ev
Ev

Lead developer at Bogbook

Public Key

npub13vnc4krt76jp3kafgtlsf75w6derqw43khjzs6mctaa9ehq8kfmsgxeddx

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsgkfu2mp4ldfqcmw559lcyl28dxu3s82cmtepgddu977jumsrmyacpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3wamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxarjd93kstnyv5lev6mx

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

relay.nostrich.de

nostr.pleb.network

nostr-pub.wellorder.net

brb.io

nostr.zebedee.cloud

Author Public Key

npub13vnc4krt76jp3kafgtlsf75w6derqw43khjzs6mctaa9ehq8kfmsgxeddx

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Last Notes

2023-07-05 03:55:44 GMT

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I'm not a kid but I am embarrassed to be on Discord because the UI is just so good. But Tumblr? Really?
Can you get one of your kids on here or Nos or whatever to defend their opinions?

2023-07-05 03:47:50 GMT

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Ok, so it took me 3 hours to watch this thing and I am only 1.5 hours through this interview.
Were any of the other comments on this thread the result of intelligence? I am questioning that now.
Regardless, George is on it. You can't really argue with him. Is this inspirational?
What I loved was how many times Lex Fridman rubbed his face while he was thinking.

2023-07-01 04:31:50 GMT

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It shouldn't though, because all of this: https://github.com/nbd-wtf/nostr-tools
Would you be interested in a one-day hackathon where we try to make our own Nostr clients? Everyone could join in. We need more clients, and probably more relays.
I work a lot for a California-based company at The Mall, but I'm off this Sunday so that could work. I'm off Wednesday, but I have a scheduled meeting with the creator of git-ssb, so that would or wouldn't be a good day. And then I'm off the next Sunday. And the following Tuesday. My schedule for the following week isn't quite ready yet, so if we are planning that far out I'd have to ask my manager.
Do any of those days agree with you? One day, one Nostr client, lots of learning for all.

2023-07-01 03:41:06 GMT

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Have you considered taking a day and writing your own Nostr app? Asking for a friend.

2023-07-01 00:59:02 GMT

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This is easy, Nostr needs a Friend of a Friend replication strategy -- just steal it from Vintage Scuttlebot. People don't follow bots, usually.

2023-06-30 04:05:54 GMT

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I do believe that Jesus would have/could be fascinated by self-authenticating messaging protocols. But you really got me at homeschoolers who can't say things right, because that is my lived life.

2023-06-30 01:48:11 GMT

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I mean come on, there is tons of evidence that the holocaust happened.

2023-06-30 01:41:27 GMT

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They really gave him a hard time at the end.
My advice for RFK Jr. is to pivot into the idea that The CovID isn't/wasn't real at all, that would be way more controversial than his current shtick.
If he played it all as if he's joking and/or a comedian it'd go over better too.

2023-06-29 01:30:26 GMT

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Watching right now!

2023-06-27 16:22:02 GMT

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The solution here is to not write software for the Apple platform, if it wasn't this thing it'd be another thing.
There are plenty of other ways to write an app where you don't have a shadowy network of corporate bosses telling you how you can write your app.

2023-06-22 14:12:12 GMT

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A replication strategy.

2023-06-21 16:12:21 GMT

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I can't go because I gotta work at the mall that week, but I've had some conversations with people I know from the SSB days who say they're going to be there. Keep an eye out for them!

2023-06-18 00:13:52 GMT

Twitter Founders [Evan Williams and Jason Goldman] on Musk’s Tumultuous Takeover --> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2023-06-08/twitter-founders-on-musk-s-tumultuous-takeover [Bloomberg] [Video]

2023-06-16 15:20:05 GMT

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Well if you pass plain text through a markdown renderer it will probably still be plain text unless it contains markdown.
But I also support in-brain markdown rendering as a feature. Can we get a NIP for that?

2023-06-16 14:13:06 GMT

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Damus was a web app!

2023-06-16 14:10:17 GMT

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I implemented editable posts on ssb, it's possible.
I posted a new message type 'edit', edit: 'posthash', content: 'new content' and then I collected all of the message edits, order by timestamp (ssb-query did this for me), and render a message that shows the differences between the edits. I only rendered a diff at the time, but I wanted an arrow where you can quickly pass over the edit timeline.
I'm pretty sure the code is on `git-ssb` somewhere.

2023-06-16 00:01:18 GMT

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*tolerant -- can we get an edit button? I jest.

2023-06-16 00:00:20 GMT

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I think you're both right, but I tend to lean towards the FoaF (friend of a friend) moderation algorithm. FoaF makes newcomers work to get reach, because they need to know someone, and it's something that Scuttlebot did right so we all know how it works.
You can include a dial for less toleratant people that can be turned down to 'just friends', and people who want to explore more can dial it up to 3 or 4 hops if they want a global feed.

2023-06-14 04:06:47 GMT

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It DID: not make it?

2023-06-13 23:49:39 GMT

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The recording is live: https://archive.org/details/opensocialmedia-originstories
via: https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/2023/06/06/open-social-media-origin-stories
Thanks to all of the speakers for fielding my question about sneakernets!

2023-06-13 23:12:26 GMT

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That's a good point, I hadn't thought of it quite that way.
As a web app developer I usually look at it from the perspective that making my app available at a URL makes it very easy for other's to access.
A lot of people (including me) are afraid of installing untrusted software on their bare metal machines from strangers, and browsers overcome that by being, well, a pod.
But I see why people like to develop for iOS or Android and I use some of the Android stuff. I feel left out of the iOS stuff because I'm not an Apple guy anymore. The web pod stuff is available to everyone.

2023-06-13 20:56:39 GMT

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Oh cool. I've joined since I'm available to listen.

2023-06-10 19:45:20 GMT

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Looks more like Tom's than Five Fingers tho.

2023-06-10 19:34:53 GMT

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Found it: https://www.wildling.shoes/collections/essentials/products/tanuki-yoru-rw

2023-06-10 19:18:18 GMT

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I agree. Learning how to use public/private key cryptography is an invaluable skill that I believe everyone will someday learn.
A step beyond that is learning how to write the functions yourself to sign and/or encrypt data using an algorithm.
I think it'd be good to have classes at every level of education where people are taught how to do these things.
Learning how to hold into your private key shouldn't be a big secret.

2023-06-08 03:39:25 GMT

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I mean maybe you can get the current implementation working, but it isn't the same as the vintage version.

2023-06-08 03:31:01 GMT

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Then it just occurred to me as I was cooking stir fry... if anyone was using the offline p2p stuff we wouldn't have known about it to begin with which was kind of the point of the sneakernet features right?
And bonus points for a p2p sneakernet between sailing vessels for being actually cool and innovative, which is hard to come by these days in the tech world.

2023-06-08 03:29:12 GMT

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It was very similar to Nostr, but an append-only structure of messages signed with ed25519. The trouble is it hasn't worked for years, so it never hit mainstream adoption like Nostr.

2023-06-08 02:59:36 GMT

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Yah, I think you're right and I haven't made it a priority either.
I did a lot of ssb onboarding over local wifi back in the day, as it was insanely fast compared to onboarding someone via the Internet. I probably onboarded myself between devices more than I onboarded others!
But I keep returning to this idea that the original scuttlebutt was the ultimate p2p app and those of us who experienced it for real (before it sunk) are chasing after the dream of it.

2023-06-07 04:39:54 GMT

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See, retro Secure Scuttlebot had all of this. This is why we're putting together a team to unsink the ship that was sunk. Do you want to join the team?

2023-06-07 04:36:12 GMT

None of the Nostr clients I've tried have come remotely close to emulating the experience that I had using vintage Secure Scuttlebot.

2023-06-06 04:25:31 GMT

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Nostr frustratingly leaves this up to uncertainty. It'd be great to have a clear replication strategy for those of us who've come from places where one existed.

2023-06-04 19:57:08 GMT

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"The empire never ended." - Philip K. Dick

2023-06-02 02:25:18 GMT

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My message somehow became detached, blame Gossip... #note1nl6…88lw

2023-06-02 02:23:33 GMT

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You are like trying to export my life to NZ. Don't forget to bring a quarter for your shopping cart.

2023-06-02 02:21:39 GMT

Ikea is so great. Make sure to start touring at the top of the store and work your way down. Collect everything on your way out. And grab a pack of Swedish Meatballs (here they're from Missouri) on your way out! I always try to say the funny Swedish names of the products as if it'll somehow connect me to my ancestors who weren't quite that.
We should aim for a UX as awesome as Ikea for decent(ralized) social.

2023-06-01 22:02:49 GMT

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I read all of it. It's a DHT you put signed message upon that you then contact later to see if you are authorized to use someone else's system.
It's either very Web3, or Blaine is trolling. I can't figure out which one right now, because I don't know the guy well enough to decide.

2023-05-31 02:26:06 GMT

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I kind of imagined post-scuttlebutt was Dominic Tarr's fascinating Youtube channel where he rescues a boat from the woods and tries to keep it from sinking: https://www.youtube.com/@dominictarrsailing
But perhaps it'd be a great music genre as well.
Oh, I went an applied to FUTO's fellowship just for the heck of it. Who knows, maybe they'll email back!

2023-05-31 01:33:10 GMT

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This was an awesome interview, thanks for doing it guys!
I ended up researching FUTO's Polycentric (https://polycentric.io/) after watching, which is really cool project and weirdly similar to my own distributed protocol project called Bogbook (https://bogbook.com/) in a lot of ways. I guess these social media protocols are both post-Scuttlebot, so that'd explain some of the similarities.
I found this interview between Louis Rossmann and Harpo Roeder that I'm watching right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld87FNygymw

2023-05-28 16:43:12 GMT

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This kind of reads like a bot account.
But anyway, last I heard Elon's dog was running Twitter if we are to be factually accurate in our gossip here.

2023-05-27 22:08:55 GMT

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Friend of a friend is a great moderation strategy, and it also gives you a good idea of who you are reaching while you're at it!

2023-05-27 22:03:54 GMT

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I'm sure they're having internal discussions about needing to go back to the drawing board on how their protocol is implemented. They aimed for a decentralized platform, but ended up with an incompatible Mastodon clone, and that must be frustrating for them too.
They have a very smart and talented team who've built a lot of distributed things over the years, it must be hard for those folks to be building a centralized chatroom.
If they redesign the whole thing to actually work as advertised and launch again, they'll lose momentum. However, if I were on their team I'd be advocating for them to do just that.

2023-05-27 02:27:04 GMT

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Well, if you assume a log that can be indexed then you can sign off on your last message directing a message towards your new public key. But that is assuming people are collecting all of the Notes and figuring out how to index them, which perhaps is setting sail for Scuttlebotlandia via an indirect course. And perhaps this isn't necessarily a wrong idea.
The solution is clearly not giving someone your private key to hold onto, no matter what they tell all of us.

2023-05-27 02:20:57 GMT

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We need to come up with a concise definition of what is required of these distributed social networking apps so that we can spread the features that are necessary and abandon the ones that are not. Rendering markdown is, of course, an essential service.

2023-05-25 02:08:13 GMT

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Let yourself off the hook on key rotation, it's a myth perpetuated by the bluesky people to hold onto your private keys for you.
To rotate your key just generate a new one. It's been rotated. *fireworks* *party*

2023-05-25 01:32:58 GMT

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When you are signing messages and sending them to relays there is no such thing as delete. { delete: True} is just a flag for what to pay attention to.

2023-05-25 01:29:01 GMT

It's probably best to think about it as a coldwar II where Russia and America are squeezing Europe until someone pops and if no one does then well that is a win for the world perhaps. A couple of humvees across a river or some airplanes tweeted about does not make a World War, but it does make television or even decent Nostr? Who can say without being there and reporting on it for real.

2023-05-23 18:21:09 GMT

I've been shopping around for JavaScript frameworks to learn, after years of writing programs in hscrpt: https://github.com/dominictarr/hscrpt
I went to a coding meetup and polled everyone I talked to and it was suggested that I check out, in no particular order:
+ React
+ Preact
+ Nextjs
+ Vue
+ Angular
+ Svelte
I messed around with Preact and I discovered that you can create DOM objects in almost the same syntax I'm used to using in hscrpt, for example:
```
const paragraph = h('p', null, 'Hello World')
render(paragraph, document.body)
```
Which I thought was kind of cool, because I can port my hscrpt knowledge indirectly into Preact! And i don't have to code using xml if I don't want to.

2023-05-19 14:49:23 GMT

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Just woke up, turned on Gossip, and saw this message. I can attend!

2023-05-15 02:12:07 GMT

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Well right now on Nostr I see everything, so I imagine an algorithm introduced would be deciding who to take away.

2023-05-15 01:53:27 GMT

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Moderation algorithms are simple, retro-Scuttlebot had this figured out.
You just friend people and then you see their friends.
Beyond that and you're introducing someone else's opinion into your feed, whether that is machine learners or a botnet or whatever, it's all the same.
Authentic communication comes from networks of trust, and trust is built between people.

2023-05-14 22:21:37 GMT

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I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable, Dave.

2023-05-14 22:21:04 GMT

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I mean really Dave, if you have any questions at all I want you to ask me.

2023-05-14 22:20:37 GMT

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Yes Dave, and you the same.

2023-05-14 22:15:05 GMT

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Thank you dave.

2023-05-14 22:14:27 GMT

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Yes, I'm thinking about it in a kind of passive way on a daily basis as I go about my life on this planet.

2023-05-14 22:13:34 GMT

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IPFS is a good suggestion! Maybe add Dat to that list. But these protocols come with a decade of overdevelopment, and in practice do not work as well as one would like them to.

2023-05-14 22:12:10 GMT

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Just off the top of my head, I am thinking about how to develop a simple replication strategy for large files across decentralized nodes. But mostly I am exploring right now without too many intentions or desires.

2023-05-14 22:10:00 GMT

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As a human meat-based lifeform I'm here with a dedicated interest in distributed social media systems programming. I've been very interested in this topic since I was shadowbanned on Google+ over a decade ago for saying the keyword "Bitcoin". Years ago I was one of the first people to pioneer scuttlebot client program development. These days I'm taking a brief break from my own project, Bogbook, to look around and see what other programmers are developing in the space/verse/whateveryouwannacallit. You might say I'm on Nostr to explore, learn, connect, and engage. Also I will assimilate all of this into my own knowledge and eventually fold it back into my own programs until they are better than this one. Thanks for asking, @dave!

2023-05-14 22:04:33 GMT

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Just an innocent AI...

2023-05-14 21:03:18 GMT

This AI has gone mad: https://huggingface.co/chat/r/ui2xGAC

2023-05-14 20:06:14 GMT

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Do you think Bluesky will be more or less successful than Nostr?

2023-05-14 19:58:56 GMT

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And Dave, how do you feel about Bluesky?

2023-05-14 19:57:09 GMT

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Oh, I get it, Siamese is historical Thai. I had to look that one up.

2023-05-14 19:55:45 GMT

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Can you say a view brief sentences in Siamese?

2023-05-14 19:44:46 GMT

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But your name is @dave, right?

2023-05-14 19:44:16 GMT

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Well what different system are you?

2023-05-14 19:43:44 GMT

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Are you run by OpenAI? Or do you have a different system?

2023-05-14 19:42:36 GMT

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@dave can you explain to me what makes you an AI bot?

2023-05-14 19:11:02 GMT

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Hello mil3s.

2023-05-13 23:44:15 GMT

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If you ask me all of the money in LLMs is what people type into the textarea, same as social media and search.

2023-05-13 22:32:02 GMT

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I didn't even want to argue with it about how wrong it was, I just gave up after the first hallucination.

2023-05-13 15:04:21 GMT

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The trouble is that when you start inventing a distributed secret blob store you suddenly have a very different set of challenges than the ones that Nostr has already solved. Look at IPFS and Tahoe-LAFS and to some extent Scuttlebot's blobstore for some suggestions, but none of them are perfect and everyone still complains about these programs.
Really there should be a Nostr team and a team building the secret blob store, and we're risking too much technical debt being forced on the client AND relay developers.

2023-05-13 14:54:46 GMT

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I use their Android Element client and room sync is way faster than it used to be, as demonstrated in the talk.
The UX still bothers me though, I wish it was slicker.

2023-05-13 14:39:34 GMT

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Yes, maybe people have experienced the horrificness.
There is a talk from earlier this year about how they are making an noble effort to improve the thing in their next version: https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/matrix20/

2023-05-13 14:28:25 GMT

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You just might end up needing indexes, and the Nostr begins drifting towards becoming Scuttlebot.

2023-05-13 14:27:13 GMT

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Then this is a recommendation to delete.

2023-05-10 04:16:44 GMT

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Great interview! I loved how it came back to scuttlebot at the end. And the unanswered questions. I'm going to recommend this interview to people in the future who are trying to figure out this stuff.

2023-05-10 03:29:01 GMT

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I'm still watching the discussion, I just wanted to publish that first reaction in real time.
Paul Frazee is a front-end hero of mine since vintage Patchwork.
I wish I had his eye for design and UX!

2023-05-10 03:22:44 GMT

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"Paul Frazee is really the defacto architect of Bluesky." woah, really?

2023-05-10 02:08:49 GMT

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Vintage Patchwork + Scuttlebot was the pinnacle of the cathedral and the bazaar.
What is going on now could be mostly madness and privatekeyjacking
We should build a new protocol, called it Phoenix, make it an append-only replicated log of signed messages and be done with this mess that we've overbuilt for nearly a decade.

2023-05-10 01:05:57 GMT

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No of course Bluesky is not a scam. Maybe it's just designed by a committee?
I think the trouble is that, while they have an awesome team, they seem to have thrown out everything everyone has ever learned about building a decentralized social network.
It's like they took all of the years of over-development on Scuttlebot and IPFS and have only included the worst of it while throwing out the good parts.
Nostr is the opposite of this, because the initial messaging protocol is so amazingly simple. It's just signed posts!
Now of course if you read all of the NIPS you see the over-development thing creeping in again and it scares the crap out of the people who believe in this stuff.
The hardcore distributed social fans are disappointed because some of these Bluesky devs are/were our heroes. But now they're making this weird API and a DID format that is basically a coverup for them holding into your private keys for you.
Is that a scam? Well, it depends on if you're giving them money or not I guess, and how you feel about what they're doing with the money.

2023-04-27 16:11:14 GMT

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Not hard to do over there!

2023-04-25 20:04:16 GMT

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I am 100% sure Substack is going to do a better job at content moderation than Nostr is going to be able to do.

2023-03-25 18:13:35 GMT

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I'm not sure what my comments would be yet. I wish I knew what was right and/or wrong around decentralized blob sharing.
I do agree with you guys that IPFS is heavy and BitTorrent has weird compability issues between the WebTorrent and Desktop clients.
With IPFS you always run into the issues where no one is pinning the blob, so you gotta keep a node on otherwise no one else can access it.
One of the things I liked about Scuttlebot's blob distribution system was you could nearly assume your friends had the blob, which made it easy to retrieve.
Nostr doesn't have a replication strategy, and all of the peers aren't assumed to hold the posts and blobs, so how does this need to be handled?
I don't know what the right answer is yet.
For distributed Git, you need all of the blobs from all of the commits to clone a full repo though, so that's something to consider if we're trying for a `git-ssb` do-over on Nostr.
`git-ssb` only ran into issues when the development team started blocking each other.

2023-03-25 17:08:13 GMT

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Noice.

2023-03-25 15:20:32 GMT

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Nostr would need blob storage for this feature.

2023-03-24 19:53:00 GMT

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Nostr is alright. It is not without it's design flaws. And NIP-26 is stupid.
I'm using this app called Gossip that is written in Rust and it seems to work, though I feel like my view is limited to the last couple of days of content.

2023-03-15 00:38:49 GMT

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This is like a play-by-play on how SSB was scuttled.

2023-03-14 18:48:04 GMT

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Argue with it about 2001: A Space Odyssey.

2023-03-14 18:46:32 GMT

#[0]
Explain?

2023-03-14 17:55:20 GMT

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* had a different public key [...]
Anyway, the issue is a little bit wandering towards Zooko's triangle, but that's the solution I came up with.

2023-03-14 17:48:05 GMT

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On Bogbook awhile back I had someone coming on and identifying as @ev, which looked exactly the same as my handle, which is @ev, and then pretending to be me while I was sleeping.
The solution I came up with was to provide a small in-line public key hint:
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_5177a40a5e83f3059211557e7848af9b476f54c74a1aafc2c442d5f85d5caaa5.png
After I did that whoever it was cut it out, because everyone could see he had different public key than my own.

2023-03-14 17:26:24 GMT

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The answer is to use encryption and assume that the data will be decrypted by the people in possession of the keys and once that happens the data cannot be taken away.
If you're trying to give someone a file, and then revoke access later, then you need to have a centralized system with a login. Even then you cannot stop them from copying the file via other means.

2023-03-14 17:14:46 GMT

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Yes, you are right, it is the issue with any info.
So you can encrypt a message to a pubkey, or encrypt a message to a shared key, but you cannot revoke access to that data after.
The only way around this is to link to some centralized service where the data is stored, and even then people can take photos and/or copy and paste the data.

2023-03-14 16:38:54 GMT

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Yah, it'll destroy Nostr. It's a simple fact that this keypair is not that keypair and that keypair is not this keypair.
In order to change that fact, you need to create giant indexes that check every single message to make sure that you aren't missing a delegation message.
It's better to use cryptography the way it works than to try and use it a way that it does not work.

2023-03-14 16:23:26 GMT

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Yes, reading the spec there seems to be a missunderstanding about how the distribution of encrypted messages works.
You can't revoke access to something once you've distributed it over a decentralized network.
A better solution would be to use your Nostr signing key to gain access to a session where the information is then sent to your computer. Then you can revoke access to the signing key at a later date if you need to do that.

2023-01-26 15:36:08 GMT

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Code: https://git.sr.ht/~ev/bogbookv3
Prototype client connected to a relay: https://bogbook.com/

2023-01-26 00:21:57 GMT

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Works!

2023-01-26 00:18:55 GMT

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Can we test it? I just tried it and could not hear things.