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102 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 9 Aug 2023 \ on: Where will nostr be in 3 years nostr
Social media hot take: like email/mastodon in terms of topology ... which is wayyyyy better than the alternative centralized social media so a huge win
But I do think it isn't going to be forever like email or is doomed to be like email because identities are portable which is novel and hard to account for. It's just where I'd guess it'll be in 3 years if the protocol can't produce portable experiences in that time frame. (You can already see thought leaders in nostr giving people permission, even shilling, centralization points on nostr.)
I'm very hopeful @jb55's work on nostrdb will approach the limit of decentralized experiences possible with nostr's current protocol design and inform what's needed to raise the limit.
Feels like the solutions are being worked on and open sourced quite rapidly.
One such example would be Primal. They worked out a solid caching service, and then open sourced it because they knew it could potentially be a centralizing force.
They've open sourced their entire stack here - https://github.com/PrimalHQ
Any Nostr business that is seeking to create a better experience needs to open source their solution or risk the entire network centralizing around them. Which, at the end of the day, would be a complete and total failure. Might as well just use tradition social media in that case.
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They've open sourced their entire stack here - https://github.com/PrimalHQ
I'm super happy they open sourced. How expensive (including staff to maintain operation) do you think it is to run primal? It's cost/time prohibitive to run a normal relay and primal is caching the data of all of them.
Any Nostr business that is seeking to create a better experience needs to open source their solution or risk the entire network centralizing around them.
Nostr can't require projects open source though. Certain experiences are so expensive or hard to provide, open sourcing won't provide meaningful decentralization either.
Which, at the end of the day, would be a complete and total failure. Might as well just use tradition social media in that case.
We'd have to define failure. Creating a portable identity and portable data protocol that's widely adopted, even if experiences using it are centralized, is still a huge win in my book. It's a relatively incremental victory, but a victory nonetheless and more victories can be piled on top if it stays relevant.
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Completely on board with your points, but here's my concern: If a single proprietary client or service becomes THE go-to on Nostr, it's vulnerable. The moment authorities knock, they'll give in, undermining Nostr's core purpose.
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embrace.expand.extinguish
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I agree. Ideally we're all practicing good data sovereignty practices and can migrate between go-tos until we figure out how to not need them.
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