In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite.
People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced.
Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.
In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.
The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:
- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)
- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)
- short posts like Twitter/X
- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit
- very long, blog-style posts
- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar
We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.
Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...
1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM) 2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos 3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff 4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read 5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues 6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group 7. Like twitch with live video streams 8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)
To paraphrase:
> If you Used Nostr your communication would be completely uncensored and decentralized.
> Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who use Nostr.
As of now it’s filled with BTC-maxis / crypto bros that mainly talk about how great Nostr and Bitcoin are … and not much else. I suppose there’s plenty of tasteless AI slop and gross adult scams if that suits your palate.
> Pro-censorship: The protocol is ownerless, relays are not
> Nostr doesn't subscribe to political ideals of "free speech" — it simply recognizes that different people have different morals and preferences and each server, being privately owned, can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please and users are free to choose what to read and from where.
When I setup my account I list 3-4 relays that will host my content, if any one relay decides they dislike me and bans me no big deal everyone who follows me already knows to check 3-4 different servers for me and will find my content on the others, and I can update that list at any point in time just as quickly as I'm banned... so unless you can get every relay (which ideally are all individual groups with likely different rules / regulations) I publish to to ban me at the same time there is no real way to "censor" someone in the way we are used to currently.
On Lemmy for example you can't even find a post another server, since post ids are tied to a server. So despite post actually being cached on multiple servers, it provides absolutely nothing that helps with censorship or crash tolleranze.
Truly awful to have decentralized freedom.
Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.
What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers.
There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.
That statement is false and if you disagree: please provide a source.
There is no such restriction on the NIP (protocol guidelines). I have been writing NOSTR software since years and there was NEVER such restriction in place. In fact, wouldn't even make sense because some relays (e.g. Primal) are super-aggregators for smaller relays.
> users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays
This is a false statement. NIP 65 provides a list of which servers the users declares to be using. This way readers for that user know at which door (server) to knock and ask for updates.
this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with.
there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.
This would be like the HTTP protocol not defining `POST`, and leaving it up to servers and clients to implement it based on however it feels like.
I really like the ideals behind Nostr, but I think its implementation and execution could be better.