andros

Is it suitable for small communities? I don't think so; it's over-engineering. A small decentralized or federated system is sufficient; successful examples like Tilde or FriendCamp reinforce my point. But everyone has their own perspective; I prefer simple systems without third-party dependencies. Small and sufficient is better than large and complete.

Comment · 14 days ago

Is it better to have something small with a certain level of usage, or a network of millions of users where only a negligible percentage actually interact?

Comment · 14 days ago

Sure, it's Wei & Tyson, "An Empirical Analysis of the Nostr Social Network": https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05709 The 98.2% is download traffic, not relay-to-relay sync. Across 17.8M posts and 712 relays (second half of 2023), the average post sat on 34.6 relays, and since clients subscribe to every relay in their list, they pull the same event over and over.

On curation, expiry and registered identities: I agree, and that's more or less my point in the article. A relay that only accepts its members and drops old content is a small community with a gatekeeper and someone paying the bill. That's fine, it's what I'm arguing for. But "the content survives when a node drops" comes precisely from the replication that costs money. The more relays curate and expire, the more survival depends on someone (often just your own client) keeping a copy to republish.

I also wonder: if each administrator has their own rules and configurations for their respective relay, is it a decentralized or a federated network?

I wrote about where each protocol puts its single point of failure (identity, discovery, cost) here: https://en.andros.dev/blog/603e4e90/there-is-no-such-thing-a...

Comment · 14 days ago

The problem with Nostr lies in its cost and replication; the traffic is redundant (98% of it). The result is a fragile infrastructure; a "ticking time bomb" in terms of costs. Added to this are the typical headaches associated with any decentralized network (spam, moderation without a central authority, Sybil attacks, a constantly growing volume of data, etc.). Furthermore, it is dependent on relays (which is not the case for other networks).

Comment · 14 days ago

What is your goal? To talk with other users via private messages, in the style of XMPP or IRC?

Comment · 14 days ago

This can happen, even in open-source projects. The key is that not everyone has the knowledge or the money to maintain them. These mini-federations make the Internet much richer and more accessible.