Nostr Is What Hive Should Have Been
In today's edition of YIYL (You Invest, You Lose), we go through a little thought experiment and review the state of social media today. Many of us know that legacy social media is broken and have been looking for alternatives where you can say what you want and not get banned.
There are plenty of options these days, like Truth, Minds, Rumble and all the other competitor sites that have not got much traction except for a niche audience.
While shitcoiners have exploited this narrative of broken social media to dump shit projects on the market for years, voice, somEE, bitclout, and a host of others.
I've been a user of STEEM/HIVE for years now, it had the best performance, uptime, multiple UIs, and does what it promised, it just never took hold with the public and never will because of the complexity of using the service and the need to buy a token to use it.
Futility tokens
I think the utility token narrative is finally dead with only a few still holding on to the dream that it can be made to work and you go right ahead.
Simply the mass adoption that was promised never came, and won't come. You're not seeing venture capital lining up to use the tech for their products or services. You're not seeing communities moving their current social media activity here.
You're not seeing businesses putting any money into the ads ecosystem to try and reach hive or steem users. I do think a lot of lessons can be learned from it and there are parts of the tech than can be used going forward but one thing that won't is tokenomics.
The one thing most people focus on here, is the one thing that should have never been added or ripped out long ago. I always wondered what a system like this would look like if there was no token, how would people react to it, and in 2022 we're finally getting to see it play out with Nostr.
What is Nostr?
Nostr is a protocol built on public and private key pairs that allow you to create a self-owned account/identities so that you can take your account with you to any website.
It enables 'decentralized' social networks since information can be self hosted or on third party relays that can be called when you login to a new front end.
There are several projects building on Nostr or adding Nostr support to their existing systems. These are all concepts you should be familiar with if you've used altcoin social media serivces but one thing you'll notice is there is no coin.
There is no token, no pre-mine, no dumping on your customer base, because they need the token to use the service but you don't want to "charge" them to use it so instead you let them pay whatever they think it could possibly be worth.
Nostr is an open source project and recently got around 14 BTC in funding from Jack Dorsey. Considering the fact that someone who knows how to build a social media empire is backing this service, has to tell you something about the potential of the protocol.
https://twitter.com/nobsbitcoin/status/1603452270674202624
Private and public key
To use Nostr you'll need to create your own private key, this will be what holds your account and there will be a corresponding public key that is used to source your information for the front end and for others to find you.
Once you set up a private and public key, you should be able to login to any Nostr frond end you prefer
An example of a public key would be:
7ecd3fe6353ec4c53672793e81445c2a319ccf0a298a91d77adcfa386b52f30d
While these private keys don't hold any signing rights to a wallet, you should still protect it in the same manner, if you aren't going to use it as a throw away account and want to build up a Nostr profile.
Key management
Now running around and copy and pasting your pubic key into websites isn't the most intuitive experience, so why not have a web wallet that handles it for you. Many people in shitcoin land should be used to these online sign ins with the help of Meta mask and other key management apps.
If you want to have the same experience with Nostr your best option is to set up an Alby wallet which has Nostr support. Alby is a Lightning web wallet so you can also send and receive sats through its interface, using their node by default or you could use your own node too.
Front ends
If you'd like to give Nostr a try, after you've created your private/public key pairing, you can use one of the following front ends to login, find and follow other users and create some posts in the process.
You'll see its quite rough at the moment, and can be a little clunky, but it should give you an idea of what is happening with Nostr.
Nostr backed profile view
A Nostr tutorial
If you're not one of those who can simply jump into a new service and test it out without some hand holding then check out this tutorial from Ben Arc, where he takes you through how to set up a Nostr account and muck about with the lads.
Source:
Have your say
What do you good people of HIVE think?
So have at it my Jessies! If you don't have something to comment, "I am a Jessie."
Let's connect
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Thanks for this information. In the field of blockchain-based social networks there are many failures, one after another. At the time I also tried Sapiens on Ethereum... now I don't know what happened to it.
I didn't quite understand which blockchain NOSTR runs on, can you reiterate that?
Nostr doesn't run on a blockchain because you don't need a damn blockchain to store data, its inefficient, you can run your own rely or you can use someone else to post
But then you need to trust on a centralized institution again with all it´s downsides, right? Not sure what a relay is, but if it is similar like a server run by you, how would other users know I run it?
The main purpose of using a blockchain and consensus algorithm to handle social media posts is to perform operations that Nostr seems to not be capable of supporting, e.g.
I haven't used Nostr so I might be missing some things, but after reading about it, it looks like there is no guaranteed backup of posts/data. If you send your posts to a server (relay) and then the server is deleted, it seems like your posts would be lost - but maybe I missed something.
If that´s the case, that would be completely ridiculous. And no competition to Hive whatsoever.
By the way, I am a witness now, would you please vote for me? Many thanks.
Pretty much, yes. I did already vote for you but then removed it after reading your neuralink post.
Oh. Well, I think we can have different opinions in some topics. I thought we would be overall on a similar wave-length.
Thinking differently is fine, but there are limits to that when the future of humanity is at stake. AI represents the end of life on Earth when embraced. This has been predicted for 1000s of years - a parting of the ways where the majority of people destroy themselves through denial of their own internal essence.
We should embrace new possibilities. At least, you are using computers as well, right? With your argumentation, one could have said, computers bring the end of the world, enslave humans, manipulate and oppress them.
Not all possibilities are valuable. Any external technology does indeed pose a threat to the ultimate evolution of internal capacity, however, some is more extreme than others. AI cuts straight to the core of the spirit of life itself, bypassing emotion and the individual will. It is a rapid pathway to suicide. You will find if you make enough of the unconscious conscious that there are many programs operating within the human condition that equate to most people having an unconscious death wish, this is a very perilous situation and only a tiny number of people will resolve it. AI insertion into neurology guarantees evolutionary failure.
That´s how the evolution works since eons: Try new things out and if they fail they will vanish. Same here. Why would just this technology be so disastrous? Humankind is overall very resilient.
I think the wokeness/trans/cancel culture much more dangerous because it is an invisible virus which works against all natural drives of humans.
Humanity is already on the brink of extinction due to having denied so much of the emotional input within self. This denial is the actual cause of the existence of sub and unconsciousness. AI is an attempt to make up for the power that has been lost by denial, but it will only result in more denial. Most people are already too lost to recover and AI will push the rest beyond the point of no return.
Yes that's my understanding if a relay nukes your content its gone, but you can post to multiple relays and "trust" that one of them would hold it because nuking peoples content wouldn't be good for people using your relay
Or if you want complete control just run your own relay
Full decentralisation does rely on each user being able to run their own node/server/relay, so it's a noble goal. However, without a consensus of the kind that is achieved on Hive, for example, many needed features are missing.
From what I can see, most of the items in the list of failings of Mastadon on the Nostr Github page also apply to Nostr.
Can you provide an example of features that are missing that would require consensus?
How are you not trusting witnesses?
A relay is just another word for your server/hosting. When you login to a front end you will see all relays available and you can add it to your profile, and run with mutlples or spin up your own
Here's instructions on how to create a nostr relay
OK, but then Nostr is much more for IT-savvy persons only than Hive is.
Blockchains operate a consensus algorithm that is almost trustless. It is possible for anyone to validate the actions of witnesses themselves and even if that is not done, we can see that the system inherently incentivises and pressures the consensus witnesses to not introduce foul play. The only real way that the witnesses could cause problems for free speech that was undetected would be if they all colluded, no-one checked the situation and the people who were censored or cheated never spoke out. That situation has never occurred, to my knowledge. If witnesses collude and the community finds out, there will likely be a fork if the witnesses can't be removed - which is what took place when Hive was created from Steem.
At what cost? Forking reduces the security since its subsidised by the tokenomics that is the incentive to hold the data for others. Also if you fork why waste resources holding data you don't care about and thus prune the blockchain you fork
As the chain gets bigger it reduces the amount of people with the resources to do manage and you always have to trust a set of witnesses, moving the trust assumptions to a different party at great cost doesn't remove trust
In a situation where a chain has been corrupted by nefarious witnesses, the choice to not fork is the one that reduces security. I'm not sure why security would be reduced due to financial incentive in the way you are stating.
Whoever runs the fork can do so in whatever way they prefer. If the users don't like the way the fork is setup they can fork their own version.
If the processing requirements exceed the level of hardware that can be procured by the amount of rewards paid to the witnesses, then mitigation can be put in place that involves sharding, pooling or other strategies. However, we have never reached a point where this has happened.
I have already addressed this in previous comments.
Your comment has generated a great discussion. I read all the comments.
What happens if a relay goes away? If your data was stored there is it now gone?
You can keep all your data on your local and broadcast to a new relay and if no relay would touch you, you can simply run your own
So I guess it comes down to how easy it is to run your own relay then. It sounds like something that the average user wouldn't do though. I might play around with it when I have the time.
The average user doesn't need to do it thought, like I said keep it on your local, you are the fail safe, and just pick the relays that you like
You can find the instructions to set up a relay here
Its not like many people are running witness servers and no one is running an ETH node
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This is a pretty neat concept. This is an area that requires different protocols trying different things. Free speech is constantly under attack and the more robust protocols that work towards that end the better.
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Yeah I agree and I like that its not nothing to do with a token which just creates skewed incentive structures, its just an open protocol that anyone can use to give their users a fall back and you can make it as indepth a part of your project as you like
Hey there Che my bru, thanks for a very informative post. I love exploring social media platforms, and in the past I signed up to several. However, some failed and others never kept my attention like Hive because I'm incentivised by the crypto payments for my posts. I even tried Publish0x, Minds, etc but found better feedback and returns from Hive.
Because I don't need reach or a voice or a social media footprint, I simply stick to Hive, which has no reach but it pays. If Nostr was crypto based and paid me for my content, then I would check it out, but since there is no use case for me, I will skip it and focus on Hive.
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This isn't a platform though, its just a way to relay your data, in theory your preffered hive front end could have a Nostr relay and broadcast your info to it or allow you to connect your relay to it, so you keep your content on there or a copy on your local and you can take it where you like and exclude it from sites you dont like
Funny you mention Minds, they are adding Nostr support soon, so well see how a bigger site handles the use of the tech going to be a great test for it
I personally don't see the point of crypto incentives paying you with inflation, because you just create a culture of token chasing and it kills the product, thats why this place is a ghost town, no one wants to have real discussion they're too focused on where can I secure my next token and it hollows out the product and as soon as that dries up people leave, which has been the case
I am a Jessie.