@mckinley@twtxt.net absolute rubbish.
@bender@twtxt.net How so?
@mckinley@twtxt.net a few points:
Technical:
- Single point of failure: Relays, though decentralised, could be targeted for censorship or sabotage.
- Message integrity: Messages are not inherently linked, raising concerns about spoofing and manipulation.
- Data storage: Clients may need to download large amounts of data, especially historical messages, impacting performance.
- Limited functionality: Currently focuses on text-based communication, lacking media sharing or advanced features.
Usability:
- Steep learning curve: It is still young and requires technical knowledge for setup and use.
- Limited user base: Finding an active community and familiar faces can be challenging.
- Unintuitive interfaces: Client applications may not be as user-friendly as established platforms.
Also, full of crypto bros, crypto bros wanna be, and, well, worthless crypto (mixed with some porn, nazi crap, etc.). But go ahead, go through the same phases I went (I even ran my own relay), and see it for yourself. :-)
All three of your points on usability are definitely true, especially #3. I haven’t been able to find a good TUI client.
Regarding the technical points, it seems like there are mechanisms to address each of them. Please tell me if I’m wrong on any one of these. I have only been learning about Nostr for a short time.
Relays aren’t a single point of failure because a user can (and should) post to many of them. The attacker in a censorship or sabotage scenario would have to take down every one of your relays at once. If they were taken down gradually, you could replace the bad relay with a new one and advertise that one on all the other relays your followers already use. It’s much more resilient compared to twtxt.
Every event contains a signature from your private key, so it’s hard to spoof. NIP-10 provides a method for marking a note as a reply to another note.
(3) Does Nostr require clients to download much more data than, say, Twitter? I can see it being a little more because of signatures, etc. However, text compresses well and clients should cache previous posts, anyway.
(4) NIP-96 does HTTP file upload, XMPP style. There are some other advanced features like tipping on posts, custom emojis, and at least three conventions for selling goods and services.
Of course, not everything is available with every client and some of the specs are still being worked out. It looks promising to me, though. I like its distributed model with dumb servers and smart clients. The software will get better over time.