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Comment by smcleod | Hacker News Reader

The sites design is very aesthetically pleasing, well done on that front.

Something that put me off a bit was immediately seeing bitcoin influencer content after loading the page.

That's the reason I personally avoid Nostr. I know it's unfair because Nostr itself is actually a cool protocol that has nothing to do with bitcoin, but the stench of that is hard to wash off. I wouldn't want to build something that becomes associated with bitcoin just because of the name of the protocol.

It's like whenever there was a reddit/twitter/etc alternative some years ago following outrage, it'd get flooded with some of the worst people on the internet. Voat comes to mind as a pretty competent reddit clone that had potential, until it got overrun with nazis/racists and other kinds of losers. I was very close to releasing an app for that one, but abandoned it once it became clear the direction the userbase was going.

Yeah. I love these new approaches to social networking and especially decentralized ones, but after joining Nostr and experiencing it for a while I got so tired of all the crypto talk. I'm pro crypto, I just don't want to only read about crypto

That's a huge indicator to me that Fedi is wayyy ahead any of the other "alt social media" projects. That normal, non-technical people use it to talk about normal real-life things in their day wayy more than they use it to just talk about how much they like Fedi / the thing / related thing. At least Bluesky as reached that bar too, but Nostr and none of the other crypto-y social media have.

I had a look at some nostr apps, and I was extremely impressed by the speed and the fact that even decentralised it seems that all nodes are integrated (not like mastodon). But I can't get over the bitcoin scam everywhere

In what way is bitcoin a scam, and gold isn't?

Who said gold isn't a scam?

Do you think gold _is_ a scam?

I was mostly being contrary, but honestly I kind of do.

Gold itself? or the scams it enabled due to weaknesses in its monetary qualities?

For example, coin shaving (difficult to quantify without a scale), counterfeiting (tungsten wrapped gold), fiat central banking with zero reserve (due to poor portability + above) which transfers enormous wealth from entire populations and countries to the bankers?

Or maybe its scarcity? The amount of above-ground gold doubles every 50 years (which halves its value).

All weaknesses that bitcoin has solved BTW

That’s just the nature of Nostr at the moment. It’s very Bitcoin adjacent. There’s significant overlap between Nostr and Bitcoin developers. Also, Bitcoin (through Lightning) is the currency used on Nostr for anything and everything.

I can totally see how that’s off putting for normal people though.

It's so off putting I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I wouldn't even curiously browse a landing page of an otherwise interesting project beyond the point I notice that something is mildly "cryptocurrency-adjacent", or it becomes obvious that it has involvement from devs who also enjoy working on blockchains. Thanks for the heads up.

Same sentiment here. Something to compete with YouTube would be great but I'm not going anywhere near anything crypto related, the whole ecosystem stinks to me.

I can honestly report that big majority of Nostr users are very much against "crypto". Just ask on nostr "Do people here support crypto and all the various blockchains?" and you will see for yourself.

It shouldn’t really be much of a surprise though that people hacking on decentralized value transfer where identity is asserted using asymmetric key cryptography were the ones coming up with the idea to use a similar approach for information transfer.

Can I ask why?

Beyond the "crypto grift," a blockchain-based social network might offer some benefits:

- permissionless - (no moderation)

- means for auto solvency - (we are not the product)

- interoperability - (multiple clients, forks, etc.)

- privacy

You can't brush off the "crypto grift" though. That's the sticking point, and it's a very big one.

Nostr is extremely anti-crypto and pro-bitcoin. The trouble is that most people don't appreciate the distinction, they will in time but at this stage, without deeply researching and understanding the topic, most just include bitcoin in the snake pit of "cRyptO"

Sure.

"no moderation", massive problem. I'm not hosting my (admittedly limited) content on a platform that lets my videos get posted in proximity to scams, CSAM etc. If I'm going to ask people to go to somewhere to see my videos (again, admittedly limited) then I'm not going to want them to be stumbling across that stuff.

YouTube isn't getting it right, they're allowing bad shit (poor quality, scams, excessive shrieking) and taking people down for spurious DMCA takedowns, but the answer isn't "no moderation at all", that's not the problem.

As a user I don't sign up to somthing because it allows anything, doesn't take anything down, I sign up beacause it has the things I want to watch. I'm not a character in cryptonomicon or snow crash.

More precisely, I mean no "centralized moderation."

You can moderate at client level whatever you want.

There could be shared lists of non-acceptable users/content based on your world views (like AdBlock but for users).

And the joke’s in the fact that Nostr is not even blockchain based. It’s basically Bitcoin devs’ response to the whole Web3 thing demonstrating that you don’t need a blockchain and a shitcoin to have a decentralized, permission-less, censorship resistant social network.

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