makeasnek
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Proton mail launches LLM and crypto wallet 3 months ago:
You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet’s balance. It’s not as clear as you’re making it sound. Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it’s where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can’t look up somebody’s balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.
- Comment on Proton mail launches LLM and crypto wallet 3 months ago:
In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. Most transactions are on lightning by number of transactions. Maybe not by total value moved, but lightning is pretty opaque and grants additional privacy, so it’s hard to measure for that reason.
- Comment on Proton mail launches LLM and crypto wallet 3 months ago:
It’s open source, and it’s fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.
- Comment on Proton mail launches LLM and crypto wallet 3 months ago:
It’s a self-custody wallet and open source. It’s regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn’t support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.
- Comment on Why haven't we figured out monetisation for peertube? 4 months ago:
Pretty well established case law at this point:
- Comment on Why haven't we figured out monetisation for peertube? 4 months ago:
There are no protections for me if I unknowingly let some stranger use me as a host or router for CP or some pedo shit. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take. There need to be legal protections in place, like there are for ISPs.
There are, at least in the US. That’s why running a Tor node is legal and so is a coffee-shop sharing their wifi to customers. They are not legally liable for actions of users, they are just routers.
- Comment on Why haven't we figured out monetisation for peertube? 4 months ago:
Each network has its own way of addressing this with pros and cons.
- Comment on Why haven't we figured out monetisation for peertube? 4 months ago:
Also it’s worth mentioning the “how to distribute content among peers” problem has mostly been solved and has for a decade, just that nobody has built out the UX for it. Torrents exist, #freenet and #hyphanet exist, #ipfs exists, these are all excellent platforms for storing and distributing content without relying on expensive, centralized hosting. Instead, users share the burden of hosting.
- Comment on Why haven't we figured out monetisation for peertube? 4 months ago:
Nostr has. Over the last two months alone, their users have “zapped” (tipped/donated) other users around 950K USD worth of BTC via lightning. And it doesn’t just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your “zaps” towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn’t take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it’s over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees.
Long-term, if I am a content creator, which “fedi”-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can’t? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon.
Source about nostr fees: lemmy.ml/post/17824358
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 8 months ago:
It’s just as scalable as fedi, I’d say it’s even more scalable since relays don’t need to communicate with each other, which reduces the cost to run a relay. The average user experience is basically identical. They download an app, it connects to a set of default relays (or they can choose some manually if they want), they tweet.
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 8 months ago:
Because you can choose which relays to connect to and you typically connect to multiple relays. On Mastodon/fedi, an instance controls your entire view of the fediverse unless you make a separate account elsewhere and check it separately. You can’t follow or be followed by users or instances they block even if you want to. They also control your identity, since it’s tied to a relay/instance. If your relay shuts down or your account gets banned, you have to make a new account elsewhere, re-follow everybody, get everybody to re-follow you, etc. It’s a mess.
On nostr, instance/relay admins only control that goes through their specific relay. If you want to follow somebody blocked by that relay, you are connected to other relays and the signal can flow through there. You don’t need to check multiple relays separately. If your relay closes, you don’t lose your account/identity.
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 8 months ago:
A relay admin controls what goes through their relay. A user controls who they follow and who follows them. If you want, you can just auto-ignore all DMs directed to you by people who aren’t in your follow list. Also remember that your DMs have to come through a relay, presumably you are connected to relays you trust the moderation policy of, so toxic users can’t use those relays to DM you.
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 8 months ago:
Read the first bullet point:
- Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 8 months ago:
Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:
- Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
- On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
- On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can’t stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated “public squares” according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn’t blocked you).
- On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it’s not, so this doesn’t happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it’s clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
- Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.
Why I think nostr will win lemmy.ml/post/11570081
- Comment on OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion 8 months ago:
It can. Lightning transactions are as easy and lightweight to process as e-mail.
- Comment on OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion 8 months ago:
Except it’s not. Lightning is incredibly decentralized, you can run a full lightning node on a raspberry pi. Look up a graph of lightning network, looks just like any other decentralized system
- Comment on Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption 8 months ago:
Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, there is no “mining” in a traditional sense, so its power consumption is more akin to e-mail than mining crypto. But proof-of-stake leads to centralization over time, which is antithetical to what Bitcoin people want.
- Comment on OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion 8 months ago:
It’s been letting people be their own bank for 15 years. You can send transactions across the globe for pennies in fees which confirm instantly using Bitcoin lightning. The supply has remained capped at 21 million. It’s doing exactly what it said it would do without a single hack or hour of downtime 24/7, 365.
- Comment on The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes 8 months ago:
“Not everybody will use it and it’s not 100% perfect so let’s not try”
- Comment on The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes 8 months ago:
Putting it on the blockchain ensures you can always go back and say “see, at this date/time, this key verified this file/hash”… If you know the key of the uploader (the white house), you can verify it was signed by that key. Guatemala used a similar scheme to verify votes in elections using Bitcoin. Could the precinct lie and put in the wrong vote count? Of course! But what it prevented was somebody saying “well actually the precinct reported a different number” since anybody could verify that on chain they didn’t. It also prevented the precinct themselves from changing the number in the future if they were put under some kind of pressure.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 9 months ago:
There is no “delete a user from the internet” button. It doesn’t exist. Even if a single admin could ban a user from entire network, which is giving immense amount of power to any admin, all that user has to do is make a new account to get around it. That’s true for Nostr, AP, Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, etc. This is why spam exists and will always exist. AP or nostr or whoever isn’t going to solve spam or abuse of online services, the best we can do it mitigate the bulk of it. Relays and instances can share ban lists in nostr or AP, that can be automated, that is the way to mitigate the problem. There is, however, a “delete a person from society” button we can press, and that is LEOs job. That, conveniently, also deletes them from the internet. It’s just not a button we trust anybody but government to press.
As we get stronger and stronger anti-spam/anti-abuse measures, we make it harder and harder to join and participate in networks like the internet. This isn’t actually a problem for spammers, they have a financial incentive, so they can pay people to fill out captchas and do SMS verifications and whatever else they need to do. All we do by increasing the cost to spam is change that kinds of spam are profitable to send. Other abuse of services that isn’t spam have their own intrinsic motivations that may outweigh the cost associated with making new accounts. At a certain level of anti-spam mitigation, you end up hurting end users more than spammers. A captcha and e-mail verification blocks like 90% of spam attempts and is a very small barrier for users. But even that has accessibility implications. Requiring them to receive an SMS? An additional 10% but now you’ve excluded people who don’t have their own cell phone or use a VoIP provider. You’ve made it more dangerous for people to use your service to seek help for things like addiction, domestic abuse, etc as their partner or family member may share the same phone. You’ve made it harder to engage in dissent against the government in authoritarian regimes. You’ve also made it much more difficult to run a relay, since running a relay now requires access to an SMS service, payment for that SMS service, etc. Require them to receive a letter in the mail? An additional 10% but now you’ve excluded people who don’t have a stable address or mail access, etc. For a listing to be placed on Google Maps, maybe a letter in the mail is a reasonable hurdle to have, after all, Google only wants to list businesses which have a physical address. For posting to twitter? It’s pretty ludicrous.
I generally trust relay admins to make moderation decisions, otherwise I wouldn’t be on their instance or relay on the first place. And my trust becomes extended to other admins they work with and share ban lists with. And that’s fine. But remember that any person with any set of motivations can be a relay or instance admin. What I don’t trust is any random person on the internet being able to make moderation decisions for the entire internet. Which means that any approach to bans would need to be federated and built on mutual trust between operators.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 9 months ago:
Yes very true!
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 9 months ago:
If you want a platform with built-in tipping, you can’t use PayPal, the fees make microtransactions impossible. If you don’t like the Bitcoin feature, you don’t have to use it. Bitcoin has a market cap that puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. Higher than Sweden. It’s been doing its thing for 15 years. People may say they don’t like it, but if you decide to not use any platform or service which accepts or uses Bitcoin, your circle of places you can use is going to continue to get smaller. Have fun not shopping at Safeway or any other major grocery store since they all have Bitcoin ATMs. Have fun not using mutual funds or other investment portfolios from major banks since they all have degree of exposure to Bitcoin. You choice to avoid it is yours alone, but it seems like a weird thing to be mad about and hate.
Crypto is full of scams and rug pulls and bad actors. But Bitcoin has kept its promises to faithfully relay transactions without a single hack or day of downtime for 15 years. They are not the same.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 9 months ago:
Before we get into the weeds here, let’s start with an important basis premise: Moderation ability, at a protocol level, from an instance/relay admin perspective in nostr and AP is identical.
Are there moderation tools to propagate bans across relays quickly?
Relay operators can share ban lists like they do in AP. Relay operators can only directly control their own relay, not other relays.
Some users need to be booted off the network entirely and swiftly sometimes, we’ve seen several cases of this in Lemmy already with users posting horrendous shit. I’d be concerned that one of my relays would lag on banning (timezone differences for moderators or whatever innocuous reason) and these users achieve their goal of more people seeing the shit they post. For some people this might trigger PTSD, which is why I say it would be a huge barrier to mass adoption until that issue is resolved.
Relays sharing ban lists help can solve this problem. I would argue that we don’t want to give that power (to ban a user from the entire network) to a single relay admin or even a couple relay admins (since anybody can be a relay admin), so broad consensus of some form needs to exist. A relay admin doesn’t need to be able to ban somebody from the entire network if they simply disagree with that user’s post, they can just ban the user on their own relay. There is value in having public squares with varying degrees of moderation, among other reasons, because laws about what kind of speech are acceptable vary country by country. There is value in having mainstream platforms which refuse to host some kinds of content and having that be a different moderation policy than the one used by the government, for example. Remember that legality and morality are not the same and that there are differences in what is illegal vs illegal in different jurisdictions.
If the user is doing something which is very illegal, which I believe you are referring to, that is a job for law enforcement. Neutral networks like the internet are traditionally policed “at the edges”. We don’t have gmail proactively filtering for objectionable or illegal content because of the consequences that come from that privacy invasion, false positives, additional computational load, reducing reliability of sending/receive between email carriers, etc. Comcast is not inspecting packets as they fly through their network at a the speed of light, delaying them, and determining if they should be passed or not. It’s the internet, they just pass them through. Instead, we say “this is an open, neutral network and if you break the law, LEO will deal with it”.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 9 months ago:
It has an optional built-in tipping function where you can tip users (and receive tips) if you like their posts. Just like reddit had. Pretty cool imo but not required to use the platform.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 9 months ago:
- You don’t need a w3c standard to have a protocol that is open source and used globally, it’s just one way to go about that. You can also have standards which are not made through w3c but are made through some other governance body, or you can have standards where the standard just kind of evolves from a bunch of different devs trying different versions of things until there’s one main way which floats to the top since everybody prefers it.
- Relays on nostr, which are the equivalent to instances in ActivityPub/mastodon/lemmy can set their own moderation policies, defederate from other relays, etc all the same as in ActivityPub. The moderation abilities are basically the same. This means relays can choose what content they allow and ban users/topics/etc. The key difference is that you are by default connected to multiple relays. So if your relay blocks a user you really want to follow, you can keep following that user and see them in your feed, they just don’t show up for other users on that relay. So you get the best of both worlds: relays have curated, moderated public squares while not reducing your ability to choose who to follow and who can follow you.
- Comment on The Verge - The fediverse, explained 9 months ago:
Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon (fedi) if anyone is curious. lemmy.ml/post/11570081
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 9 months ago:
Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. lemmy.ml/post/11570081
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 9 months ago:
It’s baked in pretty deep to the protocol and to the concept of instances. This would be like making an e-mail address that’s portable between e-mail servers. Maybe AP can pull this off, but it’s going to be quite a change.
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 9 months ago:
Relays store:
- Content posted by users connected to their relay
- Content posted by users of other relays that their relay is connected to
“Accounts” are private/public keypairs. You don’t have a username/password at a specific instance, you have a public/private keypair you can use to authenticate your identity.