[HN Gopher] Fiatjaf/nostr - a censorship-resistant alternative t...
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Fiatjaf/nostr - a censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter
Author : Cameri
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-12-31 15:47 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Banning people is an upside. Setting boundaries of acceptable
| behaviour is necessary for having a space where people won't be
| troll-brigaded and hate-swarmed, and where the worst people on
| the internet don't drive out everyone else.
| noptd wrote:
| Seems like an acceptable position to take until you find
| yourself outside of the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
|
| Personally, I don't mind having to manually filter/ignore non-
| conformant behavior in order to prevent that possibility for
| myself and any other minority group online.
| Ambolia wrote:
| Customized chains of trusts can be created too. Where you
| could choose either directly who you want to read, or who you
| trust to "whitelist" people, so you can have censorship but
| you can choose your own censors.
| Ambolia wrote:
| That's fine, nobody is taking Facebook and Twitter away if you
| enjoy those, just opening up new spaces.
| marstall wrote:
| exactly. when I see "censorship-resistant," I hear "we don't
| have a way to control abuse on this platform."
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Or "this platform was explicitly designed to host abusers".
| gaws wrote:
| When I see "censorship-resistant," I read "I can call someone
| the n-word and not get banned for it."
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I like the intent of these types of projects but a serious
| question I have is: How do you get the majority of people to
| switch to something like this?
|
| There are many examples but the most recent ones that come to
| mind are people trying to get their friends to use Murmur/Mumble
| instead of Discord with basically near-zero success. I've seen
| this in a few gaming forums. Anyone attempting this is basically
| laughed off the platform with the responses like _" All my
| friends are on Discord"_ and _" Discord can do x,y,z can your app
| do that?"_
|
| So in practical terms how would one make such a platform widely
| adopted?
| Ambolia wrote:
| You don't get the majority to switch. You get small interesting
| niches.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Well, I feel like your example goes the other way. Discord does
| feel like it's always been the default, but many of us old
| timers remember the days of 2015, when everyone was using
| Mumble and Teamspeak except a few people trying to push this
| Discord app that had just launched.
| riffic wrote:
| > How do you get the majority of people to switch to something
| like this?
|
| This is really the wrong focus.
|
| Everyone should be focused on how to "mainstream" this in the
| minds of content creators, organizations, institutions, and
| media. The audience will find these subjects because they have
| a certain gravity to attract followers.
|
| This is why, in my mind, if the federated open web wants to
| "succeed" (spoilers, it hasn't failed _at all_ and it 's a
| spectacularly organic ecosystem. Everyone's just using the
| wrong definition of success), it needs to start demanding for
| these mainstream content creators to publish to the open web by
| way of standardized protocols. Especially any groups that take
| public money or hold special permission to use public airwaves
| (licensing).
| swalsh wrote:
| Focus on small communities, not lots of large communities.
| riffic wrote:
| I mean, that's valid as well. Each "influencer" or "big
| account" on existing services is in a way its own
| community.
| itake wrote:
| chicken or the egg?
|
| Why would a content creator, org, institution, and media use
| a new app with no users? All of the above publish to twitter
| because Twitter's "bizarre techniques to keep you addicted"
| and "doesn't show an actual historical feed from people you
| follow"
| riffic wrote:
| you know, there are a lot of interesting parallels with the
| early adoption of the internet.
|
| I remember back in the 90s there was a time when no one had
| their own web site, but you couldn't listen to 15 minutes
| of news without someone telling you their AOL "keyword".
|
| Things are very similar today, in a way.
| supernintendo wrote:
| I don't think the majority of people would be interested in a
| project like this.
| arsenico wrote:
| Takes time, a lot of marketing money, more time, more money.
| Look at what is happening with Telegram globally. It is used as
| a serious alternative to WhatsApp in some countries, but far
| from being a real global competitor still.
| perilouspear wrote:
| UI/UX also needs to be buttery smooth and non-technical,
| _especially_ where setup /onboarding is concerned. The more
| you stray from that the more difficult it's going to be to
| bring in a significant population of users.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > How do you get the majority of people to switch to something
| like this?
|
| One way is to port over interesting content from existing
| platforms. They already have an RSS relayer here:
| https://github.com/fiatjaf/rsslay
|
| Not saying that this is like a genius new idea, but I think
| they're aware of what people may want.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| Well, Twitter has been going into a series of serious banning
| recently. They even banned the president of the United States.
| All these banned people had to find homes in suboptimal
| platforms from which they can be banned again and so on. If
| that trend increases and Nostr can position itself as a viable
| alternative it might catch some chunks of mainstream.
|
| But yeah, it's kinda hard. We must keep building though.
| swalsh wrote:
| Being decentralized can't be the only reason (unless you're a
| part of a group actively being wiped from a centralized
| platform).
|
| You need to do something better that makes people go "oh, this
| is neat". I had never heard of Murmur/mumble before, so I spent
| about 5 seconds checking it out. Nothing about the home page
| appealed to me... so I closed it.
| ldiracdelta wrote:
| Be the unreasonable minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-
| most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
| twodave wrote:
| I think we have all seen what happens when a platform has no
| moderation whatsoever. And a good many of us feel like it goes
| too far on the platforms that do. Where's the middle ground? Is
| there one? Maybe social media is just a bad idea--who does it
| really benefit anyway?
| didibus wrote:
| So there's no like/dislike? No retweet? And posts are simply
| chronological? Is there still a text length limit?
|
| How does it handle a relay tempering with the content of posts or
| altering the meta-data? Or a relay who'd be sending out fake
| posts?
| cuu508 wrote:
| > How does it handle a relay tempering with the content of
| posts or altering the meta-data? Or a relay who'd be sending
| out fake posts?
|
| Author signs every post with their key.
| didibus wrote:
| > Author signs every post with their key
|
| So the client does the verification? Or is it the relay?
|
| Also, I didn't mean impersonating a specific author, I meant
| generating posts that no one truly posted to it. So when your
| client lists the chronological most recent posts you get a
| bunch of fake manipulated content that was mass generated by
| the relay itself for example.
| cuu508 wrote:
| >So the client does the verification? Or is it the relay?
|
| From the README:
|
| > A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides
| accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others.
| Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on
| the client side
|
| ---
|
| > So when your client lists the chronological most recent
| posts you get a bunch of fake manipulated content that was
| mass generated by the relay itself for example.
|
| From the README:
|
| > Each client can decide how to best show posts to users,
| so there is always the option of just consuming what you
| want in the manner you want -- from using an AI to decide
| the order of the updates you'll see to just reading them in
| chronological order.
| Ambolia wrote:
| As far as I can see you subscribe to specific authors, not
| to a global feed on the relay, an the author is identified
| by their cryptographic key.
|
| Not sure how it allows you to find new people or responses
| to comments. Seems like it should be a key part.
| supertestnet wrote:
| Peer discovery and peer suggestions are not implemented
| yet. People have been posting their public keys on
| twitter etc. There is a proposal for encoding a set of
| followers/followed in a message which your followers'
| clients can then use to display info about that on your
| profile. That should help with peer discovery once
| someone codes it up. You can also find threads that
| people are widely commenting on (e.g. someone might post
| a nostr thread on twitter) and follow people who post in
| those threads.
| Ambolia wrote:
| It's not so much peer discovery, rather the nice thing
| about Twitter compared with a newsletter or a blog is
| that you get a post and different people responding and
| interacting with it.
|
| I guess some level of interaction will be needed to
| replicate the things people look for in Twitter. I guess
| a very basic functionality that that would cover this
| would be posting in your timeline "responses" to other
| posts by including the key of the other author and the
| cryptographic signature of the post. From that a client
| would be able to obtain the "parent" post and build a
| thread.
| Ambolia wrote:
| >So there's no like/dislike? No retweet?
|
| Yes, that's interesting. You don't want to replicate the
| addictive part of Twitter but you need at least to replicate
| some of the network effects.
|
| There should be at least the possibility to reply to posts, so
| if you follow a guy regarding a topic you can find what other
| people interested in that topic think somehow.
| supertestnet wrote:
| You can reply to posts. Retweets and likes are not yet
| supported but they should be easy -- likes can be a reply
| with just a heart emoji and clients then display those via a
| counter. Retweets will probably be a new message that
| contains a link to a prior message and clients will then
| display it in a twitter-esque manner.
| r721 wrote:
| >If spam is a concern for a relay, it can require payment for
| publication or some other form of authentication, such as an
| email address or phone, and associate these internally with a
| pubkey that then gets to publish to that relay -- or other anti-
| spam techniques, like hashcash or captchas.
|
| Sounds like these anti-spam measures are not actually implemented
| yet.
| supertestnet wrote:
| Correct. Spam is not a problem yet because nostr is super new
| and no one uses it yet. But a few friendly bots have been
| released for it (since it's very bot-dev friendly) and DMs are
| open by default (and the branle client has no way to close
| them) so spam is basically guaranteed to come eventually.
| floober wrote:
| > It insists on having a chain of updates from a single user,
| which feels unnecessary to me and something that adds bloat and
| rigidity to the thing -- each server/user needs to store all the
| chain of posts to be sure the new one is valid. Why? (Maybe they
| have a good reason);
|
| I assume this is so a relay can't manipulate your messaging by
| picking and choosing which messages to forward; they'd have to
| forward messages [0-N].
|
| Edit:
|
| > sig: <64-bytes signature of the sha256 hash of the serialized
| event data, which is the same as the "id" field>
|
| Signed hash rather than a mac - might be vulnerable to an
| extension attack
| Cameri wrote:
| I'm using branle (https://branle.fiatjaf.com/) as my client and
| you can follow me with my pubkey:
| 22e804d26ed16b68db5259e78449e96dab5d464c8f470bda3eb1a70467f2c793.
|
| You can find my pubring on my bio after following me. There's no
| ability to discover others at this time!
|
| Nostr relay registry hosted here (https://nostr-
| registry.netlify.app) by fiatjaf.
|
| Exciting times!
| webmaven wrote:
| _> I 'm using branle (https://branle.fiatjaf.com/) as my client
| and you can follow me with my pubkey: 22e804d26ed16b68db5259e78
| 449e96dab5d464c8f470bda3eb1a70467f2c793._
|
| It isn't too hard to improve upon the status quo in various
| ways when you just drop a key usability requirement (in this
| case, the need for human-memorable 'handles').
|
| It is worth reading 'Why Johnny Can't Encrypt' (1999) [0], 'Why
| Johnny Still Can't Encrypt' (2011) [1], and 'Why Johnny Still,
| Still Can't Encrypt' (2015) [2].
|
| [0]
| https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec99/full_papers/whitt...
|
| [1]
| https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.22...
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.08555
| swalsh wrote:
| the eth guys have solved this with ENS, you could add your
| public key address in your ens record if this ever becomes a
| thing. Then you just tell people to add me <myname>.eth
| vidarh wrote:
| That's true, but you can disconnect those requirements on the
| _server_ side.
|
| E.g. a "name/profile to key/value" service would be useful
| for more than this.
|
| If people want mastodon style handles, for example, it's easy
| enough to create a mapping that can leverage DNS for example
| to let you query for a matching pubkey in a cacheable and
| easily scalable way and without the need for that to be built
| into the messaging protocol.
| webmaven wrote:
| > That's true, but you can disconnect those requirements on
| the server side.
|
| > E.g. a "name/profile to key/value" service would be
| useful for more than this.
|
| At which point you've reintroduced a global namespace SPOF
| that is vulnerable to censorship, etc.
|
| You can push the complexity around like food on a plate,
| but getting rid of it is another matter entirely.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| No, you don't. You can have DNS-based aliases to pubkeys,
| and then people will follow pubkeys and interact with
| pubkeys, not with the DNS aliases. So if these users are
| censored later from the DNS then they still keep their
| identity, their contacts, their followers etc.
| pseudozach wrote:
| You could even deterministically map pubkeys to handles
| with something like bip39. it won't be pretty but it will
| be unique, human-readable and uncensorable.
| vidarh wrote:
| That's only true if you choose to introduce a global
| namespace. There's nothing requiring you to have just a
| single such catalog of users as long as the canonical
| reference is the pubkey any more than the contact list on
| my phone requires you to name people the same on your
| phone.
|
| (and in fact on reading the protocol specs, they do have
| a way for relays to publish mappings [1] . EDIT: and that
| would seem to make it possible for crawlers to crawl
| relays to assemble non-canonical catalogs fairly easily).
|
| There are downsides to having multiple namespaces, such
| as e.g. that there's no guarantee that your client will
| be able to map a given pubkey back to a human-readable
| name and/or dealing with collisions between mappings from
| different sources, of course, but this is reasonably well
| thread ground.
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr/blob/master/nips/02.md
| upofadown wrote:
| YJCE identified a lack of usable concepts as the root
| problem. Human-memorable 'handles' actually make things worse
| in that they add in another concept that the user has to
| learn about and understand. The idea that the ridiculously
| large number represents a human identity is very easy to
| comprehend and the user can not avoid contact with that
| number in a system like this. The number _is_ the identity.
|
| Usability and convenience are two different things. A system
| that is difficult to use might be easily understood by the
| user and vice versa.
| swalsh wrote:
| Just checked it out, my pub key is f0bed2e11260f0f77f781db928f4
| 0a34c18713fda1918d3be996f91d0776e985
|
| it's not obvious to me though how you find people to follow.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| You find their pubkey in HN threads, of course.
| speedgoose wrote:
| You may know it already but "branle" means jerking off in
| French.
| makeworld wrote:
| If ed25519 was used instead of secp256k1, wouldn't pubkeys be
| shorter? Like SSB.
| swalsh wrote:
| One of the neat things about the way they've done it, is you
| can use a bitcoin wallet to connect:
| https://twitter.com/Bumi/status/1476957006653276170
| ss108 wrote:
| So a platform whose where any idiot can spout any garbage and
| they feel expressly empowered to do so? No thanks.
|
| Granted, there seems to be no censorship on Hacker News.
| :thinking:
| MMS21 wrote:
| > there seems to be no censorship on Hacker News
|
| https://jcs.org/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news
| ss108 wrote:
| Ah, thanks, I wasn't sure there was any moderation on here.
|
| That's a good thing in general, though I suppose the example
| cited is an example of moderation most of us would consider
| poor or undesirable.
| haunter wrote:
| >Granted, there seems to be no censorship on Hacker News
|
| follow the site through RSS and you can see a huge amount of
| flagged, dead/removed posts
| jmakov wrote:
| You just deacribed Twitter...
| gogs wrote:
| Open source Twitter ? We've had that for a decade.... nobody
| wants to run it's own, it makes no sense, you'll have no
| audience. If I wanted my twitter, I'd setup a WordPress....
| kaba0 wrote:
| Censorship is not that big of a problem in this age. That exact
| info will be available on someone's server God knows where. Hell,
| moderation is very fundamental so any project not thinking about
| that is prone to fail due to low-quality/illegal content, driving
| away intelligent users.
|
| Obstructing the truth by misinformation, spamming, etc is the
| actual problem. It is a much more effective way to target
| uncomfortable infos. During one of the Russian elections, voter
| fraud was caught on camera and was uploaded to Twitter, with
| #villageName. It quickly caught on and censoring was impossible
| at that point - so Russian bots instead started spamming
| #villageName posts with no sane content so anyone clicking on the
| hashtag to learn what happened was left wondering.
| theossuary wrote:
| Agreed. What we need is a 21st century web of trust for
| reliability of information. This way those you trust could help
| you find others you trust. And if somebody you trust starts to
| trust people you don't, you can cut them out of your news
| sources. This might even be a way to validate trust in
| anonymous sources, without leaking their identity. Just,
| please, no more keysharing parties.
| olah_1 wrote:
| You should follow what Synonym[1] (specifically Slashtags)
| and Iris[2] are working on.
|
| [1]: https://www.synonym.to/products/
|
| [2]: https://github.com/irislib/iris-messenger
| [deleted]
| scsibug wrote:
| Lots of exciting work going on with this right now. I really like
| that I can open up websocat, and interact with a relay directly
| to learn how the protocol works.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > it does not rely on P2P techniques, therefore it works.
|
| followed by
|
| > To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key
| and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else,
| or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple
| relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can
| run a relay.
|
| Sounds pretty much like P2P techniques to me.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Sounds like p2p with supernodes, like the GNUTELLA network
| (limewire) used.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| It doesn't seem like the relays on Nostr sync with each other
| and each relay operator can choose which content is hosted on
| it.
|
| The link to the content isn't global it's still relay/post
| the client just searches for a given post within its list of
| relays.
|
| The content is then served through a specific relay which
| hosts it so basically directly from a server.
|
| So this isn't a supernode topology or server P2P of any kind.
|
| GNUTELLA supernodes were used to limit the number of peering
| connections that each client on the network had to maintain
| and organize the network into a manageable topology this is
| necessary from a technical perspective and any P2P network
| solves this problem in some manner that turns a fully meshed
| network into some sort of leaf and spine topology.
|
| This is basically needed to ensure that any client on the
| network can reach any other client reliably and to ensure
| that the network can support large number of clients without
| needing to coordinate peering globally across the entire
| network.
|
| If you build a P2P network where peering is just a randomized
| best effort mesh between all clients it would rather quickly
| break into a bunch of rather isolated networks as peninsulas
| and then islands would form.
| easrng wrote:
| Seems more like torrent trackers to me.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| Another nitpick this -> "A relay can block a user from
| publishing anything there, " sounds like censorship to me
|
| We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people,
| it's with _who_ does the censoring.
|
| We don't like it to be the gov, because we don't feel like the
| gov is 'by and for the people'
|
| We don't like it being large corporations because that's doubly
| the case.
| logic_beats_pro wrote:
| >We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people,
| it's with who does the censoring.
|
| No, the problem is with censoring people.
|
| You make it seem like censorship is a given. I disagree and
| feel no need to have a third party prune unwanted ideas for
| me. This will seem like a strange idea for some but I don't
| need a priest in between myself and God. I don't need a
| doctor in between myself and good health. Why would I need a
| censor in between myself and information?
|
| No need for governments, no need for corporations, just me
| and my silly brain will decide what to digest. What a
| concept!
|
| -
|
| We need to realize our problem is not with censoring people,
| it's not with who does the censoring, it's people that try
| and normalize censorship.
| beebmam wrote:
| Censorship is certainly necessary on some level. Child
| sexual abuse material, for example. Animal brutality
| material, rape/snuff material, and so on. I do NOT want
| this stuff shown to me, ever, and I don't want anyone else
| in society to have access to this material ever. Even just
| a short exposure to these things can be life traumatizing
| to people, as it has been to me.
|
| Racism/sexism is a lot murkier of a topic. There's a lot of
| nuance there that I think we culturally haven't fully
| figured out. The whole "cracker" situation on twitch, for
| example.
| ch33zer wrote:
| > Even just a short exposure to these things can be life
| traumatizing to people, as it has been to me
|
| +1. When I was younger I used to browse 4chan somewhat
| regularly. I saw snuff videos and other awful content
| that I still think about to this day. My life would have
| been better had I not seen it.
| ss108 wrote:
| This is a really sophomoric take.
| logic_beats_pro wrote:
| krapp wrote:
| So you don't want doctors (or presumably any form of
| expertise,) or governments, or corporations. Just you and
| your brain thinkin' thinks.
|
| I'm wondering where exactly you think all of this
| "information" you would be digesting would be coming from,
| absent the "censorship" of structures and systems needed to
| collect, validate and disseminate it?
|
| Good luck reconstructing the last 8000 years of human
| progress and knowledge from first principles, naked and
| alone in nature with some crystals and potions before you
| fucking die of parasites and tetanus I guess.
| logic_beats_pro wrote:
| You're attempting to steer the conversation away from
| censorship and now towards a scenario where the internet,
| medical journals, books were no longer available? In that
| situation, I would have a much harder time getting access
| to the information to make a decision.
|
| Back to the original point - You're assuming that a
| doctor, government or corporation will make a decision
| for me that's in my best interests. In reality they're
| much more likely to make a decision for me that's in
| _their_ best interests. Lots of examples in the past few
| year+ with the pandemic.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| ncallaway wrote:
| > No, the problem is with censoring people.
|
| No, it's who/when/where the censorship occurs.
|
| If you want to come into my living room and shout Nazi
| propaganda, your ass is getting censored and banned from my
| house.
|
| If you think that level of censorship is a problem, then we
| have a fundamental disagreement, and the bad news for you
| is 95% of people will disagree with you.
|
| If you agree on that level of censorship, then we're just
| arguing where the who/when/where line should be.
| [deleted]
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Censorship is a given for large online platforms. You can
| and should try to allow free propagation of ideas, but you
| also have to protect the forum from people who are
| determined to fill it with hateful commentary and
| pornography. 4chan isn't a crazy special case, it's the
| default destination of a forum where everyone knows there
| are no rules.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| In particular, it used to be called "forum moderation"
| until that was deliberately conflated with censorship by
| far-right groups, angry at their loss of audience,
| starting I guess somewhere around 2010.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The equivalent of "forum moderation" is removal of
| content by Facebook group owners, or subreddit
| moderators. Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today
| would be equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking
| admin backdoors into the software so that they could
| censor other people's instances of it.
| krapp wrote:
| > Censorship at the scale Big Tech does today would be
| equivalent to the vBulletin developers baking admin
| backdoors into the software so that they could censor
| other people's instances of it.
|
| No it wouldn't. As big as Facebook is, they still only
| moderate their own platform, and there is only one
| instance of Facebook. Separate vBulletin instances do not
| constitute a single, collective "vBulletin platform." The
| narrative of "Big Tech" as an organized leftist
| conspiracy orchestrating censorship over all social media
| is simply right-wing propaganda.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > there is only one instance of Facebook.
|
| That's my point. The reason vBulletin forum moderators
| aren't equivalent to Big Tech censorship is that you can
| run your own vBulletin, independent of theirs. Censorship
| of Facebook is bad because that isn't an option.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| It absolutely is an option! There are open source social
| media projects out there that you can fork and start
| hosting today, if you want. Or you can use one of the
| existing alternatives. It's just that not many people use
| them right now, because Big Tech "censorship" has done a
| pretty good (definitely not perfect) job of just
| targeting bad actors. If a large non-toxic chunk of the
| population starts getting banned, non-toxic alternative
| platforms will become viable for the network effects that
| power social media centralization. Until then, the
| alternatives will look like Voat and Gab, and it seems
| like the online public doesn't love platforms that are
| dominated by the toxic castoffs from more mainstream
| platforms.
| krapp wrote:
| >If a large non-toxic chunk of the population starts
| getting banned, non-toxic alternative platforms will
| become viable for the network effects that power social
| media centralization.
|
| Case in point: a number of Youtubers fed up with the
| platform demonetizing and delisting their content are
| advertising their content on other video platforms, or
| just hosting their own like Corridor Digital.
|
| The web is one of the few examples of the free market
| actually working, but people have fallen for the
| defeatist and nihilistic narrative about the
| "centralization" of the web and "control" by sinister
| forces, insisting that competition with any big platform
| is simply impossible.
|
| They said that about MySpace too and look what happened.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| That's because forums generally have topics and rules. If
| we're in a forum about sports cars and you're constantly
| starting adversarial threads about city planning and
| parking, then mods would probably censor you to keep the
| forum on topic. Places like Facebook advertise themselves
| as the "town square of the web". Traditionally nobody was
| censored in the town square. There's a difference between
| purpose built communities and the general network of
| communication.
|
| The term moderation itself often came from debate and
| discussion venues where moderators would police speeches.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| > Traditionally nobody was censored in the town square.
|
| This isn't true, it's just that the spatial constraints
| IRL mean there's never been a need to scale moderation of
| town squares beyond intuitive methods. Go to your
| physical town square and start screaming slurs and
| threats of violence at passers-by, and see how long it
| takes before the community "censors" you.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > screaming slurs and threats of violence at passers-by,
| and see how long it takes before the community "censors"
| you.
|
| In developing and developed countries I've had
| (ostensibly) mentally ill people shouting epithets at
| passerbys and they're just ignored. So I think this is
| more about cultural norms.
|
| Moreover, the case you mention is simple. If a spammer
| joins a forum and starts spamming, there's usually broad
| support to kick them out. Once the argument becomes
| ideological, that's when sentiment is a lot more mixed
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| You're your own censor in this situation and that's
| probably what the sentence was getting at.
|
| I censor myself all the time. There's numerous things I
| simply don't want to read or see, but I've made and own
| that decision for myself.
|
| Here's a devil's advocate point of view:
|
| Free speech/free press is an asset within a group when the
| following are true: A) members are acting in good faith
| which typically requires value systems to be not too
| divergent, B) members agree on how to arrive at the truth,
| and C) members are not confusing science (designed to be
| true), opinion (designed to be neither true nor false), and
| entertainment (designed to be false).
|
| When one of these is not true, it creates liabilities that
| need to be managed. Social breakdown is the result of not
| managing these liabilities.
|
| Probably an initial response will be: "well who decides X"
| ... if we've figured this out for engineering problems
| where lives are phyisically on the line we can figure it
| out for this. Any authoritative action whether it be laws
| or standards make some portion of people unhappy.
| radford-neal wrote:
| I think there is a need for "censorship" (if you want to
| call it that), but not for the reason the other people
| replying to this comment say.
|
| Do you really want to censor racist comments, for instance?
| Wouldn't you rather know how many racists there are out
| there?
|
| The real problem is possible use of a channel like this to
| support bad actions, not bad viewpoints. For example,
| someone could advertise to hire a hit-man to kill someone.
| Or a group might use the channel to organize a mob to go
| around burning down jewish businesses.
|
| In the scheme described, owners of individual servers could
| block such messages, if they recognize they're there (a
| possibly hard problem). Perhaps this would be sufficient,
| while still leaving viewpoints uncensored, since there are,
| we hope, very few people in favour of serious criminal
| activity, while many favour free speech even for those they
| detest.
| sa1 wrote:
| > A relay can block a user from publishing anything there.
|
| The point is that it won't be effective since messages are
| pushed to/pulled from multiple relays.
| brightstep wrote:
| Unless relays come together and agree to block someone or
| something. As long as there are enough relays this is
| improbable
| ayende wrote:
| At which point you can setup your own relay, you don't
| have a block here
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Unless nobody is willing to peer with you.
|
| These are all questions we've already seen from USENET;
| in fact, it's not entirely clear to me what the benefit
| to this protocol is _over_ USENET, except it 's new.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| From what I know USENET is more like Mastodon. Nostr has
| similarities with Mastodon but it's much more flexible,
| scalable, not to mention the public key infrastructure.
| cuu508 wrote:
| But IIUC, other relays don't need to peer with your
| relay. Your followers just need to know what relay you
| are using, so they can get your posts.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Correct, but that makes your node a non-distributed
| single-point-of-failure if the question is censorship
| concerns.
| elevader wrote:
| This sounds more and more like running a blog.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| To me it sounds pretty much like client-server architecture.
| supertestnet wrote:
| I think p2p techniques are distinguished by being "serverless,"
| that is, you don't publish content to someone else's device,
| you host your content on your own device and people have to
| connect to your device to get your content. Peers talk directly
| to other peers. In nostr and other client/server models like
| mastodon, you publish content on someone else's server and if
| you go offline people can still access it.
|
| The difference with nostr is lots of redundancy -- you post
| your content to like 5 servers so that if one goes down you're
| not really censored, people still get your content and -- in
| your list of relays -- you replace the censorious one and then
| your followers update where they follow you at.
| Cameri wrote:
| Adam <-> Relay <-> ... <-> Relay <-> Bob
| vlunkr wrote:
| For me the fact that it's censorship-resistant is not the
| interesting point here, it's that it's decentralized.
| supertestnet wrote:
| It's not decentralized yet but only potentially decentralized
| if a lot of people run relays. Currently there are only about
| seven relays powering the whole network: https://nostr-
| registry.netlify.app/
|
| Luckily, relays are very lightweight and easy to run so maybe
| it will eventually get decentralized.
| pseudozach wrote:
| And remember relays can be incentivized to host content by
| micropayments via Lightning network if needed.
| al2o3cr wrote:
| This is very simple. Why hasn't anyone done it before?
|
| TBH this sounds like UUCP without routing, I'd say people _have_
| done it before...
| uncomputation wrote:
| The protocol is nice and simple, but how does this prevent the
| issue that Aether has where running a relay just basically
| destroys your bandwidth and you have to store tons of stuff?
| fiatjaf wrote:
| Relays don't have any requirements, you can run very
| lightweight relays that do very little or very big relays that
| do a lot of things -- and so on.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| How is this different than Usenet GPG signed messages? Signing
| messages on Usenet is in practice right now and can be done with
| existing stable software.
| krmmalik wrote:
| Sounds interesting but my main concern is the anti-spam approach.
| It sounds good for general spam but what about a concerted
| defamation campaign from someone. How do you deal with that?
| ayende wrote:
| That depend on how you do it. The client selects what you see,
| you can unsubscribe from accounts with spam, and your client
| will refuse to show posts from those you don't follow
| rfoo wrote:
| ... congrats on reinventing Usenet?
| dsr_ wrote:
| Yup. Cryptographically signed Usenet, so spamming requires the
| overhead of creating a new identity per... something.
| Unfortunately, creating a new identity is still effectively
| free, so spamming will exist.
|
| Social problems need to be solved by social arrangements and
| supported by technical tooling.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Sounds cool, I might check it out.
| rabite wrote:
| This is not censorship resistant. Relays are external points of
| centralization. For all intents and purposes, they are federated
| service providers -- central services that can deplatform users
| by simply choosing not to syndicate their messages. Over time
| this will result in all relays being compromised by state
| adversaries. Legitimate "free speech" relays will be removed from
| the internet via ddos, legal complaints, and just general
| nuisance complaints that the SPLC and other organizations excel
| in. Both domain names, ARIN/RIPE/etc IP assignments, and BGP
| peering relationships are historically subject to revocation via
| a loud chorus of complainers when the speakers are politically
| unpersoned. Original nodes will then be replaced with adversarial
| ones -- sometimes on the same now-reassigned IPs or domain names
| that were taken from the original operators.
|
| This could be reasonably censorship resistant if the first place
| people checked for the updates of users they follow was a hidden
| service that is innate to every client. Ricochet Refresh and Bisq
| are great models of this -- every messenger or trader client
| launches a local daemon accessible only by a hidden service that
| corresponds as its identity. Any kind of relay or pub system
| needs to be an offline-only gossip protocol that is only checked
| if the publisher's hidden service is inaccessible.
|
| Secondly, this just does not scale, at all. The twitter firehouse
| is petabytes of content a day. If even a single city adopted this
| and used it like people do Twitter, running relays would be a
| financially and logistically significant enterprise. This is
| obviously nonviable. There are great ways for lowering the cost
| of UGC, namely serving it on some sort of DHT. You could use
| BitTorrent, or you could use IPFS. You are using neither, which
| means you haven't done basic napkin math on what being a Twitter
| alternative would mean.
|
| But basically a real useful and actually decentralized and
| censorship resistant protocol would not be dependent on pubs or
| relays. If you want to contribute to something in development
| which actually has a viable model, I recommend Identia:
| https://github.com/iohzrd/identia
|
| This proposed service has not confronted a single one of the
| actual problems of censorship or centralization in the subset of
| social media. You maybe should actually talk with people who have
| done significant anti-censorship work and ask them what the
| actual problems are and what needs to be done to solve them.
| jlelse wrote:
| Why so complicated? Just setup your personal website with RSS
| feeds.
| antris wrote:
| The people who cry about censorship on big platforms are people
| who want to access the audience. They aren't crying for the
| censorship itself (they usually love when people with opposing
| views get banned), they are just using that word to complain
| about them losing an audience. Setting up a personal website
| doesn't meet that goal, and probably a thing like this doesn't
| either. Most of the nazis etc. are quite miserable in their
| "censorship-free" platforms, because they can't reach normal
| people there.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| It's sad, but not surprising, to see a question about how two
| protocols compare answered with insinuations about "people
| who cry about censorship", who supposedly "love when people
| with opposing views get banned". Any discussion of
| censorship-resistant technology seems to attract people who
| just love censorship, and hate anyone who doesn't, and it's
| not enough for them to express these views in a top-level
| comment, they even have to spam specific discussions.
| antris wrote:
| If pointing out that having an audience is a central need
| for people who use social media, makes me "love
| censorship", then you are delusional.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| What makes you "love censorship" is making insinuations
| about anyone who "crys about censorship".
|
| As you yourself pointed out, neither RSS nor nostr do
| anything to help people find an audience, so this is
| completely irrelevant to the question of how these things
| compare.
| antris wrote:
| > What makes you "love censorship" is making insinuations
| about anyone who "crys about censorship".
|
| Ok. So still delusional. Have a good day.
| perilouspear wrote:
| Indeed, in many cases the takeaway is that the greater public
| just isn't interested in what these individuals are saying.
| If it were, the personal sites and small uncensored platforms
| you mention would be sought out by it, but with few
| exceptions that practically never happens. Even with
| platforms with the potential for limited/no content
| moderation like Mastodon, the bigger nodes with less
| polarized demographics tend to be those that moderate their
| content. It's almost impossible to build a healthy community
| on a platform where anything goes.
| pseudozach wrote:
| barrier to entry. You can start broadcasting your thoughts
| within seconds with no infrastructure. No need to worry about
| hosting content until you're big enough to be censored.
| gxt wrote:
| endymi0n wrote:
| I used to be a huge fan of censorship resistance, freedom and
| privacy, but I didn't appreciate just how much self-selection
| there was in the kinds of people who went to great lengths to
| access IRC in the times of dial-up modems.
|
| These days, I have the feeling there are only two kinds of
| platforms left:
|
| The clean ones with strong moderation, where any form of edginess
| and possibly controversial topics including breastfeeding,
| violence or discussing human rights can be banned globally or in
| certain countries.
|
| And the other ones, where the Nazis, lunatics and scammers hang
| out.
|
| I'm still not sure what to take from that.
| Ambolia wrote:
| I can appreciate censorship if I thought the authorities and
| experts had any idea what they were doing. I don't think that's
| the case anywhere at this moment. Seems a good time to create
| new alternative spaces.
| darthrupert wrote:
| I'm like you except I've reached a clarity: the Internet and
| anonymity destroyed free speech and it's now dead as an ideal.
| warning26 wrote:
| The internet has shown that free speech simply doesn't work
| if literally anyone has the power to broadcast whatever they
| want to thousands of algorithmically selected users.
|
| Comparing "speech" pre and post social media is like
| comparing "weaponry" between knives and nuclear weapons.
| rpdillon wrote:
| There may be a third category for those with technical know-
| how, that tend to be like the early internet, since they apply
| the same selection bias. I'm thinking of things like Gemini and
| SSB. If SSB could work out the challenges that make it hard to
| implement in non-JS, I think it could become something like
| email in its ubiquity.
| zft wrote:
| Is that possible to have some kind of "global" twitter like feed
| or search by tags to find some people to follow?
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