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fiatjaf8d ago
Sorry about that, I'm tired of seeing people claim Nostr isn't decentralized always for the wrong reasons and never expand on their claims. But in your case I think you really misunderstood things. The idea of Nostr isn't that messages are evenly spread across the network. I do not believe that is the correct approach at all. Although nothing prevents someone from trying and would be fun to see more p2p spreading of Nostr events I don't think that will scale, so I wouldn't focus on it. Instead the approach Nostr takes is to let each person publish to one or more servers they choose. Decentralization happens by not requiring publishers to be present on a central location, but by allowing readers to go to whatever location necessary in order to fetch their content. So even if everybody is using the same relay at one point, the network is still "decentralized" as long as clients are doing their job correctly and anyone can move out of that central relay anytime they want and start publishing to his own personal relay in his basement: all their followers will continue to get his updates automatically, now from the new relay. It's explained visually here: https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/#/outbox
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xte8d ago
Being technically decentralised doesn't make it practically so. The Web is technically a hypertext, running on a partially interconnected mesh network, yet nowadays the bulk of traffic flows between a handful of giant hubs, to the point where "marginal" social networks stay that way simply due to a lack of critical mass, and not having an account on some giant's servers is a communication problem for many. We have, and consider normal, major communication systems that only talk to themselves. XMPP is decentralised by design, yet when it was popular, Google was the main player and its changes were adopted even if they were unsuitable for most, simply because they were needed to interoperate with it. When Google abandoned it, the users vanished and XMPP essentially died, having become irrelevant. To put it another way, yes, Nostr is decentralised by design, but this peculiar design makes it practically centralised, and it is, or rather will be in the future if it succeeds, a problem. Just see Primal as an example.
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inkan7d ago
"... all their followers will continue to get his updates automatically ..." Yes, but for this to work and scale in the long-term, Nostr identities (i.e. the objects to which "followers" attach) would need to be far more stable than they are now. Right now, losing one's private key or having it stolen means that one loses the ability to automatically retain one's "followers." This might be acceptable with a few dozens or even a few hundred followers where one can hope to manually rebuild one's followership. But it won't work for, say, a few hundred thousand followers. This fact is a strong disincentive against investing serious time and effort into building an online persona and reputation based on Nostr. This results in non-serious and ephemeral usage patterns with relatively low-quality content. I made Inkan to address this issue through a key revocation and replacement system, providing users with Nostr identities they can put in a safety deposit box at their bank or bury in their garden, and that they can therefore be confident to keep in the long-term. I'm conscious about promoting a product here. The excuse is that it's relevant to what's being discussed.
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