Week 40

• Added a page with my research findings around async concurrent websocket requests: https://nostr-php.dev/references/async-concurrent-requests

Week 41

I attended the Nostrdam meetup and helped as a volunteer at the Nostr booth at the Bitcoin Amsterdam 2024 conference. Here are some photo's:

I also wrote down my personal learned lessons from this expierence: https://nostrver.se/note/my-learned-nostr-lessons-nostr-booth-bitcoin-amsterdam-2024

There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified.

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:

1. Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
2. Only the original author may remove content they produce.
3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society. Much more about this here: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690

I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time. Of course mistakes were made. But if we had focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us, and moved much faster towards absolute transparency, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation of needing a fresh reset (which I am supportive of). Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right.

Back to the principles. Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.

I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible. Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity. There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today. The internet is trending towards a world were storage is “free” and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content.

Which brings me to the last principle: moderation. I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all. A “follow” action should always deliver every bit of content from the corresponding account, and the algorithms should be able to comb through everything else through a relevance lens that an individual determines. There’s a default “G-rated” algorithm, and then there’s everything else one can imagine.

The only way I know of to truly live up to these 3 principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influence. The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not. This is by definition a single point of failure, no matter how great the person, and over time will fracture the public conversation, and may lead to more control by governments and corporations around the world.

I believe many companies can build a phenomenal business off an open protocol. For proof, look at both the web and email. The biggest problem with these models however is that the discovery mechanisms are far too proprietary and fixed instead of open or extendable. Companies can build many profitable services that complement rather than lock down how we access this massive collection of conversation. There is no need to own or host it themselves.

Many of you won’t trust this solution just because it’s me stating it. I get it, but that’s exactly the point. Trusting any one individual with this comes with compromises, not to mention being way too heavy a burden for the individual. It has to be something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible. If you want proof of this, get out of the US and European bubble of the bitcoin price fluctuations and learn how real people are using it for censorship resistance in Africa and Central/South America.

I do still wish for Twitter, and every company, to become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions, and I wish I forced more of that years ago. I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.

As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, nostr another, Mastodon yet another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet. I believe this is critical both to Twitter’s future, and the public conversation’s ability to truly serve the people, which helps hold governments and corporations accountable. And hopefully makes it all a lot more fun and informative again.

💸🛠️🌐 To accelerate open internet and protocol work, I’m going to open a new category of #startsmall grants: “open internet development.” It will start with a focus of giving cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS. I’ll make some grants next week, starting with $1mm/yr to Signal. Please let me know other great candidates for this money.

Note: This is not some fancy writing piece. this is just brain farting that I thought it was too long for a regular post.

Alex Gleason is always doing a lot of crazy interesting work. Ditto is a step in the right direction for an alternate type of relay ecosystem that runs alongside the standard globally focused community we all know.

While #Ditto is awesome, what I'd really like to see something similar, but more focused on a multi-community experience that simultaneously makes each community's viewing experience focused only on that community's content. Just for fun, to write down some ideas, below are the 2 big changes that I think would make ditto the ultimate "communities" system that could trounce Reddit.

1. Single relay experience on the domain:

By default, I think community sites should only show content from the built in relay (or a relay group for redundancy). Currently on ditto.pub, when you first sign in, it feels a lot like any other web nostr client. The default home just shows follows I have from other relays instead of being thrown into the community content. You have to click the local feed, to filter the community's content, but it's limited to people who registered a NIP-05 for that domain. I think that it would be great if you could contribute with any NIP-05 and it counts as community content. That could be accomplished by equate community content to content posted on the relay. There are countless apps to get a feed of your relays, so it doesn't benefit me to see it on a communty's domain.

2. Sister client giving multi-community aggregation experience:

I think communities should like pokemon and you grab the ones to identify with. Create a set of web and mobile app clients that manage viewing and switching single relays at a time. The client experience would be like reddit where you navigate ditto communities like subreddits. If a community is a pokemon, then this is the pokedex? OK I actually don't know shit about pokemon so that might not be the slam dunk I thought it was. Whoops.

Ideas / more particulars

• To see a community's content, you add a community relay subscribing to subreddit, or simply visit the domain.
• Another great feature would be customizing the relays that make up your home feed, and making other named combo-feeds (especially awesome if you are a part of 2 rival communities who's focus generally overlap)
• The client would use more globally used relays to handle settings like your list followed ditto communities, etc (configurable)
• Similarly, to help users find communities, ditto servers can optionally publish their relay info to a list on a "discovery" relay. Main popular discovery relays would be set by default (where communities publish discovery info to), but could be configured to other relays (if people wanted to set up custom curation relays or something.)
• Registering a domain handle (NIP-05) at the community domain can be more focused on people with relay moderation roles, or just people who really for some reason want that community to be their whole identity (i don't personally get that, which is why mastodon is not for me)
• Communities could work independently of the aggregator app(s) If people just wanted to visit the domain to post (from any NIP-05)

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zure errele zerrendara.

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Ikusiko dugu elkar Nostr-en!

this is in response to Shinobis recent piece occupy bitcoin found here

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/occupy-bitcoin-bitcoin-is-not-just-libertarian?new

Occupy bitcoin is a thing every single one of us tries to do. There isn't a single one individual that doesn’t see bitcoin for what it is and have it not occupy all of them to varying degrees. There’s an innate fascination with coming upon previously unknown knowledge and become overtly obsessed with it and exploring all of the facets in which the new knowledge can be applied. When one does so, it normally can lead to finding previously unknown areas that you come to find with the more that you learn you find out just how much you truly don’t understand.

Now with this being the foundation of what all of humans are doing. None of us, not ONE, know everything. Its a fallacious argument to claim to do. In the journey for the discovery that is truth one can happen to fall upon the political rabbit hole that can be called or dubbed Libertarianism/Anarchism/ AnCap/AnCom etc. I use these labels very lightly as they are just words at the end of the day words mean different things to different people. I cant know what these words mean to you dear reader but I can only know what they mean to me, and my journey specifically. What we as humans do is to come to an agreement upon to what does these words mean to the both of us when we are communicating them to each other. I do my best to not fall into being pigeon holed into believing or having to defend that when I say one of the aforementioned words that I should have to commit to whatever it is your preconceived understanding of what that is. We must remember that these words are collectivized terms, they are strictly USEFUL fictions that we humans use in order to better conceptualize the ideas to better understand. That to take any attribute pulled from any one of the above and blanket paint “some” or “most” individuals that claim to align with above ideologies/alignments/political beliefs that these individuals represent that is an absurd claim. One cannot claim that individuals acting in mean/harsh ways when facing others who don’t agree with them is the wrong way to act.

We are humans we disagree, were free to act as we please to anyone we wish to do so. We’re NEVER free to ignore the consequences of those actions. One could characterize the vehement disdain for the acceptance all ideas, and letting others have their own opinions, is how we as individuals got here in the first place. It was the ideas of society being more important than the whole that had legitimized the aggression sanctified by the state as an omnipotent entity free from doing no wrong in lieu of the greater good. Individuals can do as such with their minds as they please but your actions of freedom stop at the point of my nose begins. The individuals that understand freedom and its core philosophy understand this. Treating one side as an evil and the other side as some glorified good is a cop out of intellectual dishonesty.

In the realm of bitcoin there can be disagreements and even out right hostility towards any number of ideas/opinions. This is the nature of freedom itself. As I’ve seen it and as I have championed it myself do with freedom what you will, but whatever you do if I think its stupid I’m going to tell you its stupid. Social pressures have been with human civilizations for thousands of years to think that the idea of attacks to your ideas not being a thing because we should accept all ideas and be kind to differing opinions is a farce at best and some unicorn fart huffing at worst. It was the individuals that were unwavering IN SPITE of the social attacks, the public slandering, the outright social ostracization, the being called dumb and stupid that paved the way for the best and most historical moments in history Ideas don’t care about these passing affronts. If your viewpoint/idea needs soft corners to gain traction then maybe you should reassess your idea in the first place. The battleground that is the societal/accepted norm isn't one that’s for the faint of heart. Everyone has limited time and resources available to them if they are choosing not to hear you then its probably time to seek out others to speak to. In the realm of freedom everyone CAN choose any ideas they wish to follow and interact with others that agree, where that stops is you can NO LONGER force everyone else to participate in your own shared delusions with the others you associate with. The freedom to EXCLUDE is one of the core tenets of freedom principles. We DO NOT have to be accepting of everyone if we do not wish to do so, the belief that everyone should ALWAYS accept everyone and everything is a communistic one. No one individual has the time and resources to accept every person and accept or contemplate every single idea presented to him. What freedom DOES allow for is for YOU to find the individuals that ARE accepting of your views/beliefs and do with that what you wish.

By trying to call out one group of individuals as being too “tribal” in what they view as the best course of action for themselves while SIMULTANEOUSLY praising another group for their favored tenets of “acceptance” is a laughable and down right sad view that “everyone should be more like the accepting crowd”. It is only through the choices we make that we get to where we are going on this journey. Those choices are inherently going to REQUIRE dissociation, omission, & exclusion.

The ideologies/beliefs mentioned at the beginning of this article are only a starting point to the journey. They are in no way shape or from a claim to be a complete set of knowledge's that allow everyone to be able to navigate this earth. Are some things flawed? Probably. Do some things work for some and not others? Absolutely. But the major core belief at all of them is the belief that violence is never permitted, in all its facets to the individual liberty of the person. Its the only morally justifiable way to navigate life. This is in and of itself the most open and accepting philosophy of all life choices.

Individuals can do with their lives as they please, nobody is stopping you from doing that, but you because someone said some mean things to me about what I believe. Its about time some individuals get that we must remain steadfast in our mission. We don’t get there by being nice to everyone. We only get there by allowing everyone to do what they wish and not expecting others to bend to our will because you hurt my feelings.

The ultimate arbiter for what you should pick and choose is you the individual, don’t let others decide that for you. Don’t be a passenger in your own life, take that wheel and choose for yourself where you are headed. But if you're going to let someone who was mean to you stop you from using probably the greatest tool that a human has ever invented, then maybe there isn't hope for humanity after all. The one thing that I know for sure is that there is one thing that that can hinder you or augment you, that thing is choice. Embrace it.

NIPs (Nostr Implementation Possibilities) are technical specifications that Nostr developers create to define how specific event types and tags are used. These can be written before or after the feature is implemented and often go through multiple revisions before becoming stable enough to matter. Once two or more clients fully implement the proposal, it is merged into the main repository. This process ensures that while new ideas are encouraged, they are also rigorously reviewed and tested.

There are generally two paths for NIPs: 1. New Ideas, when developers just have a hunch on a new solution and want to quickly write something up to gather feedback from the community. These are my favorite NIPs because they generally introduce a new way of thinking about a problem we are all having. And because they are not just a general solution, but a specific proposal, it allows us to see the entire picture in just a few paragraphs. Even though they are my favorite, they are quite "green" and usually spur 2-3 separate solutions in following PRs by different authors. 2. Existing implementations that need to explain what they are doing. These happen when a client is already running the code in production and simply wants to explain to the rest of the community how to generate and interpret the events the client is creating. These NIPs start much more stable than the former and allow for fewer changes, but because there is already an implementation available, it's a market-tested solution that might just need a few adjustments before others start implementing it.

Well-written specs ensure clarity, reduce ambiguity, and help developers implement the proposal consistently. The text should be VERY short, precise, prescriptive, and actionable by other devs. Start by introducing the new kind or tag in the first sentence and jump straight into a mockup of how the event looks like. The mockup should be self-explanatory and provide clues to what the remaining of the document will talk about. Some folks like to add long/verbose introductions, conclusions, and discussions of the reasons why the NIP is needed or why certain features are there. But those are largely unnecessary and are more appropriate to be placed in the body of the Pull Request descriptor.

Start your NIP with the following template:

``` NIP- ======