In this interview i thought i would attempt to explain perhaps the most arcane insight behind Nostr. I think i failed, but thats not the end of the world.
I won't do a full attempt here and now, but the point is that verifiability on the one hand, and context on the other is what makes Nostr ''work'' eventhough theoretically it should not. A pubkey or a hash are just meaningless strings. If i would hand you such at string, it would just be a random garbled mess. And it is, it very much is a random garbled mess, that is very much the point of such strings.
It is only because there are things associated to those strings, be that an event in the case of the eventID/hash, or an actor in the case of a public key, that it gains any meaning.
This begs the question as to how you would find out what that associated thing is, where you would find it. And it is this question that is the reason that from a theoretical perspective the unsolveable problem comes in; there is no full proof method or insurance you ever will.
It just so happens that in practice, we have all these servers that make an effort of indexing this association. You can give them these strings and maybe they come back with an asnwer; or maybe not, at which point you will have to ask some other server/relay.
But these random strings, in practice, rarely stand on their own. Each event always stand in the context of its publisher in the first place, but may also itself be referenced by other events from other publishers. These publishers also reference eachother (chief among such references is a follow list), so in actuality there is this lively network of active references that quickly scatters among the relays.
Once you find the association, you know you found it because you can verify, so each attempt, each quest for context atleast carries this promise that you know you arived at your destination once you get there, eventhough there is no promise you will ever get to the destination.
So regardless how scattered the data may be, in its fragmentation it is indexed, and in its 'liveliness' it is interconnected through reference, and in its answers it provides context, and in its context it delivers meaning.
And thats how you go from a meaningless string to meaning. The reason for all of this is so that everyone can permissionlessly operate on the same interoperable plane and we don't need a cental party, a platform, to provide context and therefor meaning for us. It is the method by which we liberate ourselves from the silo, whatever it is we are doing.
It is how we solve for coordination, be that on Nostr itself, be that for Blossom, be that for Ngit or whatever else. It is how we flipped the script, so that instead of all going to the exact same place to interact, we can manage to go wherever the other happens to be to interact, in order to fullfill the promise of the internet that everyone potentially can get into contact with anybody else.
Ok, maybe i sort of did do an attempt to explain it again, and frankly I don't think i did much of a better job than i did during the interview, but...i dunno, bite me.
Nostr.
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