Speaking of which, the most absurd promotional claim about Nostr is that you can "own your own data." This isn't just because Nostr doesn't work that way at all, but more fundamentally, because information or ideas cannot be owned – not on Nostr, not anywhere.
The concept of ownership originates from the need for logical rules to allocate scarce resources. Therefore, information, which is not scarce, cannot fundamentally be an object of ownership. While the state attempts to recognize information as ownable through various intellectual property laws, this is just one of the government's many absurdities – a privilege that cannot be logically justified.
Intellectual property, from its very inception, is rooted in government coercion and lacks a basis in logic and reason, which is why it's inherently inconsistent. Can anyone provide a logical reason why a semiconductor recipe is considered intellectual property, but a cooking recipe is not?
Of course, this discussion pertains to general, publicly available information (like Kind 1 events on Nostr). However, if you can effectively exclude others' interference through certain means, establishing exclusive possession, then that can become an object of ownership. Thanks to cryptography, we can own our identity on Nostr (via private keys) and own Bitcoin (as money).
But publicly shared information, quite literally, is not 'your data' in the sense of ownership.
richard
there are currently so many factors that make this whole process near impossible to achieve:
- it's not only about trust in relays, but also trust in end users as they could re-broadcast what they see.
- clients have default big pre-defined relays
users are told they "own" their data which is kind of true only under very specific conditions
among other major onboarding issues, nostr is advertised with crazy statements: "you own your data" but as many others also mentioned before, data ownership is not real, it has never been.
and you can't ever have true control over where your data is going. for this to be real, each user would have their own household relay, all clients would use outbox model and, even then, it would only work for protected events while also hoping your posts don't end up broadcasted to relays that don't care about nip-70.
this makes me think there could be data crawlers all over nostr that will find your data and possibly just sell it.
PoW and paid relays are solutions yet to be, for the former, deployed on more clients, and for the latter, accepted by people (no one wants to pay)
- there's basically no information on the biggest relays rn and who owns them as far as i know
what relays to use in order to have the broadest view possible or to help with discoverability? nostr.wine looks okay... but what else is there?
if your client doesn't use the outbox model, setting main big relays is the only way for you to discover new content.
at this point i have accepted that anything posted on nostr is automatically freely accessible to everyone on earth by default. and we should expect all the companies in the world to track everyone's data. the censorship-resistant aspect is real though.
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Great comment, want to add that "owning data" doesn't mean "restricting access". Nostr clients could potentially backup locally all the events that are published by the user as an extra "home relay". Then if I decide to move to another relay, perhaps I purchased a paid one, the Nostr client could re-publish my entire archive to this new relay.
Clients should also do outbox model, only publishing profile and other events to a small set of relays, except from the Relay List, which should be published on "Discovery Relays" so everyone can be discovered.
