censorship resistant better than anything else. I'm just saying what a shame that it's wholly separate from IPFS. That was a huge lost opportunity. And I generally disagree with your gripe that everything is worthless until everything is perfect, because by that logic even Public Key encryption is a baby to be thrown right out with the bath water too. No, the overall system will be made of parts. The CID part is a necessary part, and the PublicKey identity is also a necessary part.
From the fact that you completely ignored the question on whether Nostr has suffered a reality-injecting major problem yet, I assume that it hasn't yet.
BTW IPFS CID isn't even the best, oldest or most stable identifier. We had SHA256 hashes before IPFS.
I answer about things I'm interested in and know about. I don't know about any breaches of Nostr protocol, because I quit all Nostr work 2 years ago.
About IFPS hashing... I'm a very experienced IFPS developer myself (2 years of it). I always argued the 'variable hash algorithm' aspect of IPFS was just an unnecessary complexity and that SHA256 should've been hard-coded into the whole thing. As per usual, the IPFS team went with the more complex approach, just like they did when they over-engineered ATProto in the same way by the SAME developer.
But the main reason Nostr cannot fit into IPFS is slightly more nuanced than the actual hash algo. Fiatjaf made the decision NOT to take the hash of the FINAL JSON object itself, and so no matter what hash algo he had used, it was never going to cleanly fit into IPFS without each Nostr message being 'wrapped' with some IPFS wrapper, necessarily resulting in an DIFFERENT hash. So there's two different layers to the incompatableness.
EDIT: Going deeper into the weeds: If social media messages are shorter than 256K (the default chunker size of IPFS) I think you can end up getting a SHA256 directly out of it, so there WAS the potential to use IPFS with Nostr in that way, except for the fact that Fiatjaf didn't hash the FINAL JSON, but hashed parts of it.
Hey Fraze! I'm a big fan of yours! I bet you know who I am, but don't dox me plz. :) I hope things are going well for you at Blue Sky actually, if you're still there. I think all your contributions to ATProto were probably all the good ones!
I remember Jeromy and his boss Cake who pretended to interview me for a job once, which cratered when I refused to do the "coding challenge" purely out of the principle of the thing. lol.
Too bad one cannot export the highlights form the kindle app and import them into this app.
Now I need a computer and a usb cable, while I’m mostly living off road and off grid.
This is in no way the fault of your app. Just pointing out how Amazon isn’t for serious researchers. Just selling books is the bare minimum that they support, and only from the website, not from within the app. I’m sure Amazon is big enough to put the cork screws on Apple to not pay the 30% Apple tax?
I agree that Mastodon isn’t it in its current form.
I’ve left Twitter a while ago now, although when I have to, I will read messages via https://xcancel.com/
Since there is no clear winner I’ve set up a mastodon and nostr and bluesky account and I use https://openvibe.social/ to read and cross-post to all platforms, when I feel the need to share anything at all. There are other apps that do the same trick like https://nootti.com/, but I am content with OpenVibe.
Mostly, I’ve found that not being on any “social” media is better for my mental state.
Why is it a jab at physics? It's honest and beautiful -- I imagine this is exactly what an experience on the cutting edge of experiment is like! :D
Making this measurement (an ancient discovery) with latest equipment is easy, but imagine what it might have been like for the people who actually discovered this property of germanium. Our tools/probes cannot advance much faster than our understanding of a (related) subject -- we are constantly inventing/improvising tools using cutting edge scientific knowledge from a related field.
I mean if you didn't already know how to solder to Germanium crystals you would have had to spend months experimenting with the material before you could get leads to stick.
Soldering a lead to a germanium crystal typically involves using a gold-germanium solder alloy (like 88% gold, 12% germanium) due to its compatibility and good bonding properties
Plus you'd need to decide how to get a good thermal connection to set the temperature of the crystal - maybe via one big lead?
Being in the future makes some things simpler?
The little experience I've had with lab physicists showed they needed a good ability to build, debug and maintain their own equipment. You can't always rely on technicians.
In most but the very richest physics research groups there are no such thing called technicians.
Except for shared equipment in centralized managed facilities like the nanofabs, even there you need to tune your own recipe...
I'm an industrial physicist, and the post put a smile on my face. And indeed, it's not fiction. It's a blast. You will go through times like this, I guarantee it.
I've been wrestling with a cantankerous experiment for a couple of weeks. It produces reproducible results, but they don't make sense, and the work is not in a domain where discovering new physics by accident is likely.
I was wondering about the fingerprintability of devices too. It seems a too easy thing to spoof. What if every visit was “unique” in terms of RAM or Screensize? Seems an easy metric to game.
I don’t get why the speculation is so dumb with this question: Cared for like a companion, or killed like prey?
What if the dog/wolf was cared for by one group of people and used as a guard dog, and in that capacity was attacked by other people?
Afterwards the owners of the dog beried it because it was their beloved pet and guard?
This explains why its bones would both show signs of human care and human damage simultaneously.
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