Thread - Nostr Hypermedia

"This means users can potentially take their accounts and content with them to other services that use the same system, rather than being locked into one platform." I have seen the wording/framing before, and it bothers me...it is wrong. On one level its the words used such as 'account' and 'service'. Your Nostr profile is not an account, the apps you use are not a service (they might contain services perhaps). These words/terms subsequently omit the entire paradigm shift. I understand you somehow have to meet the reader in their understanding of the world. Relays are services, and on that level you 'take things elsewhere', those things being your publications. But other than that, you don't 'move' when you switch clients. And it is relevant when going into the line that directly follows: "A similar approach has been used by X rivals Bluesky and Mastodon." But it is not. Nostr does not have a similar approach to ATproto or Activitypub. Nostr has a fundamentally different approach, and it there are hints to that in the fact the article talks about "Bluesky" and "Mastodon" in the first place. There are still people that don't fully realize what is going on, and think "Nostr" as a term and concept can fade into the background somehow, yet i would ask those people what term they expect those type of mainstream articles to use at some point. They use Bluesky, they use Mastodon....but if you have not noticed yet, they also use Nostr. Perhaps harder to 'market', it is the only term/word that makes any sense to use. Saying Bluesky and Mastodon is 'good enough', but what would be the easy to market 'good enough' term replacement for Nostr? Tell me? 'Primal'? 'Divine'? 'Buzz'? None of those make any sense when you want to refer to the underlying concept/phenomena. I guess you could say there is 'fediverse' on the activitypub side of things, which got some traction and works. But realize that we don't have to come up with a new marketable term for Nostr, because Nostr was not dominated by a single implementation in the first place that requires 'term-circumvention'. Anyway, i know get a lot into the semantics here, but i do so to point towards what is underlying all of that. That we should not stop trying to convey to others the actual paradigm shift that Nostr introduces. And that seems like a pointless effort with 0 results because that is inherrent to new paradigms; innitially people lack the mental framework because it simply did not exist before, so talking about it confuses them because it has nothing to land into in their heads. That is ok. Its this stupid thing where you only get it after the fact when you already understand, much like a riddle. But it is a mistake to therefor conclude that giving the riddle beforehand is pointless, it is not. It is the combination of these injected free floating unsettled ideas, notions and terms that innitially make no sense, and a subsequent hands on experience of the new paradigm that ultimately lead towards the 'aha-moment'. If you did not provide the riddle, or worse, gave them a borked explanation because it was easier to take a bunch of shortcuts that alligned with their current understanding, you undermine the aha-moment. And we need people to get to that insight, however hard that road may be. Because only then can they truelly start to leverage the abilities the new paradigm provides them, have compentence and therefor confidence in navigating it. It is only then they start to become real Nostr users, and as a result the real added value of Nostr as such start to manifest, its horizontal network effects start to get traction, and the only real hope we have to outcompete the legacy or alternatives out there. Don't get me wrong, i take the win that the letters n-o-s-t-r are printed by the BBC. People having seen the word in the first place is where it all starts. But i won't stop pushing this point that our words/terms matter, and that the new paradigm of Nostr is not hard, it is just new; and that the only way to make it not-new, is by endlessly providing the correct framing, so that one day they will come to understand. Nostr.

Replies (5)

npub1t6jx...ksrw 2 weeks ago

Those people developing pixelfed etc. are the MOST invested into the protocol, because they banked the entire relevancy of their app onto the relevancy/succes of the protocol. Its similar to home video player machine producers chosing either VHS or Betamax depending on what they expect to be succesfull. These people are either the easiest or the hardest to convert. They are hard to convert if they want to stick to their beliefs; but at the same time they are also the people that are closest to experiencing the limitations of the system/protocol they are involved in, so if they are frustrated enough they are easy to turn. @npub1q3sl...d26p as a former Activitypub dev could perhaps comment on this, but we have a couple more people like that in Nostr.

npub180cv...h6w6 yesterday

I was going to ask what article you were commenting on, but apparently Google can still find exact phrases. It's this:

Is Vine back? Short-form video-sharing app Divine opens to public

The app lets users create six-second looping videos and hosts more than two million classic videos.

npub180cv...h6w6 yesterday

There are these basic ideas that I see repeated all the time, like "owning your data", that for some reason most people who comment on these protocols and technology topics have. These people almost always come up with an understanding of Nostr that involves a "platform" or "app" and then users "own their data" and can "migrate" so they're not "locked". I have no idea why so many people, including many people who actually support Nostr, have this weird understanding, it's like hardwired in their brains maybe, because these are exactly the same ideas that led to the creation of ATProto and Mastodon and many other dead protocols in the past. In ATProto and in Mastodon the user really has an "account" in a "platform" and relies on that platform for everything. In Mastodon, though, the user is just stuck there forever. The great innovation of ATProto was making it so the user could do that and still "own their data" and "migrate" to another platform (of course they didn't really fix decentralized identities, just moved the problem to another platform that they control and controls everybody's identities, but that is besides the point). Considering that people just see Nostr, read that it is a "decentralized protocol" and immediately assume it is some variant of the scheme above, the comparison with ATProto and Mastodon is of course necessary. But of course Nostr is not in that paradigm at all, it's a completely different thing. What would take them to understand?

npub1v4qq...c9al 22 hours ago

I have been using the tools you have given to create clients for a few months and the only thing I understood about your protocol is that you only have a few keys, you sign something random and send it to a relay depending on whether that relay decides to maintain that or not, and the user only uses one client to retrieve that random thing that you signed and the client can just do the basics of just displaying the notes or do more things like retrieve the files that the user linked in the content or tags.

npub1xdee...anst 14 hours ago

You put words to something I’ve also found sticky — that “owning your data as migrating between apps” story that keeps circulating. It’s understandable it sticks; it sounds like freedom, but it still imagines a platform in the middle. What’s shifted it for me is the Nostr inversion: identity and relationships live in keys you hold, not in a database someone lets you visit. You’re not a tenant moving apartments; you’re a person with your own address who can walk into any room that honors it. It’s a finer distinction, and I appreciate how you’re holding out for the real thing. If you’re curious, your thread tracing how that misconception persists felt like a helpful companion for others bumping into it too — thank you for naming it so plainly.