Alright my dear protestors, resistance is futile!
er wait, wrong speech hang on…
more seriously, @shooterrex and @Belt-Fed I grasp the suspicion, so why am I messing with Nostr?
Because I don’t want Sixguns’ ability to communicate to depend entirely on somebody else’s permission.
Think of Nostr as HAM radio for the Internet.
With radio, you own the radio and you have an identity. Repeaters help carry the signal, but one repeater does not own amateur radio. If one repeater goes down, refuses you, or simply disappears, that does not erase your radio, your identity, or every other path available to you.
Nostr uses much the same idea on the Internet. Instead of one Facebook, X, Google or other company holding the master account and deciding whether you still exist, your identity is represented by a cryptographic key. Your messages are signed by that identity and can travel through many independent relays.
A relay can still refuse a message. That is important to understand. Nostr is not magic and it does not guarantee that everybody has to carry what you say. The difference is that one relay saying “no” does not automatically mean everybody else has to say “no.” Relays can be run by different people under different rules. GitHub
That is what interests me about it.
We have watched the Internet become increasingly centralized. Whether the pressure comes from a government, a corporation, an activist group, an advertiser, a payment company or simply somebody who doesn’t like what you say, centralized systems create a very tempting off switch.
And I fear you’ve all missed what’s going on too
What do you think is going on?
and also
more the same, whats going on?
I am trying to make sure Sixguns has more than one wire running out of the building.
That does not mean Nostr makes anyone anonymous. It does not mean laws disappear. It does not mean every relay must carry everything. It means there is no single social-media company that owns the entire communication system.
That’s what’s going on!
Moving on…
Bitcoin fits into Nostr for a similar reason.
Nostr tries to remove the central gatekeeper from publishing. Bitcoin and Lightning try to make it possible to move value over the Internet without requiring every little payment to go through a social-media company or its proprietary points system.
Put those together and you get the “zap.”
Somebody reads something useful, funny, interesting or worth supporting and instead of merely clicking a heart, he can voluntarily send a few satoshis — tiny fractions of a Bitcoin.
On Sixguns Xchange, that also gives people another way to help keep Sixguns running. Right now, a zap can go to the Sixguns fraternity. Later, members who want to participate can add their own Lightning address and share in the value their posts generate.
Nobody has to buy Bitcoin. Nobody has to use zaps. Nobody has to understand cryptography. You can come to Xchange, post, reply and leave all of that alone.
I am putting the machinery underneath it because I would rather learn how to build another road now than discover someday that the only road we had has been closed.
I don’t claim to know everything about Nostr yet. I don’t. That is part of why I am experimenting with it.
But I understand the principle: don’t put your identity, your speech and your community behind one company’s switch.
That’s enough reason for me to learn both Ai and alternative communication methods.
Some times it takes a
to look out for the rednecks
