/ Greg is on Nostr

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Last Notes

2024-09-11 00:49:40

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I’m a bit past halfway through the dispossessed and ive been loving it. It’s not surprising coming from a nostr user since it really explores a decentralized society without a central authority (but still encourages a capitalist society, through incentives and not coercion).
How is Malka Olders Infomocracy?

2024-09-11 00:45:09

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I read sci-fi more to understand the optimism of other people’s imagination. Magic and complex characters can make a story interesting, definitely. But reading sci-fi that dreams up more utopian but still feasible futures, I feel like is almost more productive than reading something nonfiction. We can get caught up in fear and loathing, and reading someone else’s positive (or negative, can be just as informative) imagination of future can help you see it too. I’m reading through the Dispossessed by Ursula Guin and find it amazing so far.

2024-09-07 23:04:48

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Primal wallet isn’t supported in some states. New York particularly, why?

2024-08-30 23:17:17

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Are you able to use a VPN to access these services?
I don’t understand the $10k/day fine for using a VPN. Unless the VPN you use is compromised and is actively working with the government enforcing the fines?

2024-08-28 19:43:46

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I didn’t know this, thanks!

2024-08-28 16:52:18

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You could use AI, but I think even smart contracts would achieve the same result. If a person clicks on the article, they auto-pay 5 cents etc.
The biggest concern IMO is that we are looking to minimize friction between two users making micropayments, and I agree that zaps (for right now) are the easiest way to accomplish this. But zaps are running on an entirely unsustainable backend, where members of the blockchain offer compute to verify transactions.
If the number of micro-transactions on the BTC blockchain suddenly skyrockets because of a new online economy which depends on this, would this even be a sustainable approach?
I am pro crypto, fiat currency is 100% not the way to go with this. Not even their centralized crypto which they want to push. But I have my doubts about BTC proof-of-work in a large scale economy, and the closest alternative ETH uses proof-of-stake yet is a centralized asset run by Buterin and the ETH dev team.
Am I wrong to question BTC on a much larger scale, and where is the POS crypto which is genuinely decentralized and optimized for frictionless micro-transactions?

2024-08-27 18:37:38

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This would definitely work, but I think this would ultimately build the type of media we currently have. Posts that garner the most attention (clickbait, ragebait) would be curated to the top of the list, instead of posts the user finds value in/enjoys.
It’s hard to make such a system. If we were to use this attention-based feed, maybe we need “someone” who knows us. They know we’re republican, yet we spent 30 minutes reading and replying to a democratic blog post. Our comments were angry and without consideration.
If there were an AI model capable of capturing these details, then maybe it would show us a bit less of the content that makes us angry.
Though, this would lead to a very narrow perspective of the world as we’d only see republican content in this case. Really hard to solve this lol.

2024-08-27 03:55:39

An idea to make Nostr relays more realistically scale to the size of Twitter:
- Define a minimum period for a post to gain traction. This is the minimum amount of time that a post would typically take to be seen, go viral, etc.
- If this time passes and the post sees little interaction, then…
- Define a minimum interaction threshold for a post to remain on the network. In other words, how many people have to click/like/comment per hour/day for this post to stay on the network?
This should be technically possible as well. I’m not sure if this is the case with Nostr relays, but at least in the case of IPFS: posts are “content-addressable” and not “location-addressable”.
When I want to find a post I don’t say “go to this DNS address to find the post”. Instead I say “this is the hash of the post I’d like to see”, and ask the network if anyone has this post. This to my understanding is the way that BitTorrent works.
If the post is hosted across multiple relays, each relay can announce to the network the amount of traffic they saw to the post. In this way, the entire network should have a global understanding of how much interaction a post is seeing.
This would offer an alternative to just “delete a post after 30 days”. Because here we can actually delete posts maybe earlier than this deadline to save space for posts that never gained traction, and also save posts for users who still show a high demand for this content.

2024-08-27 03:42:37

Reading through peercuration a bit and it seems interesting. Users have a web of peers (similar to Web of Trust), and they rely on those peers to help curate content. If their peers rate content highly, then that content will be more likely to appear on the users feed. The user is also responsible to rate content, so that their peers can be recommended content too.
If a user is constantly rating content highly which their peers disagree with (imagine a bot, or someone trying to spam), then those peers may decide to omit that user from their web of peers. In other words, a user is incentivized to honestly rate content, so as to maintain their network of peers.
Though, every implementation to curate content for users requires some sort of input from the user. In this case, peercuration requires the user to send their peers a “score” for content they consume. This score is averaged across all peers of a particular user, this way the user can get an idea of what their friends think.
But this is just unrealistic. We cannot expect a user to rate each post they come across, especially for posts they have no interest in. If they never click on the post, how is the post rated? At the very least, this scoring system should take into consideration all posts that appeared on the users feed which they did not click on.
For the posts that were clicked, the user might like the post, comment, bookmark it. In the case of a comment, AI should be used to understand the meaning of their comment. In the case of a like, does it really convey just how much the user liked the post? A binary input surely doesn’t capture this. A bookmark may be given a higher score than a like, but again these are more binary values than analog.
Maybe there’s a unique way of accepting input from a user, maybe: using a circular motion dragging your thumb across the screen, the number of revolutions coincides with just how much you like the post? Would produce haptic feedback for a satisfying experience, etc.
It seems that if we can define an input which is realistic (the user will actually use this input, and it is not too demanding) then the issue of content recommendation is effectively solved.

2024-08-27 03:31:52

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Agree with this, and eventually we would like nostr to grow to a Twitter size someday. Storing notes indefinitely is infeasible, and even with a 30-day deletion policy it seems difficult.
Though, is social media the only thing we’re aiming to build here? For example, Turkey blocking access to Wikipedia to its citizens in 2017 because it was a “danger to the public”. A Wikipedia hosted on Nostr cannot be blocked by the govt, because there is no resolvable DNS address that stores all of its content.
But for a Nostr-based Wikipedia to exist, it needs to have persistent data storage.
The technical limitations are clearly an issue, and it seems that for now at least (until technology can reliably store more information on a consumer device), social media is what we are limited to if the # of users skyrockets.

2024-08-27 03:17:15

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How does peercuration accept input from the user? When a user is scoring content either negatively or positively, how are they doing so? Does a user have to score every piece of content they come across? Would be curious to see what the implementation would look like.

2024-08-25 02:50:34

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It’s just that nostr doesn’t have aggressive algorithms that push certain content. Google for example has had criticism recently because they’ve catered search results to match their political bias.
Though, most nostr clients don’t have smart algorithms which expose you to new content. Mostly just naive algorithms like “Trending 24h”, which is where I slightly disagree with Dorsey here.

2024-08-23 19:27:15

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It’s a long book but The Mind Illuminated has been helpful for me. Basic premise is to focus on the breath, and continuously improve your focus, and forgiveness after forgetting. Trying to minimize the time between forgetting to think about the breath and returning to the breath is also important.
Walks in nature are unequivocally good also.

2024-08-22 12:08:19

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The two comments the confuse me are
- You can bring your existing profile and followers to Fountain
- Your boosts and comments will be surfaced in other Nostr clients
Are these not just features native to using Nostr in the first place? Your followers and posts should be tied to your public key not the client, and any post you make from the public key should be sent to your followers regardless of the client they use..

2024-08-19 03:29:06

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Agree that censorship resistance is not enough of a feature for the average person to be interested in Nostr. But I disagree that if we can’t capture the freedom money group then we’re SOL. Nostr has more opportunities than freedom perks (although they are important), and I’m personally excited for Nostr to be able to recommend content that’s much more interesting than what’s on YouTube/Tiktok etc..
Escaping the data silos of big tech means that user information and posts across the network can be used and manipulated in new ways. User choice of a specific algorithm is HUGE and I don’t think this should be overlooked. We’re talking about fine tuning parameters so that each time you open the home page of an app, you’re actually interested in most of the content presented to you. Can’t tell you how many times YouTube recommends the same videos over and over, or more clickbait esque videos about how the world is burning and all hope is lost. Customizing your own algorithm means having the ability to filter out a lot of this.

2024-08-18 02:13:44

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Hey,
Which relays/profiles have posts about this kind of content? Or websites/repos outside of Nostr. I love Primal, and not that posts about peoples mornings aren't lovely, but these kinds of discussions I find to be more interesting.

2024-08-18 02:05:58

Hello everyone,
I've been reading through some of Nostr's ideologies, the problems it solves, the problems it presents, etc. Among the problems that are solved:
- A censorship resistant communication network. This is without a doubt an extremely important aspect especially for third-world countries/communities under an authoritarian regime.
- Destruction of big-tech data silos. A decentralized network of relays which store information means that no big-tech company owns your data, which opens up a massive number of avenues which I'm posting to discuss
- There are of course others, like client interoperability, crypto (bitcoin) integration, user specific choice of which content they'd like to see, etc.
But there are many issues yet to be solved:
- With no centralized store of data, how do we guarantee data safety? In other words, how is it guaranteed that my post from 10 years ago will in fact still be on the relay(s) it was originally posted to?
- How are relay operators incentivized to store data? They can of course require a fee for data fetching/storage, but at least to my knowledge it will not be guaranteed to offset the electricity/hardware costs to run the relay.
- How is content recommended to others? With no central authority to provide an algorithm, the discovery issue on Nostr clients is very obviously prevalent
I think its important to address these issues. Nostr can geniunely change the world, but not if the adoption rate is as low as it is now. There have been proposals to fix these issues, but I very rarely see them discussed on Primal unfortunately.
I have some ideas of my own and would like to know what's already been fleshed out or what can be improved. If anyone knows of a blog/repo where this type of stuff is welcomed, please let me know.
First, data safety. There was a recent proposal called Replicatr, which not only defines the protocol for a relay but also the infrastructure of the network. It relies on the Internet Computer, which from my understanding is a collection of independent datacenters, of which anyone can join, that operate on top of the blockchain to ensure content distribution is sufficient and content remains available. This would solve the issue of data inconsistency (two users connected to relays seeing two different feeds), and data safety to ensure content does not go randomly missing.
The incentive to store data is a tough problem to solve but I think there are viable avenues. In the case a user is viewing a post provided from a specific relay and there is an advertisement, a small percentage of the ad revenue would go to the relay operator. This would require direct contact between the relay operator, the advertiser, and the client developer(s), and would probably rely on smart contracts to ensure proper payment.
Content recommendation I think is the biggest opportunity that Nostr has going for it, and could vastly modify user experiences on social media platforms. I was reading through some of the other protocols that have been proposed besides Nostr, and one is called Solid by MIT. It proposes that everyone has a POD (a Personal Online Datastore). This is almost like their online identity, and it contains all the info about that person (their information, their browsing history through certain clients, video games played, etc.). Of course this is sensitive information, but the point is that if the user owns their POD, they can distribute information only with their consent. This opens up so many doors that it would be hard to list all of them in one post, but there are some big ones worth mentioning. Jack Dorsey has recently mentioned that the problem is not free speech, but free will. Big tech with their large data silos decide what content you do or don't see, with really no input at all from your side. But what happens when that data isn't in a silo? The posts you want to view are publicly available across a huge network of relays. And most importantly the data about your interaction with those posts is something that you own. This means that you can apply your own algorithm. An algorithm that is more biased towards educational content, gaming content, content that is more or less recent, content you've watched before or not, or content that you aren't directly subscribed to but others connected to you are (social graph), etc.. Open sourced algorithms become a thing, and user feedback of these algorithms (upvotes, discussions, etc.) also becomes prevalent.
What could become possible if you are able to temporarily assume a recommendation feed? For instance, what if we are able to upload the feed that is recommended to us on our homepages (without any disclosure of your specific viewing history)? I can see a use case where users try their best to cater a recommendation feed through a careful viewing history, so that others can enjoy the interesting feed of content they have to offer. This could even evolve into a money-making opportunity.
Nostr is great for now to act as a censorship-resistant protocol but how do we bring everyone else over? I think it would be a promise of a feed that they control and have influence over, not just for their own free will but because it actually recommends interesting and relevant content.
There is little standing in the way of moving from: closed-source, limited customization, a monopoly on platforms that prevents small devs from making their own tweaks, censored speech; and into: open-source, a free-market in regards to clients because anyone can access the data, a free-market in regards to algorithms and recommendation feeds because we own our data, and free speech
The biggest issue I can see is the incentive for users/organizations to host relays/data centers for our use. They need a way to make money and in a relatively easy way. I would love to look at some of the ideas that people have dreamed up for this and/or other similar protocols, these are just my own. What are the other economic models that are more sustainable than just running ads on every page and post?

2024-07-08 16:53:39

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How do you guarantee that data persists? In a corporate model of social media i.e. YouTube, the revenue generated is enough to operate and maintain huge data centers with employees who work on data compression, database models, etc. Videos with little attention posted 15 years ago are still online because of this fact.
Nostr is operated and maintained by the contributors who provide relays, which store an arbitrary set of data so that users can fetch posts from their followed accounts. Though, where is a post from 15 years ago (nostr isn’t that old, but let’s imagine) stored? I’d see this as a huge flaw in a framework intended for freedom of speech, since a user might not be held accountable for a post that was lost with time. This would not happen with a platform like X. I am in support of nostr, but how are these problems being addressed?
If a solution were established for this issue, that would indirectly solve an issue of content recommendation. Algorithms can’t be established without a basis of the users prior history. If a user owned their historical data, then they would also be in a position of power to choose which algorithm they want to use for content recommendation, since clients on nostr are interoperable and data persists across platforms. This, in my opinion, would immediately put nostr clients ahead of any other media platform.