I'll never get why people keep throwing money at web3 stuff. It's pretty clear 99% of it is total crap that nobody is going to adopt in serious numbers.
Is there anyone involved with it who has experience building successful distributed systems? Every time I’ve seen it mentioned it’s been by someone who was pushing cryptocurrency and it makes the same kind of, let’s politely say, unlikely claims about censorship resistance which the blockchain salespeople like to make.
I don't know what you are referring to, but there's nothing magical about nostr here. You're identity is a public key. It's not tied to a particular server. So if a server boots you off you can continue publishing on other servers using the same public key. It's common to publish to multiple servers at the same time.
That's really it, servers have less authority in nostr, and that's why it's more resistant to censorship.
Okay, so let’s keep thinking about this a little: if your concern is being censored by the government, all servers are required to follow the law so this only helps to the extent that the government chooses not to or is unable to enforce it.
If your concern is private, if this were to find some kind of use you’d inevitably see shared blocklists just as we’ve seen for things like email spam. That’s a really important thing to study for any distributed system because “censorship resistant” inevitably means “full of spam, malware, and illegal content” unless you’re very careful designing some compromise to prevent that (e.g. IPFS mirroring is opt-in, so an innocent node owner doesn’t wake up to the FBI knocking their door in).
In the case of GitHub, anyone who wants to self-host an alternative can do so for only the cost of their time & modest app hosting resources running Gitlab, Gitea, etc. That raises the question of where this offer is coming from: there isn’t a notable problem with censorship on GitHub for otherwise legal content, so you’re mostly talking about things which are actually illegal and that means that something like Nostr isn’t changing the picture much because everything already is decentralized. If the Tornado Cash guys are on a block list, Nostr server owners are going to have legal demands to block their keys, too, just as a hosting company would get a take-down for a private GitLab instance.
The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over.
If governments do try to get things removed on Nostr they're going to have a much much harder time. Folks can re-pop-up on different relays. Governments can keep playing whack-a-mole but I have hard time seeing they'll have any success. Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me, seems to be way different from what I'd expect when this situation crops up.
Not needing to host is a critical change of the game here, in my view.
> The current distribution mechanisms (wonderful softwares like gitea) let people mirror, but if the primary host goes down there's no easy fall-over.
The DNS system is decentralized and updates take seconds. We’ve seen this for decades with things like open source projects when someone gets tired of hosting it.
> Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me
Look at what happened with the TornadoCash guys — once legal action was taken, how many exchanges would allow transactions to or from their addresses? This would be similar: once enough people start using it, someone will do something illegal, and then governments are going to start telling server operators in their jurisdictions to stop allowing that traffic if they don’t want to be charged as accessories. Since those guys don’t want to go to jail or have their servers packed up by federal marshals, they’ll figure out whatever is necessary to block certain keys.
Something like Nostr might make it slightly easier to replicate things or provide a less antiquated key management system than GPG but it won’t be a game-changer but an incremental improvement at best.
I think this effort here is both overstating the problem of using GitHub and understating the challenges of replacing it. People use GitHub because running servers is a chore they don’t want to deal with. Relatively few people are donating hosting and the ones who do generally aren’t interested in hosting the few types of content which GitHub bans, either. They’re certainly not going to go to jail rather than help the police who tracked something illegal to their IPs.
I don't feel like your recognizing a ton of really obvious differences.
DNS is hardly a good shield for dealing with potential takedowns. It seems obviously true for a variety of reasons, including some mandated takedowns at the centralized DNS layer itself. Relays obviously allow a vault potentially infinitely replicated way means for unhosting that simply lacks many good modern parallels.
TornadoCash again seems radically different from anything we are talking about, simply because it is so heavily in the highly regulatory financial regime, in a way that Nostro simply isn't. The government never really had to step in; the threat of it maybe having to made everyone change their tune very fast. And there just were very very very few actual decision makers involved. Nostr is far more decentralized in practice, even though the number of users is much lower than cryptocoin stuff.
Elsewhere I've agreed that replacing GitHub is really really hard & long work, & I've pined for us to take smaller steps rather than make such big totalizing attempts. But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage. And you seem unwilling to deem any attempt worth starting. At some point the feelings against big centralized social networks leads us to trying new things, but I mostly read fatalistic why try from your people-dont-want-to-host-things, even though Nostr's whole point is to make being a relay at small interpersonal scales reslly easy, without having to tackle the hard big-scale computing hosting challenges. And if your relay goes down,... so what? Your small unhosted network is there.
I would strongly suggest you think about how such a system could actually work. For example, DNS is still decentralized unless you’re running something illegal in so many places that you can’t get a stable entry from one of thousands of choices around the world. If that’s the kind of thing you’re concerned with, I don’t see much advantage to replacing a DNS record with a public key on Nostr - that’s the easiest part of the problem compared to preserving the actual data, limiting access only to people you trust (how do you know who that really is?), etc.
> But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage
This is why so many people are comparing this to blockchains/web3 — people seem to have started by saying everyone needs to adopt a particular technology but it’s like pulling teeth to get a proponent to give a concrete example of a real problem experienced by non-hypothetical people which is competitively solved by using it. If you ask for details the response is not to provide them but say “you don’t get it”, which in my experience is one of the most reliable indicators of a technology which will fail.
I first used self-hosted development tools in the 90s so assume I’m familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of working that way. What I’m missing here is a benefit from Nostr which would be so beneficial that people would give up the advantages of the systems everyone has settled on. For example, if the big pitch is “censorship resistance” I’d start by establishing who’s being censored on a scale noticeable enough to support a large development effort, followed by convincing analysis that the proposed system will actually accomplish its goals.
> DNS is still decentralized unless you’re running something illegal in so many places that you can’t get a stable entry from one of thousands of choices around the world.
The infrastructure is decentralized, but it's one of the most centralized systems in the world, in terms of what's available/what you'll find.
> people seem to have started by saying everyone needs to adopt a particular technology but it’s like pulling teeth to get a proponent to give a concrete example of a real problem experienced by non-hypothetical people which is competitively solved by using it.
I think a lot of it is a pretty simple desire: we want to chat with each other, and be able to have access to the data. Literally no social media system on the planet actually lets you take your conservations out. You're limited to 24 hours of caching at most. If you quit or get banned, your words vanish. If someone else quits or gets banned, their words vanish. Memories up in smoke. With Nostr, the data is yours to do with.
In general I think there's a pretty obvious calling here, for people to have something/anything. Right now we literally have no option to start from, no ability to do anything or try other things, on any of the major incumbent systems. Your criticism seems very "no one can explain what it's for" conservative, but the progressives don't care about what it's for. We want something where we can figure out what it's for, we want a way to start to figure out what progress might look like. We need a starting place to explore what is possible.
There's already a ton of really neat & interesting NIPS. There's already social networks forming. We already can archive and relay our data, over any available medium including offline. There are interesting capabilities here which are unmirrored. I don't think anyone here is concerned about the normies right now: the alpha geeks want to serve themselves, want to build freedom & possibility, which is what's denied right now. They are building possible starting places we can adapt and adopt to many uses.
And they're doing an excellent job, doing new things, that no one else can, in part because no one else can do anything at all (because giant megacorporations own all the other mediums)_and in part because they have good technical underpinnings with potentiate a much wider space of possibility than the limited centralized site-based hosting systems we have today.
Contrary to your shade, I don't think the Nostr people are fanatics about their tech. It's a starting place, that techies find to be a reasonably good place to start building exploring from. There's not a lot of contenders, to be honest. We need something, and very little else right now fits.
> Your criticism seems very "no one can explain what it's for" conservative, but the progressives don't care about what it's for.
Progressives have goals. That doesn’t always mean solutions, but nobody should struggle to say what they’re trying to improve. That’s somewhat conspicuously absent in Dorsey’s bounty listing, and that’s why I’ve been asking.
Ultimately, the problem is that a service like GitHub or GitLab uses a fair amount resources to run. You have non-trivial storage needs, multiple separate systems making changes which aren’t a simple write-once structure (think about what git rebase does to your storage needs), and non-trivial services like CI. Most projects started out running those themselves (possibly starting in the CVS or Subversion eras), got tired of it and switched to something like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. and in general that’s been a popular choice. They have paid services which generate a fair amount of revenue to support their businesses but the free tiers allow many open source projects to work without thinking about infrastructure.
This means the very first question I have is the still unanswered one: what is going to motivate someone to spend time working on this or take the risk of switching to it? Nostr isn’t designed for this problem so it’ll be harder to solve there and you’re still going to have to pay for servers since relays don’t guarantee storage unless you run them, and I don’t see very many people who are unsatisfied enough with the status quo that they’re going to donate millions of dollars worth of development time.
Maybe his mistakes with Twitter is exactly how he came to realise the importance of not letting giant corporations rule over the social networks we all rely on. Twitter, GitHub, and so on and so forth.
He was CEO until end of 2021 which is way after the harms of centralized, for-profit, ad-supported social media were clearly visible, both at Twitter and its competitors.
If he wanted to rectify his "mistake" he could've at least attempted to do so, yet I see no signs of that, so I'm not buying this story. My opinion is that he got rich of shitting in and poisoning the centralized social media well for everyone else, and now wants to double-dip and do the same for (supposedly) decentralized networks while garnering sympathy about how he supposedly made a "mistake".
>If he wanted to rectify his "mistake" he could've at least attempted to do so, yet I see no signs of that, so I'm not buying this story.
How does one rectify this issue? Destroy a public company with a lot of shareholders?
Removing the centralization in Twitter and adding the levels of censorship resistance her prefers would have been a massive gamble with a high probability of failure and would have eventually gotten him ousted.
IMO the only way he could proceed is build on a clean slate without destroying the existing value it took a decade to accrue.
This is not about decentralising git itself, which is already decentralised.
This is about a decentralised alternative to GitHub. All of the other parts that they have on top of the git hosting. Issues, PRs, stars, followers, everything. GitHub the social network. The thing that MS paid $$$ to buy.
The reason that people centralise themselves on GitHub. That’s what we need a decentralised alternative for. So that everything everyone is doing on GitHub can be done without involvement and rule from a giant corporation and their commercial interests.
Nostr does not use a blockchain, nor NFTs, nor tokens, etc.
The fact that someone is offering to pay a bounty in BTC for the creation of a Github alternative using the Nostr protocol does not make Nostr, nor this Github alternative, a crypto token.
If you self-host GitLab and I come across your repo, and I want to submit an issue I’ve found with your code. I then have to go through the trouble of making a new account for me on your instance, assuming that your instance even allows me to create an account.
Don’t get me wrong, self-hosted GitLab is very useful too. But it is different from the goal of replacing GitHub with a decentralised alternative.
The decentralised alternative to GitHub should work such that there is no one party that decides over accounts. You should be able to float freely around the network of instances.
You should be able to follow other people and star their repositories.
People, and code, should exist independently of the individual instances in the network.
Any instance could ban you, and any instance could ban some of the people you follow or repositories you are following. But the network as a whole can still allow you to continue to follow others and others to follow you.
Your identity is not tied to the instance. Your repositories are not tied to the instance.
If one instance bans you, you can access the same network with the same identity from another instance. And others can still find you with that same identity over the network.
How much time account creation realistically takes? How does that compare to the actual PR creation time?
You will need to spend significantly more time on writing code, debugging, testing, creating PR that follows all the guidelines, potentially signing legal docs etc. If you can’t spend 15s on creating a new account I’m not sure I would be interested in accepting such PR.
> When did the hatred for anything with a token turn into outright bootlicking? Do we not remember MS of the 90s?
When the "thing" that is going to replace "MS of the 90s" is actually a grift with the intent of propping up another grift; how is it bootlicking to be incredulous?
Nostr isn't crypto, what are you talking about? Are you just unhappy btc is being used as the reward?
It's not a grift to use a currency as a currency. That's the actually worthwhile purpose, you being able to send money to people without messing with payment processors who are themselves grifts.
GitHub is only as strong as people want it to be. GitLab is their most important competitor with one important advantage: they offer an open source version whereas GitHub is totally closed (maybe their runners are open, I don't know). Which is paradoxical when you think of it.
For smaller projects you have Gitea which is ultralight and works perfectly if you don't need CI/CD.
Scams won’t solve problems, but they can distract from real solutions. Git is a fully decentralized protocol and there are multiple GitHub alternatives which are reasonably good so the first question should be why most users actively want to centralize onto GitHub.
This is driven by a desire to boost cryptocurrency which is understandable given that investors are realizing how little value has been created with all of the billions spent, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sound or even coherent idea. For example, what is “permissionless” other than a marketing slogan when you’re talking about a real decentralized protocol which has been that way since its beginning 17 years ago?
No, but I’ve only ever heard it promoted by cryptocurrency people and it shares the wooly thinking about privacy, censorship, etc. common in that space. In this case, you can see that both from the bitcoin people pushing the idea and their signature tendency to push complicated technology as the solution to a social dynamic.
Even if you hate all cryptocurrencies and financial use cases, the space has spurred a ton of new and interesting applied research. Ignoring eg BLS signatures and multiparty computation because of affinity with cryptocurrency isn't rational.
I’m not ignoring it, just being realistic about what it can do and where the problem needs a technical solution. There are people I respect working in the space but they are mostly getting ignored since pragmatic research doesn’t promise a gold rush.
While I think crypto is at best nonsense, at worst a fraud, a small amount of Bitcoin can still be turned into US Dollars fairly reliably. You might have no confidence on its value though by the time you get them.
Beyond the financial concerns, this looks like the classic "solution looking for a problem" ... except it's found a problem and it still can't make it stick.
It's a bounty that anybody in the world can take advantage of thanks to Bitcoin. No sanctions can stop them. If that was the mission of Bitcoin, mission accomplished.
As far as the Nostr based Github goes, the features being discussed by potential users sound interesting
https://stacker.news/items/147389
Musk could be good for Twitter. Pretty much all the backlash against him fizzled out, and he managed to streamline the company with apparently close to zero impact on the service.
Especially if that person is in a different country than the US. Wiring money from the US to many countries is an exercise in frustration and futility.
Except Microsoft has kept github basically the same as it was when they bought it, added features regularly and removed the need to pay for certain features that were once premium.
I'd accept your argument if it was say Oracle, but MSFT hasn't done anything "bad" that affects your use of Github.
Only if you haven't grown out of the "M$" phase in 15 years. The ms of that is vastly different. If anything there needs to be more caution against Apple and Google.
The "M$" of the good old days merely wanted money and acted anti-competitively to get it - the products themselves were solid.
The MS of today, starting with Windows 8, became a worldwide spyware operator with the spyware masquerading as a shitty, user-hostile OS with the same UI consistency as your typical Linux distribution.
The former could be kept at bay with enough money and the products were solid. Not only is the latter's greed for spying on you unsatiable, but the products themselves are terrible.
How does this pass for a top voted comment on HN? To put it mildly, I get that cryptocurrencies aren't the most popular thing on HN but this comment breaks just about every HN commenting guideline and yet it's up here:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
Nostr is not Blockchain. The tech is unrelated. It's just a simple protocol of message types and relays that store messages. A lot of blockchain fanatics like nostr but the tech itself doesn't use it.
I don’t know enough about nostr to know what is being suggested here.
Would this entail creating a new VCS which has a server that communicates over nostr, as well as a GitHub-like frontend? Or just some nostr interface to git?
I would imagine it's just the GitHub part. It's an alternative to GitHub, not Git. There already are many such alternatives, they're just not using Nostr or ActivityPub, they're not... "decentralised social network", and that is what this bounty is looking for.
Personally, I wouldn't dare try to compete with GitLab, let alone try to take on GitHub, for a measly 10 BTC. But someone more optimistic than me might, and good luck to them.
It’s just hurting my brain because git is already decentralized by design, and frontends are too in a sense. Anyone can clone a GitHub repo and put it up on their own web frontend or just serve the repo directly.
I guess other people value the “social media” aspect of it more than I do? I don’t really care if I’m interfacing with github or gitlab or codeberg or huggingface or sourcehut or whatever. Git is git.
Like parent commenter said, this is about all of the other features of GitHub. The issues, the stars, the followers. The social network that MS paid $$$ for.
We need a decentralised alternative to GitHub that lets everyone do everything they are using GitHub for today, without the involvement of any big companies that rule over our social networks.
That is what Jack Dorsey is asking for. That is what we don’t have today.
We need a decentralised social network with GitHub features which makes it so that we can create an account anywhere and use that same account everywhere, across servers. So that there can be a billion GitHub alternative servers with all of the GitHub features, and you can communicate across instances without being beholden to the owners of any single one instance too much.
Jack Dorsey wants this to happen on top of the Nostr protocol specifically.
But yes, if you try to understand all of this from an angle of “git is git” then it might not seem to make sense. But that’s because it’s not about git. It’s about everything social around it.
In most of the open source circles I run in, people are pretty openly hostile to anything web3, so they probably would opt to stay on their alternative hosting platforms.
But perhaps there are enough web3 people to use it? I’m curious to see how it plays out and what kind of development takes place on there.
How do you think the bounty will play out, by the way? Will whatever is developed be open source? Who do you think will oversee maintenance?
What does "read from global" mean? What is a "relay" and what is paid vs public? Why does FF suggest adding snort.social as an application for "web+nostr" links?
FYI, this website is a nostr client. Nostr is a decentralized messaging protocol where many relays are used to share messages among many clients. There are mobile client apps like Damus, and there are web clients like this website. There are others. Some relays are free, and some relays are paid, which helps filter out spam.
Messages are cryptographically signed, and users are identified by their public key. Users typically follow other users like they would on Twitter, but the client manages everything, so there is no dependency on any relay.
Messages are typically posted to many relays at once and clients typically read from many relays at once. Jack Dorsey's message is being displayed here because it was copied to a relay that this website has access to. The same message is accessible elsewhere.
"Global" means that you download all the public messages that a relay has, instead of just downloading messages posted by people you follow.
I think there is nothing to prevent you from making a server that collects messages, it is just that, based on observation of how previous systems failed they have chosen a different model.
I have been thinking about this problem space a number of times and after first thinking my ideas were significantly better I have come to understand why nostr picked this solution.
Thanks. So what happens if there's a new feature? e.g. a market place or photo gallery. Do only some servers/relays provide it or is it rolled out everywhere?
My understanding is that message features are embedded in the messages themselves. So, it’s more a question of client support rather than relay/server support.
Relays today are rather "dumb". Clients are "smart". So, for your examples, each client would have to implement a marketplace or photo gallery. Relays can store that data without having to really do anything.
Clients can add new features and users that use these clients will be able to use these new features. Relays are there just to store and forward the data.
The fact that this all had to be explained is exactly why it'll never catch on. The average user does not give a crap about decentralised stuff, nor all the terminology surrounding it.
It's the same reason mastedon had a huge surge of signups followed by very little activity - nobody wants to screw around with technology that has crappy holes you have to jumpt through.
I swear every decentralised platform is aimed at a very tiny niche community who have no concept of UX or usability.
Man these tech billionaires are so far up their own ass they have no idea how distasteful their ideas are.
His money could save millions of people from starvation [0], but what is he trying to spend it on instead? A less useful alternative to an already existing service, for no reason other than supporting his neo-feudalist ideology.
Presumably because that crowd is big into decentralization, and just having anyone being able to host a gitlab instance doesn't quite fit their vision of decentralization (decentralization is an ambigious term and almost everyone who uses it means something different)
My understanding in that this case, decentralized Github means the ability to have the social features around a git repo that Github provides (Issues, PRs, Discussions) but can't be banned due to the decision of a single actor.
I don't find it weird how the people literally on nostr think nostr is good. Obviously they think there is something valuable about nostr or they wouldn't be using it.
If someone started a "hn is shit" thread, i suspect lots of people who frequent hn would disagree.
Events and signatures
Each user has a keypair. Signatures, public key, and encodings are done according to the Schnorr signatures standard for the curve secp256k1.
The only object type that exists is the event, which has the following format on the wire:
{
"id": <32-bytes lowercase hex-encoded sha256 of the the serialized event data>
"pubkey": <32-bytes lowercase hex-encoded public key of the event creator>,
"created_at": <unix timestamp in seconds>,
"kind": <integer>,
"tags": [
["e", <32-bytes hex of the id of another event>, <recommended relay URL>],
["p", <32-bytes hex of a pubkey>, <recommended relay URL>],
... // other kinds of tags may be included later
],
"content": <arbitrary string>,
"sig": <64-bytes hex of the signature of the sha256 hash of the serialized event data, which is the same as the "id" field>
}
To obtain the event.id, we sha256 the serialized event. The serialization is done over the UTF-8 JSON-serialized string (with no white space or line breaks) of the following structure:
[
0,
<pubkey, as a (lowercase) hex string>,
<created_at, as a number>,
<kind, as a number>,
<tags, as an array of arrays of non-null strings>,
<content, as a string>
]
Communication between clients and relays
Relays expose a websocket endpoint to which clients can connect.
From client to relay: sending events and creating subscriptions
Clients can send 3 types of messages, which must be JSON arrays, according to the following patterns:
["EVENT", <event JSON as defined above>], used to publish events.
["REQ", <subscription_id>, <filters JSON>...], used to request events and subscribe to new updates.
["CLOSE", <subscription_id>], used to stop previous subscriptions.
<subscription_id> is an arbitrary, non-empty string of max length 64 chars, that should be used to represent a subscription.
<filters> is a JSON object that determines what events will be sent in that subscription, it can have the following attributes:
{
"ids": <a list of event ids or prefixes>,
"authors": <a list of pubkeys or prefixes, the pubkey of an event must be one of these>,
"kinds": <a list of a kind numbers>,
"#e": <a list of event ids that are referenced in an "e" tag>,
"#p": <a list of pubkeys that are referenced in a "p" tag>,
"since": <an integer unix timestamp, events must be newer than this to pass>,
"until": <an integer unix timestamp, events must be older than this to pass>,
"limit": <maximum number of events to be returned in the initial query>
}
Upon receiving a REQ message, the relay SHOULD query its internal database and return events that match the filter, then store that filter and send again all future events it receives to that same websocket until the websocket is closed. The CLOSE event is received with the same <subscription_id> or a new REQ is sent using the same <subscription_id>, in which case it should overwrite the previous subscription.
Filter attributes containing lists (such as ids, kinds, or #e) are JSON arrays with one or more values. At least one of the array's values must match the relevant field in an event for the condition itself to be considered a match. For scalar event attributes such as kind, the attribute from the event must be contained in the filter list. For tag attributes such as #e, where an event...
Thank you for sharing. This is exactly the kind of problem that centralised social networks give us, but which most people will not understand because for most people this will not happen.
I think it is important that we solve the problem of centralised social networks.
And I think Nostr has the right idea. Nostr differs from ActivityPub in that identity is not tied to the instance that you use.
To quote someone else:
> Nostr uses a public key to identify users, while ActivityPub utilizes a more conventional user account system. ActivityPub user accounts are based on domain names, which can be controlled by third-party entities. Nostr's identification system is more decentralized, as it does not rely on domain names controlled by outside parties.
Wow HN is just hate these days whenever someone mention BTC in headline. If Nostr is successful, the hate will be amazing for missing twice in a decade.
>It seems to be the same people that were convinced NFT's were going to be big that are backing it.
Not at all. Most Nostr proponents are Bitcoin maxis that generally hate NFTs. They are groups of people that are more aware of the limitations of freedom of speech and free markets on a constantly centralizing internet and aim to solve the problem.
So, a prize of about US$220,000 for taking the git protocol (and associated web site support), and distributing it across an ephemeral network that resists single points of failure/control ingress?
I wish I had the skill to pull that off.
On, the other hand, Nostr as a distributed social network looks interesting in its own right.
Nostr is one of the most interesting things I have seen in a long time.
The only minor problem I have with it is that the early adopters are very pro crypto/anti vaccines and it might give the impression that it is a community for such folks when in reality it seems to be just a much better technical alternative to smtp and nntp and (for some use cases) for xmpp for this century.
I've come around a bit to Nostr. I like the general idea here, actually.
But asking for a github replacement seems like way too much scope. Github is millions of people-hours of work, does a crazy large amount of stuff.
Just start with some basics: can I get a stream of commits from someone? Can I send patches ("pull requests") to someone? Find some managable goals, and build protocols forwards.
The product minded "deliver me a complete replacement for a whole (& massive) product" is a harm-inducing act that obstructs incremental growth & genuine sucess. Nostr has NIPS, Nostr Improvememt Possibilities (NIPS)- trying to coax some wildcard team into writing either one massive NIPS and a huge product or a sea of closely interlocked NIPS and a huge product is going to cause longstanding damage & an inability to grow this organic system out right.
I agree with that. I've voiced these same concerns with the "big replacement" mentality and suggested that things are made out of small building blocks.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadI'd go even further and say nostr is closer to what web3 should have been: technological innovation to simplify the construction of new services.
1 billion satoshi = 10 BTC
It’s easier to just say 10 BTC. Also it makes the headline shorter
1 SATS = 0.00000001 bitcoin
Unsure why the headline was edited. Probably to get more attention as btc draws more attention than SATS
Google told me 1 billion sats is 0.1 BTC, ChatGPT 0.01 BTC. Google was still closer :)
No I just think that an amount that is equal to several BTC is pointless to measure in sats.
It’s equally pointless to use sats as the units of measure for such a big amount, as it would be to say “20 million cents” instead of just “$200k”
That's really it, servers have less authority in nostr, and that's why it's more resistant to censorship.
If your concern is private, if this were to find some kind of use you’d inevitably see shared blocklists just as we’ve seen for things like email spam. That’s a really important thing to study for any distributed system because “censorship resistant” inevitably means “full of spam, malware, and illegal content” unless you’re very careful designing some compromise to prevent that (e.g. IPFS mirroring is opt-in, so an innocent node owner doesn’t wake up to the FBI knocking their door in).
In the case of GitHub, anyone who wants to self-host an alternative can do so for only the cost of their time & modest app hosting resources running Gitlab, Gitea, etc. That raises the question of where this offer is coming from: there isn’t a notable problem with censorship on GitHub for otherwise legal content, so you’re mostly talking about things which are actually illegal and that means that something like Nostr isn’t changing the picture much because everything already is decentralized. If the Tornado Cash guys are on a block list, Nostr server owners are going to have legal demands to block their keys, too, just as a hosting company would get a take-down for a private GitLab instance.
If governments do try to get things removed on Nostr they're going to have a much much harder time. Folks can re-pop-up on different relays. Governments can keep playing whack-a-mole but I have hard time seeing they'll have any success. Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me, seems to be way different from what I'd expect when this situation crops up.
Not needing to host is a critical change of the game here, in my view.
The DNS system is decentralized and updates take seconds. We’ve seen this for decades with things like open source projects when someone gets tired of hosting it.
> Your post makes it sound like a government can snap it's fingers & every relay will magically stop carrying content: that seems wildly out of touch to me
Look at what happened with the TornadoCash guys — once legal action was taken, how many exchanges would allow transactions to or from their addresses? This would be similar: once enough people start using it, someone will do something illegal, and then governments are going to start telling server operators in their jurisdictions to stop allowing that traffic if they don’t want to be charged as accessories. Since those guys don’t want to go to jail or have their servers packed up by federal marshals, they’ll figure out whatever is necessary to block certain keys.
Something like Nostr might make it slightly easier to replicate things or provide a less antiquated key management system than GPG but it won’t be a game-changer but an incremental improvement at best.
I think this effort here is both overstating the problem of using GitHub and understating the challenges of replacing it. People use GitHub because running servers is a chore they don’t want to deal with. Relatively few people are donating hosting and the ones who do generally aren’t interested in hosting the few types of content which GitHub bans, either. They’re certainly not going to go to jail rather than help the police who tracked something illegal to their IPs.
DNS is hardly a good shield for dealing with potential takedowns. It seems obviously true for a variety of reasons, including some mandated takedowns at the centralized DNS layer itself. Relays obviously allow a vault potentially infinitely replicated way means for unhosting that simply lacks many good modern parallels.
TornadoCash again seems radically different from anything we are talking about, simply because it is so heavily in the highly regulatory financial regime, in a way that Nostro simply isn't. The government never really had to step in; the threat of it maybe having to made everyone change their tune very fast. And there just were very very very few actual decision makers involved. Nostr is far more decentralized in practice, even though the number of users is much lower than cryptocoin stuff.
Elsewhere I've agreed that replacing GitHub is really really hard & long work, & I've pined for us to take smaller steps rather than make such big totalizing attempts. But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage. And you seem unwilling to deem any attempt worth starting. At some point the feelings against big centralized social networks leads us to trying new things, but I mostly read fatalistic why try from your people-dont-want-to-host-things, even though Nostr's whole point is to make being a relay at small interpersonal scales reslly easy, without having to tackle the hard big-scale computing hosting challenges. And if your relay goes down,... so what? Your small unhosted network is there.
> But I think you don't really grasp the unhosting ideas& advantage
This is why so many people are comparing this to blockchains/web3 — people seem to have started by saying everyone needs to adopt a particular technology but it’s like pulling teeth to get a proponent to give a concrete example of a real problem experienced by non-hypothetical people which is competitively solved by using it. If you ask for details the response is not to provide them but say “you don’t get it”, which in my experience is one of the most reliable indicators of a technology which will fail.
I first used self-hosted development tools in the 90s so assume I’m familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of working that way. What I’m missing here is a benefit from Nostr which would be so beneficial that people would give up the advantages of the systems everyone has settled on. For example, if the big pitch is “censorship resistance” I’d start by establishing who’s being censored on a scale noticeable enough to support a large development effort, followed by convincing analysis that the proposed system will actually accomplish its goals.
The infrastructure is decentralized, but it's one of the most centralized systems in the world, in terms of what's available/what you'll find.
> people seem to have started by saying everyone needs to adopt a particular technology but it’s like pulling teeth to get a proponent to give a concrete example of a real problem experienced by non-hypothetical people which is competitively solved by using it.
I think a lot of it is a pretty simple desire: we want to chat with each other, and be able to have access to the data. Literally no social media system on the planet actually lets you take your conservations out. You're limited to 24 hours of caching at most. If you quit or get banned, your words vanish. If someone else quits or gets banned, their words vanish. Memories up in smoke. With Nostr, the data is yours to do with.
In general I think there's a pretty obvious calling here, for people to have something/anything. Right now we literally have no option to start from, no ability to do anything or try other things, on any of the major incumbent systems. Your criticism seems very "no one can explain what it's for" conservative, but the progressives don't care about what it's for. We want something where we can figure out what it's for, we want a way to start to figure out what progress might look like. We need a starting place to explore what is possible.
There's already a ton of really neat & interesting NIPS. There's already social networks forming. We already can archive and relay our data, over any available medium including offline. There are interesting capabilities here which are unmirrored. I don't think anyone here is concerned about the normies right now: the alpha geeks want to serve themselves, want to build freedom & possibility, which is what's denied right now. They are building possible starting places we can adapt and adopt to many uses. And they're doing an excellent job, doing new things, that no one else can, in part because no one else can do anything at all (because giant megacorporations own all the other mediums)_and in part because they have good technical underpinnings with potentiate a much wider space of possibility than the limited centralized site-based hosting systems we have today.
Contrary to your shade, I don't think the Nostr people are fanatics about their tech. It's a starting place, that techies find to be a reasonably good place to start building exploring from. There's not a lot of contenders, to be honest. We need something, and very little else right now fits.
Progressives have goals. That doesn’t always mean solutions, but nobody should struggle to say what they’re trying to improve. That’s somewhat conspicuously absent in Dorsey’s bounty listing, and that’s why I’ve been asking.
Ultimately, the problem is that a service like GitHub or GitLab uses a fair amount resources to run. You have non-trivial storage needs, multiple separate systems making changes which aren’t a simple write-once structure (think about what git rebase does to your storage needs), and non-trivial services like CI. Most projects started out running those themselves (possibly starting in the CVS or Subversion eras), got tired of it and switched to something like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. and in general that’s been a popular choice. They have paid services which generate a fair amount of revenue to support their businesses but the free tiers allow many open source projects to work without thinking about infrastructure.
This means the very first question I have is the still unanswered one: what is going to motivate someone to spend time working on this or take the risk of switching to it? Nostr isn’t designed for this problem so it’ll be harder to solve there and you’re still going to have to pay for servers since relays don’t guarantee storage unless you run them, and I don’t see very many people who are unsatisfied enough with the status quo that they’re going to donate millions of dollars worth of development time.
The motivation, vision just never seems to be there.
If he wanted to rectify his "mistake" he could've at least attempted to do so, yet I see no signs of that, so I'm not buying this story. My opinion is that he got rich of shitting in and poisoning the centralized social media well for everyone else, and now wants to double-dip and do the same for (supposedly) decentralized networks while garnering sympathy about how he supposedly made a "mistake".
How does one rectify this issue? Destroy a public company with a lot of shareholders?
Removing the centralization in Twitter and adding the levels of censorship resistance her prefers would have been a massive gamble with a high probability of failure and would have eventually gotten him ousted.
IMO the only way he could proceed is build on a clean slate without destroying the existing value it took a decade to accrue.
When did the hatred for anything with a token turn into outright bootlicking? Do we not remember MS of the 90s?
This is about a decentralised alternative to GitHub. All of the other parts that they have on top of the git hosting. Issues, PRs, stars, followers, everything. GitHub the social network. The thing that MS paid $$$ to buy.
The reason that people centralise themselves on GitHub. That’s what we need a decentralised alternative for. So that everything everyone is doing on GitHub can be done without involvement and rule from a giant corporation and their commercial interests.
The fact that someone is offering to pay a bounty in BTC for the creation of a Github alternative using the Nostr protocol does not make Nostr, nor this Github alternative, a crypto token.
Don’t get me wrong, self-hosted GitLab is very useful too. But it is different from the goal of replacing GitHub with a decentralised alternative.
The decentralised alternative to GitHub should work such that there is no one party that decides over accounts. You should be able to float freely around the network of instances.
You should be able to follow other people and star their repositories.
People, and code, should exist independently of the individual instances in the network.
Any instance could ban you, and any instance could ban some of the people you follow or repositories you are following. But the network as a whole can still allow you to continue to follow others and others to follow you.
Your identity is not tied to the instance. Your repositories are not tied to the instance.
If one instance bans you, you can access the same network with the same identity from another instance. And others can still find you with that same identity over the network.
You will need to spend significantly more time on writing code, debugging, testing, creating PR that follows all the guidelines, potentially signing legal docs etc. If you can’t spend 15s on creating a new account I’m not sure I would be interested in accepting such PR.
At a high level, a git commit hash is a SHA1 hash of the state of the git repository at the time of the commit.
https://medium.com/@jonathan_finch/git-commit-hash-number-th...
You do realize that github != git, right?
When the "thing" that is going to replace "MS of the 90s" is actually a grift with the intent of propping up another grift; how is it bootlicking to be incredulous?
If you want to build an alternative to GitHub, sure, but keep the tuplip bulb fake money out of it.
Make them understand they're not welcome in polite society.
This site has been getting a lot better at that, but it's all of our duty to give pushback wherever we can.
You could say that this dissuades many talented developers from taking on the bounty, which is true, sure. That doesn't make it a crypto project.
It's not a grift to use a currency as a currency. That's the actually worthwhile purpose, you being able to send money to people without messing with payment processors who are themselves grifts.
For smaller projects you have Gitea which is ultralight and works perfectly if you don't need CI/CD.
This is driven by a desire to boost cryptocurrency which is understandable given that investors are realizing how little value has been created with all of the billions spent, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sound or even coherent idea. For example, what is “permissionless” other than a marketing slogan when you’re talking about a real decentralized protocol which has been that way since its beginning 17 years ago?
Even if you hate all cryptocurrencies and financial use cases, the space has spurred a ton of new and interesting applied research. Ignoring eg BLS signatures and multiparty computation because of affinity with cryptocurrency isn't rational.
As far as the Nostr based Github goes, the features being discussed by potential users sound interesting https://stacker.news/items/147389
https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump...
Because people have stopped using it as much. Look at his comments now, it's just crypto grifters and boomers who bought a blue check.
It's really fascinating to me how quickly the place has degraded in utility and entertainment.
Are you suggesting it's impossible to outsource development work to someone for $220k?
That should be the sole reason to want to create something else
I'd accept your argument if it was say Oracle, but MSFT hasn't done anything "bad" that affects your use of Github.
The MS of today, starting with Windows 8, became a worldwide spyware operator with the spyware masquerading as a shitty, user-hostile OS with the same UI consistency as your typical Linux distribution.
The former could be kept at bay with enough money and the products were solid. Not only is the latter's greed for spying on you unsatiable, but the products themselves are terrible.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
Do better.
Would this entail creating a new VCS which has a server that communicates over nostr, as well as a GitHub-like frontend? Or just some nostr interface to git?
Personally, I wouldn't dare try to compete with GitLab, let alone try to take on GitHub, for a measly 10 BTC. But someone more optimistic than me might, and good luck to them.
I guess other people value the “social media” aspect of it more than I do? I don’t really care if I’m interfacing with github or gitlab or codeberg or huggingface or sourcehut or whatever. Git is git.
Like parent commenter said, this is about all of the other features of GitHub. The issues, the stars, the followers. The social network that MS paid $$$ for.
We need a decentralised alternative to GitHub that lets everyone do everything they are using GitHub for today, without the involvement of any big companies that rule over our social networks.
That is what Jack Dorsey is asking for. That is what we don’t have today.
We need a decentralised social network with GitHub features which makes it so that we can create an account anywhere and use that same account everywhere, across servers. So that there can be a billion GitHub alternative servers with all of the GitHub features, and you can communicate across instances without being beholden to the owners of any single one instance too much.
Jack Dorsey wants this to happen on top of the Nostr protocol specifically.
But yes, if you try to understand all of this from an angle of “git is git” then it might not seem to make sense. But that’s because it’s not about git. It’s about everything social around it.
In most of the open source circles I run in, people are pretty openly hostile to anything web3, so they probably would opt to stay on their alternative hosting platforms.
But perhaps there are enough web3 people to use it? I’m curious to see how it plays out and what kind of development takes place on there.
How do you think the bounty will play out, by the way? Will whatever is developed be open source? Who do you think will oversee maintenance?
Jack Dorsey paying for it with BTC or USD doesn't make it web3 or not.
What does "read from global" mean? What is a "relay" and what is paid vs public? Why does FF suggest adding snort.social as an application for "web+nostr" links?
Messages are cryptographically signed, and users are identified by their public key. Users typically follow other users like they would on Twitter, but the client manages everything, so there is no dependency on any relay.
Messages are typically posted to many relays at once and clients typically read from many relays at once. Jack Dorsey's message is being displayed here because it was copied to a relay that this website has access to. The same message is accessible elsewhere.
"Global" means that you download all the public messages that a relay has, instead of just downloading messages posted by people you follow.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
I still don't get how this is supposed to be better than activitypub.
I have been thinking about this problem space a number of times and after first thinking my ideas were significantly better I have come to understand why nostr picked this solution.
It's the same reason mastedon had a huge surge of signups followed by very little activity - nobody wants to screw around with technology that has crappy holes you have to jumpt through.
I swear every decentralised platform is aimed at a very tiny niche community who have no concept of UX or usability.
His money could save millions of people from starvation [0], but what is he trying to spend it on instead? A less useful alternative to an already existing service, for no reason other than supporting his neo-feudalist ideology.
Gross.
[0] https://www.wfp.org/stories/wfps-plan-support-42-million-peo...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35021284
10 btc = $22300
$0.43 = one basic meal per person per day.
(10x22300)/((0.43x3)x365) = 473
This would help 473 people a year with 3 basic meals per day.
It is a number greater than zero, which is good, but we're also not talking about huge amounts of numbers here either.
Let's re-allocate funds away from militaries and politicians who create needless wars and worry less about Jack.
> The absolutely retarded state of HackerNews (Then a screenshot of this HN thread, which is here: https://imgproxy.snort.social/48YuDDEW11PoCqbeQ8R25a0kGN3BJe...)
It's interesting how different social platforms foster little pigeon holes for people, that act almost as some kind of militant platoon. Weird.
Few people then saw that making the echo chambers bigger didn't improve them much.
If someone started a "hn is shit" thread, i suspect lots of people who frequent hn would disagree.
Seems like some people already started projects to get the money: https://github.com/NostrGit
Events and signatures Each user has a keypair. Signatures, public key, and encodings are done according to the Schnorr signatures standard for the curve secp256k1.
The only object type that exists is the event, which has the following format on the wire:
To obtain the event.id, we sha256 the serialized event. The serialization is done over the UTF-8 JSON-serialized string (with no white space or line breaks) of the following structure: Communication between clients and relays Relays expose a websocket endpoint to which clients can connect.From client to relay: sending events and creating subscriptions Clients can send 3 types of messages, which must be JSON arrays, according to the following patterns:
Upon receiving a REQ message, the relay SHOULD query its internal database and return events that match the filter, then store that filter and send again all future events it receives to that same websocket until the websocket is closed. The CLOSE event is received with the same <subscription_id> or a new REQ is sent using the same <subscription_id>, in which case it should overwrite the previous subscription.Filter attributes containing lists (such as ids, kinds, or #e) are JSON arrays with one or more values. At least one of the array's values must match the relevant field in an event for the condition itself to be considered a match. For scalar event attributes such as kind, the attribute from the event must be contained in the filter list. For tag attributes such as #e, where an event...
https://docs.github.com/site-policy/github-terms/github-term...
but then other people said its allowed:
https://docs.github.com/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-m...
they also killed every issue, pull request and comment that I have ever made, across several years.
I think it is important that we solve the problem of centralised social networks.
And I think Nostr has the right idea. Nostr differs from ActivityPub in that identity is not tied to the instance that you use.
To quote someone else:
> Nostr uses a public key to identify users, while ActivityPub utilizes a more conventional user account system. ActivityPub user accounts are based on domain names, which can be controlled by third-party entities. Nostr's identification system is more decentralized, as it does not rely on domain names controlled by outside parties.
https://dri.es/nostr-love-at-first-sight
I’m sorry to hear about your experience with GitHub banning your account and the stars, issues, PRs, comments and so on that you lost.
Hopefully in the future when a truly decentralised alternative to GitHub exists, other people can avoid that kind of experience.
An alternative to GitHub, in the shape that Jack Dorsey has put a bounty on here.
Average users arent about to sign up to a "Censor-Resistant Decentralized Social Protocol". Most people wont even have a clue what that means.
It seems to be the same people that were convinced NFT's were going to be big that are backing it.
Not at all. Most Nostr proponents are Bitcoin maxis that generally hate NFTs. They are groups of people that are more aware of the limitations of freedom of speech and free markets on a constantly centralizing internet and aim to solve the problem.
> seems to be the same people that were convinced NFT's were going to be big that are backing it.
No. It's quite the opposite.
I wish I had the skill to pull that off.
On, the other hand, Nostr as a distributed social network looks interesting in its own right.
The only minor problem I have with it is that the early adopters are very pro crypto/anti vaccines and it might give the impression that it is a community for such folks when in reality it seems to be just a much better technical alternative to smtp and nntp and (for some use cases) for xmpp for this century.
But asking for a github replacement seems like way too much scope. Github is millions of people-hours of work, does a crazy large amount of stuff.
Just start with some basics: can I get a stream of commits from someone? Can I send patches ("pull requests") to someone? Find some managable goals, and build protocols forwards.
The product minded "deliver me a complete replacement for a whole (& massive) product" is a harm-inducing act that obstructs incremental growth & genuine sucess. Nostr has NIPS, Nostr Improvememt Possibilities (NIPS)- trying to coax some wildcard team into writing either one massive NIPS and a huge product or a sea of closely interlocked NIPS and a huge product is going to cause longstanding damage & an inability to grow this organic system out right.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips