Making nostr P2P \ stacker news ~nostr

365 sats \ 18 comments \ @BallLightning 1 Sep nostr

Many people here think that nostr is p2p. It is not. It relies on relays. You can't peer with another nostr user. So I was thinking that it will be quite easy to use BitTorrent like system. Since each note can be identified by its hash, it will be easy to use dht to find people who have it (supposedly the poster will have it for certain and also people who follow the poster). I am not sure about indexing but i think there are ready solutions for that.

What do you think?

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183 sats \ 8 replies \ @Catcher 1 Sep

The main question will be - why?

20 sats \ 7 replies \ @k00b 1 Sep

Yep - for mostly feed-based social media, what does p2p provide better than client-server?

It’s more decentralized obviously but is it worth the trade offs given the application?

142 sats \ 1 reply \ @entrope 1 Sep

Could it be used to fill in/check for relay gaps? E.g. when someone you're following is online at the same time as you, you tell it what notes you have and ask if any are missing, and those can be sent directly.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 1 Sep

Sure, I think for augmenting relays a dht be cool or for discovering relays/nostriches in the first place or as a place for relays to crawl and check if a peer is available to be read from.

Otherwise, I'm not sure it'd provide a twitter-like experience with online/offline/roaming/behind-nat peers.

Nostr works pretty well today because it emulates the way most applications work - notes are concentrated and duplicated to a few places and clients read from them. It's a lot like ActivityPub but with keypair ids. Moving beyond that model will require some pretty radical and practical insight that no one has managed to produce and scale yet.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @BallLightning OP 1 Sep

Because it's cool. Besides you can use it simultaneously with the standard server based relays. Feed based social media features can be achieved by some kind of decentralized indexing, which I said in the original post don't know if they are really possible or fast enough.

Another cool thing would be a p2p global git repository btw :)

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 1 Sep

Cool to say and cool to use more often at odds than not, but I agree it'd be cool.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @BallLightning OP 1 Sep

Well... would saying that relays being easier to block than a true p2p connection count as a valid argument :)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 1 Sep

It's a valid argument, but a social protocol that isn't very easy to use won't be very valuable.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BallLightning OP 1 Sep

I think end users won't see this so it will be as easy as it is now (unless something that is possible now is impossible in pure p2p architecture)

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinosphere 1 Sep

Strict P2P has a severe flaw for content sharing: Findability.

It's great for apps where every node keeps an identical data set (blockchain) but it sucks when everyone keeps their own favorite content. Your peer finding what you want to find is like winning the lotto in those circumstances.

Client-server is ideal for Nostr.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Akg10s33 1 Sep

I'm currently listening to lunaticoin's podcast about Nostr... I'm a beginner but this Nostr protocol is very interesting and due to all the craziness that is happening in common networks such as X... and I think it wouldn't be P2P... after finishing listening to my podcast I'm going to start using Nostr...

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @didiplaywell 2 Sep

So far I see Nostr balances privacy/usability very well. If you want upmost privacy, you can just be your own relay. That's the elegance of Nostr.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SatsMate 2 Sep

Does it need to be P2P? That seems complicated to engineer...

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Msd0457890 1 Sep

I have currently started my journey in Bitcoin, today I am just beginning to know what Nostr is and I think it is great how it has become a new alternative to social networks, making us increasingly free from censorship.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BTCLNAT 1 Sep

P2P on Nostr is very easy,

MOSTRO

Nostr is actually a protocol based on relays, which work as nodes similar to Bitcoin. Mostro is a web client for P2P exchange similar to the lnp2pbot of telegram. Advantages in Nostr, IT CANNOT BE CENSORED.

So don't be afraid. Nostr offers us all the freedom we need

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @luigi1256 1 Sep

is not totally true that, there are webrtc servers

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @tolot 1 Sep

P2p is gold but if we're talking about socialmedia-like protocols, I don't think that it would work as espected. A social platform, being it a protocol or a closed garden, has the goal to solve the issue of content discovery and user discovery. In Nostr, that is somehow solved by the fact that users push content to relays, thus relays can provide content discovery even for users out of each other network of connections.

In P2p you cannot achieve it in any meaningful way, because content is simply pushed to clients directly from other clients. That's a good feature for messaging platforms, not social media.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BallLightning OP 2 Sep

It works with torrents fine as I said. Or you are talking about P2P indexing? I think this can be solved. And I said that it can be used together with relays. The issue with "it works well enough" for me is that in case of an attack, relays can be more easily blocked before there is a ready solution. I personally won't be working on this, so i am not criticizing anyone, but in my personal life I am always proactive instead of reactive.