yeah, probably ended for the best this way

If I remember correctly they contacted me and I had a call with a guy from Twitter where he told me Bluesky's goals were to build a protocol for which Twitter could become a client in the future, to which I said Nostr was a perfect match, then he asked me if I would consider becoming the lead Bluesky person they would pick for leading the effort, and I said ok but asked if it would be acceptable if I just used Nostr as it was as "the Bluesky" without considering the other proposals and he didn't know what to say. Then he put me in a secret group chat with some other people including SSB people, Mastodon people, the GUN guy and people from a bunch of useless IPFS projects. Supposedly the group was gathered to work together in creating this Bluesky protocol, but I read the entire conversation and it was 100% people just shilling their own projects, so I talked a little about Nostr and the first feedback I got was: "how do we ban people? it looks like it would be very hard to ban", so I said that was the idea and the conversation ended. Maybe Jay Graber was in this chat, but I don't remember reading any messages from her. Some time after that supposedly this group produced a "report" containing all decentralized protocols in existence and a comparison between them, but it didn't include Nostr. I think the group didn't produce anything and this was likely a solo effort from Jay. The group continued its useless, sparse conversation and Bluesky the company was created through some other means of communication.

You dodged it well. So happy you continued on your own way. In the end,#nostr is winning, your idea is winning, freedom is winning. Everyone will get #theNostr after the ban they didn't deserve..

We have NIP-01. That’s all we need to start. Thanks!

Build slow

Build slow

In 2012 me and another guy pitched a way to evaluate all of our option trading portfolios. We mashed together the code for our prototype in two weeks. A few months after we pitched the idea our team was closed down and the "real quant team" took over. Took them two years to implement a bad solution that didn't do half the stuff we had done in no time. Being good is no what people want you to be. Especially if it puts their little empire in danger.

I wonder if it wouldn't have been better if I had been chosen. That would never happen in the first place, but just being able to experiment with the protocol and some test clients and environments like Bluesky did. That could probably make us arrive at clear description of what we now call "outbox model", for example, before launching Nostr. And if I was able to work together with some smart leftists on the issue, maybe we could have figured a nice way to make relays more proeminent in the protocol as home for communities and "safe" spaces, as natural curators of content and discovery layers for what later would be handled by the outbox model of following people. And if it had all worked well then maybe we would have built a nice protocol that would still be decentralized and censorship-resistant but would at the same time appeal to leftists and libertarians and everything in between and we would get a ton of media boost and maybe be ready for mass adoption and not face any criticisms from any side except from Jeffrey Epstein friends and Nostr would be named Bluesky and be bigger than all the centralized platforms combined today. But of course this wouldn't happen in this way at all. What would happen instead?

We can probably still build all of this...

I was picturing it in my mjnd while reading it.. it would have been amazing, but not sure how much feasible. Probably that's why didn't go even close to that, since most of them weren't ready for it. All what you explained can still happen if the Bluesky team or the head there wants to. Create a way and place where devs nostr devs can interect and discuss with the rest and show them now after that time what they have achieved on the freedom and censorship level with nostr. Things is are they (Bluesky) ready to not have the power to censor or decide what's wrong/right/censorable.

Bluesky is an echo chamber of wokeness on a constant witch hunt looking for “Nazis,” by which they mean anyone who doesn’t subscribe lock, stock, and barrel to their dominant yet ever shifting worldview. I’ve already deleted one account there and I’m well on my way to doing it again. I’m much less active than I was in the beginning.

I never was on Facebook, Twitter, or any social media ever. Found out about Nostr because of my interest in Bitcoin. Asked my wife to join to learn about Bitcoin (she's the social one of us). She loved it and helped on board me. My main interest here is still Bitcoin, but I've learned about many more things. Nostr's cool. Appreciate ya @fiatjaf

What does this have to do with making relay communities more prominent?

With all due respect, fuck the leftists. They owned big tech social media and only now is it slipping through their fingers. All us Nostriches making up this puny 20K daily users - we were all victims of these cunts and their weaponisation of big tech. That’s what kept people here. We all saw some shit during Covid, we saw the problem, we saw the solution. We’re not the only ones with this problem. We know others have it but haven’t pinpointed the cause. The leftists don’t need to be considered - they dominate the current mainstream narrative. They’re ideologically opposed to us so why would we want to engage them?

We need them on Nostr so we can prove them wrong with arguments and change the minds of some of them.

hard to ban ... that's the idea. 💪👊⚡

Nothing. We could probably find a way to do something like that, but it might turn this into more of a siloed Mastodon-like environment. The inability to deplatform users is probably going to be a philosophical nonstarter for a lot of people.

What would have happenend instead is an over-spec'd base protocol as a result of internal politicing. Its not just that 'lefty' people want moderated environments for themselves and are happy to let everyone else be; they will haunt you to the ends of the earth to gain some sort of controll, or the idea of controll, because only then can they rest easy. Never get into a situation where these people can veto what you do, because it is a prayer without end before they are satisfied. The only option is to confront them with a fait accompli that they can optimize for their own preferences, but simply can't dictate outside of that.

I love the based fiatjaf

I met someone who is as working on IPFS once. He seemed like a bright guy with the intention to really create something that was censorship resistant, but I am not technical enough to assess the project. I'm curious if anyone has an explanation or blog post about why IPFS is not practical. I'd like to understand it and share it with him as a counterpoint. I've been trying to recruit him to nostr because his ethos seems to be aligned.

I don't believe it's true deplatforming. For example if I decided to use ditto.pub and told all of my followers to go there, then Alex banned me, I'd just tell them all to go to derekiscool.pub and our social graphs come with us. I might be banned from a platform, but I'd just be moving to the next or building my own with relative ease.

I agree the more we broaden the spectrum the better. Let the ones who will cry and can’t handle go away but there are plenty in the left who would engage and debate. I don’t know about Bluesky but there are many on the left on Instagram and Twitter who slam the crap out of Dems and Libs, for very similar reasons the right does.

Nostr cannot be born within any corporation because the first thing they all think about is, "How do we ban people? It looks like it would be very hard to ban."

I use IPFS Desktop, but it doesn't have enough adoption to make it worth the time. At least it doesn't take up a lot of bandwidth. A nostr client to post/share IPFS hashes of content would be really cool, but that's way beyond my skills to put together.

The last two sentences; that's why bitcoin adoption went as far as it went of today.

There's a decent one on @fiatjaf 's blog:

How IPFS is broken

And 'we' will, for it is not illegitimate, their 'demands' are fair and reasonable; but the issue arrises that they deem their bells and whissles as a minimal viable requirement. As a result they will put it in whatever base protocol they come up with on the one hand, and only begrudgingly build it on top of another protocol if it turns out that is the direction the world is going.

I like this direction. It shows flexible thinking and a way to invite users who are currently entrenched in conventional social media. In my opinion, we need more influential people to join on nostr to build momentum and resources. I’m not a dev or anything technical yet I’m a supporter of free speech and investing in our country’s infrastructure. It’s why i’m on nostr. One person for example would be nassim taleb this is his tweet today pretty appropriate: “The current tension is no longer so much about left vs. right, authoritarian vs. freedom based, colonial vs. universalist, tradition vs. innovation, warmonger vs. noninterventionist; it simply became about bureaucratic vs nonbureaucratic systems. #SkinInTheGame”

Easier said than done. I don’t really want to be chasing people around to different isolated social network buckets. That’s basically what Mastodon was like and I hated it because I could never figure out how to find and follow anyone.

Pick up your balls man

That could happen now if an app that you're using hard codes in the blocking of a npub. I guess NIP-29 apps are really only vulnerable to censorship in this regard?

“How do we ban people?” Besides kicking people off of relays, can we have a PoW npub based democratic system? Similarly like Bitcoin mining.

Shut up Indian

I was also in the early pre-Bluesky group. It was chaotic and there were a lot of contradictory pressures on the group. Some people wanted Bluesky to be a twitter replacement, tech Twitter itself would eventually use. Others wanted it to be a way of solving the problem of social media platforms becoming stagnant because the platform owners could control and limit innovation by locking down the API. Still others wanted it as a way to get out of an impossible moderation problem where a single entity or person had to decide who could say what how. @Jay 🦋 was a former zcash dev / @Fight for the Future activist who’d been building a decentralized social events app / meetup clone called happn. She’d done some SSB (secure scuttlebutt) development but I think happn was on its own protocol she made. It never took off so she had time on her hands to work on the Bluesky research. I remember being very impressed with her work and spent a while trying to talk her in to co-founding the company which made planetary.social and now @nos. The thing is Jay was available and did the work on Bluesky before it was Bluesky the company or they’d created the ATprotocol. It wasn’t clear that Bluesky would need to make a new protocol. That was the reason for the research paper. Lots of people showed up and participated in those invite only discussions. Most had a project to pitch, lot of them used some shitcoin or another. Jay was pretty agnostic. She did the work of looking at the protocols and wrote up a good summary. She was also paid by Twitter as a contractor to do that writing. Probably that was what let her have the time and focus to become the founder. Lots of us pushed for Bluesky to be a separate legal entity because we felt if it was Twitter inc project eventually someone would kill it. A bunch of us applied to be the CEO of Bluesky, myself included. While there is a lot Jay has done which is different from how I’d do it and I’ve got some big disagreements with some of her choices, you can’t deny that what she built is working. Does it do everything I’d want, how I’d want? No, not at all. But it has provided Twitter with an open protocol alternative. I think Bluesky went off a couple ways. One is a lot of IPFS folks got involved and over complicated the protocol. Layers upon layers of tech and abstractions. Secondly is trickier, their user base wanted a more moderated and tightly controlled system than Bluesky was trying to build. They moved away from openness in part because they were listening to their users. But they could have build ATprotocol to work in a permissionless way and made the bsky.app part permissioned as their users demanded. They also could have built the protocol in the open, but instead if you want to contribute to ATprotocol, you need to be an employee. Jay herself signs off on every change to the spec. It’s a very top down way of working, which has worked for them, but isn’t prefigurative in building the world we want with the values we want that future world to have.

...to ban people?

I like the solution that @Martti Malmi is implementing for Iris. View quoted note →

I missed that. Thanks.

At least to more effectively moderate content. i.e: revenge porn, cp, etc…

Coracle has had this for quite a while too

It is what it is; thanks @fiatjaf 🫡

“How do you ban people?” 😂

Lol is there another?

No one can wake up every day based

I would still like to see a concept of private accounts in Nostr. In fact I think the majority of people would prefer such things to feel safer. Make posts encrypted and let them share the decrypt key with their “friends”. I know it would require some finagling to not have a bunch of junk data on the timeline, but I think the final word on the concept has not been spoken yet

Interesting. Thanks for sharing. It’s probably for the best that things worked out the way they did …

Does she really believe top down approach works? And that bluesky will prevail knowing the pressure it will eventually face - from governments, advertisers, investors? Jack said they’re making all the same mistakes as Twitter, surely she must have heard this and processed it to realize he is correct? I guess I’m not really asking you as you wouldn’t know what she thinks but why do you suppose they went down this route instead of taking nostr seriously? Was the concept of no banning so difficult to accept? I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on through her head then or now …

Ha!

to receive this as the first feedback speaks volumes

lol wtf you talkin about

This is very interesting, thanks for sharing.

bsky is DNC propaganda.

Setting aside the fact that Bluesky is technically "permissionless" today (you just have to run the full stack yourself from scratch with no users) how could it have been made really open and permissionless? I don't think their model could have supported that.

This is such a great thread. It's so refreshing seeing real substance in social media again.

still wanting to see nostr and bluesky merging together as one piece.

Scratch a leftist, find a totalitarian.

What, you haven't seen enough "stack sats" and "HODL" incantations yet to last a lifetime?!

You can change some of the moderates minds, as they are normal people that have been lied to. The far left is just mentally ill people (that's not hyperbole). You can't fix them with logic and reason.

Thank you for your insight and openness. 🙏🏻 we learn a lot from sharing your experiences. Where others might withhold information, I feel NOSTR is really driving a community built around collective growth towards benefiting the user’s and not the board members.

Sounds like everything worked out for the best.

Wild.

Why do you ask that? He seemed like a very nice fellow, but I'm pretty sure he didn't play in the NBA.

Leftists get the censorious cesspool they deserve, and the rest of us get nostr.

Appreciate the background 🤙

Léa

Let individuals decide who want to mute. Do not assume you know better than users.

Yes

nothing is stopping that. I think we have encrypted group nip PR out there

Just need a UX that treats it like a private account rather than a “group” I guess

A proper nostr is a dark forest where "the leftists" can stay in their own little island (if they want). The "we" you are referring to is a fiction on a proper decentralized network. You assume a fully-connected network. Don't do that.

Hard to reason someone out of a position they came into through emotion

Your article "Why IPFS sucks" was a big eye opener for me when I first showed up to Nostr a few years ago. Should be mandatory reading 🤣

Your statement is far too simplistic on a large scale. Muting stuff does not make seriously damaging things go away. Might just as well say “Just let people in the real world decide who they want to rape, rob & kill and if you dont want to see it, then dont look!” Decentralized self regulation is key. Note the word: Decentralized.

Yes I agree. It’s not a dark forest with one little corner for them ATM though, so I maintain - fuck the leftists. We need scale before we start giving a fuck about them or what they want. We don’t need to cater to them and provide a dark corner for them, they can fuck off to BlueSky or wherever else if they want a safe space. They can be absorbed naturally through scaling. The idea we should actively seek them out as a bootstrap cohort is retarded - you don’t invite people like this in unless you want your face eaten,

Correct. We don’t need to reason with leftists. You’ll get more reasoning out of a stray cat than from a western indoctrinated leftist who has been programmed into their thought pattern. I’m on #nostr so I don’t have to see their shit. I have no desire to try to talk them into better ideas. They’re retarded - fuck them.

They aren’t for changing, that’s for sure.

Exactly. Why engage them in dialogue when we already know for that for them to still be aligned to this statist-Borg of wokeism and money printing socialism means they are not going to change their views. They’re not on the fence and persuadable. They’re locked in to a worldview which is given to them from on high.

Your face is un-eatable on Nostr. I don't even understand what you're concerned about will happen... Say 20,000 of the worst-case users joined tomorrow, what do you think would happen to your experience?

Raping, robbing and killing are crimes. Looking is not. You have all the rights to impide raping, robbing and killing. But you have zero rights at telling others what they can look at.

A person basically has to do it on their own through a process of inquiry and intellectual honesty. Most of us leaned left at one time when we were younger. It's something that one has to do themselves though... Except in rare cases.

“The system” is setup to grind lower until you work out how to beat it. Yes you have to learn what to save in (BTC), but first you have to learn how the market works.

I reckon they’d spit their dummies that they can’t censor people directly so they’d go to other means to see who they could shout it through. How could they align 20k users?

You have to learn a lot of things.... Mostly it comes down to experience in the real world.... But at some point, you need to have s radicalizing experience.... Then, you seek the knowledge that combined with experience, leads to understanding and wisdom.

I don't understand this message. Could you re-word it or something? How would your experience of Nostr and the people you choose to follow be degraded by the fact that other people also use the protocol?

Lol. You do know that there are also a filmer and uploader involved right? 💀 Im going to cut this discussion though. Take care 👋

You open the doors, you get the dregs of the first world. Be careful who you invite.

Maybe. Maybe or I snap my fingers to the same result?

Don't open YOUR door then. I truly am perplexed wrt what you think Nostr is... If someone else uses SMTP, does it impact your ability to send and receive emails with people you trust who run their own mail servers? If course not. It's an open protocol.

Look around Vinney. Whose reality is more real - yours or mine? Stop feeding yourself bullshit. Let’s see you be honest

On proper decentralized protocols, the subjective view of each node _is_ their reality. Your perspective seems (to me) to be clouded by being accustomed to centralized experiences; this is very common. I think maybe we're talking past eachother in a pretty extreme way and I'm not sure why.

Ah, perhaps you'll understand it this way: do the Bitcoin Cash users, existing in their own stupid fork, negatively impact your use of Bitcoin? Think about that for a little and you'll see my point.

Perhaps you’ll understand it through the same lens. Do I give a single fuck about Bcashers? Do I care what they think? Do I want to listen to their opinions? Do I want to expend resources on opening a safe space for bcashers to be able to voice their opinions to me and other Nostriches? NO. FUCK THEM. FUCK THE BCASHERS. Fuck them all. We shouldn’t do a single thing to reach out to them. Fuck them. If they want to build their own shit on #nostr then I’m not going to say anything. But when people who have the ability to grant money here talk about “reaching out” to people like this then I’m going to stick my head above the parapet and say what I think - fuck the Bcashers, fuck leftists, stop trying to appease your ideological foes, that shit is only going to end badly for you. We don’t need to hear our leftists or Bcashers - we can tell them to fuck off, and we don’t have to feel bad in doing so. It’s ok. No thoughtpolice are going to come along and judge us for not being nice to leftists and Bcashers. We’re not going to hell because we didn’t satisfy leftists and Bcashers. You think about that for a bit and you’ll see my point. I’m not interested in absorbing leftist slop nor bcash slop into my frame - I’ve already considered that shit and I want no part of either. I want them both to fuck off. I want Robert Conquest’s 3 laws applied. View quoted note →

I see your point. And I appreciate persuasion; sticking your head up to say what you think re "people who have the ability to grant money". > If they want to build their own shit on #nostr then I’m not going to say anything. Case closed. They might do just that. And I expect you'll complain about it at the time - which is totally fine with me. As long as the protocols aren't changed in such a way that makes it infeasible for people to participate, then I'm happy to have people yell at eachother as much as they want.

What?