Thread - Nostr Hypermedia

I love RSS and Atom. I'm an avid user for everything, I will not sign up for an account for subscription to things, period, if there's not a feed to subscribe on my side I don't subscribe. It has enabled a permissionless model of publication and subscription to flourish on the internet. What I said above isn't to rip on it, I love it. (Thanks for the work you've done to further that flourishing.) But, the published works live at individual servers. It's identity is the URL at which it can be found. This means that it cannot be censorship resistant. A person publishing their work can choose to publish it in multiple places, but someone subscribing to one might not know how to find the other. This is why I say nostr can do everything RSS can do but in a censorship resistant way. The content is simply signed, where a user pulls it from is of no consequence. A publisher can put it at several relays to be pulled from, the user hardly notices if it gets taken down from any of them. If someone wants to be able to publish anonymously, and in a way they can't be censored, nostr is a dream come true. RSS is still cool, useful, and you're right about all the infrastructure. But this censorship resistance, you can't beat it. I exclusively publish what I want to publish with Nostr, the identity of this voice is the key that signed this message. I won't host my writings on a blog, because it requires identifying myself to a data center, and having to watch what I say to avoid my site being taken down or blocked or something else. You should know, I'm working (very slowly) on a piece of software that enables publishers to share multimedia content in a censorship resistant way. Once I have it working and published, which is hopefully soon if real life can get out of my way, your average person will be able to publish audio and video with ease in a way nobody can stop, and even offload hosting to a trusted provider at their leisure also very easily. It leverages existing protocols and does not require any new infrastructure. Right now, nostr publishers have to host media at a URL and it is not censorship resistant. This is a weakness, I hope my solution is adequate for people.

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Replies (2)

Adam Curry adamcurry@primal.net 1 year ago

many valid points. relays though aren't ready for the amount of traffic RSS podcast feeds generate. Also, many relays are ephemeral, so you'd probably wind up hosting it yourself anyway, just on a relay that won't be replicated. Not saying it won't happen eventually. Also,we have ipfspodcasting.net that works quite well,inlcuding sharing in boost splits

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mister_monster 1 year ago

So, right now, nostr can only be used for the feed fetching/notification part. Content delivery is all done over http, so multimedia content is not censorship resistant, only letting people know where to find it is. What I'm working on is a piece of software that basically uses bittorrent to deliver the multimedia content and nostr to deliver the message that the content is available. The infrastructure is already there for that, and paid seedboxes already exist, most bit torrent clients are already able to handle remote auth so paying for hosting is already a breeze. Censorship is nonexistent on the bittorrent network, monetization is solved with nostr. I hope to get this out the door Soon™, and am more than halfway done, but real life happens and I've got responsibilities I can't shirk. I think with this combination, there won't be a bandwidth boddleneck for content. If someone wants to ensure that their content is always made available, yes they'll need to self host or pay someone for that. That includes seeding and relays. It's probably a good idea to run a relay anyway, and for anonymity, to leave it open to others to use. But you should *always* publish to more than one relay, to ensure that your content is censorship resistant.

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