rodbishop on Nostr: ...

quoting nevent1q…e36t

Authoritative servers (platforms) are nice because supposedly they have a bunch of advantages.
One such advantage is that they provide things like ‘global search’ and sensible like and follow counts, as opposed to something like Nostr where search sucks and likes and follows may as well be meaningless given how trivial sybil attacks are.

Somehow we believe this yet... You can buy likes and followers for these platforms, and it happens all the time. At least you can find everything that is on there, which is true, but also the point; you only see that is on THERE. Say you have a tweet, and its very popular. You can see all the tweets that are in response; but what a search function on a platform wont show you is all the conversations that happen in response to that tweet on forums and public chats elsewhere. The status quo already is chaos, and always will be.

The name of the game is providing sufficient order. The current platforms did that, their order is ‘sufficient’, perhaps by lack of viable alternative. And frankly, whatever order that exists on Nostr currently, is by lack of attack. But the thesis/belief behind Nostr is that whatever spam or sybil nightmares we will face, they can be mitigated. By means of trusted absolutes from authoritative servers and recommended follow and block-lists, an option that is still open to us; or by fancy WoT where you take an explicit probabilistic approach to glean signal from the endless noise. Or a combination of the two.

A.I. perhaps above all constitutes automated quality noise generation; as a result the noise floor increases and determining signal gets harder. Chaos is increasing, and the only direction platforms have is to become more totalitarian; increase barriers of entry by demanding more information and control, to keep their pretense of order alive. I don't expect the masses would reject this trend, and suspect they will go along; how ever many people these platforms will marginalize, that subsequently may find a home via Nostr, wont be what will win it for us (albeit enough reason to exist in the first place).

If we win, we will win because we are more flexible in dealing with the problems at hand.