What does HackerNews think of nips?

Well... people?

Quite a few of them crypto enthusiasts and sometimes timeline can look like you've come across some crypto scam page, lol. This scares some people.

What I like about Nostr is its simplicity comparedy to ActivityPub.

The protocol is basically a set of NIPs[1] (Nostr Implementation Possibilities). Each of them describes what features relays and clients may or have to implement.

Out of 99 (currently) NIPs only one (NIP 01) is mandatory and around twelwe are stable\final (the other ones are drafs for now). So to create a basic nosrt relay or clien you have to implement a bare minimum of functionality.

The way it works:

Each user has a public and a private key.

Public one is to be shared with other people and can be published online.

The Private one is your identity you use to "log in" via nostr client of you choice.

As soon as you log in with your private key a client will fetch your notes (and notes of other people you follow if any) from relay(s), assuming you were communicating with these relays before (which will be the case unless you are using more than one client with completely different sets of relays they are talking to).

In Nostr a client (a web app, mobile app, cli tool etc) simple publishes notes to N relays and gets\receives notes from them.

Quite similar to RSS, except you have more than one RSS agregator and feed is being actively pushed to the said agredgator by "publisher".

Also if you are using a client that implemented NIP-72 (like https://satellite.earth/) you basically get a simple reddit alternative

[1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips

Nostr is decentralized. I think a big part of the idea is that relays just dont carry spam/bad actors. The protocol doesn't, as of yet, have need to handle most of your "it doesn't handle complex social issues X Y or Z" nags because it so far handles these problems socially, not technically, and that's been working for now.

Nostr is all based on anonymous cryptographic identifiers, so it seems like you have some special definition of anonymity that you are looking for, as it seems nothing if not anonymous. Having a stable identifier allows relays to know who to send versus who not to send, and allows connecting data together. Users are free to sock puppet up to their hearts content, if they wish to further diffuse traffic.

The appeal? The appeal here is that this is an incredibly malleable & comprehensible low level tool for messaging. Competitors like AtProto or ActivityPub involve complex protocols to exchange/syndicate data around, as much as the payload of the messages themselves. They are high level visions for what a network is. By compare, Nostr's low level approach is organic & searching not a refined final product, but a thriving ecosystem of expanding ideas.

Nostr has extreme elegance as a protocol by being focused primarily on messages themselves, which start as very simple & understandable self signing devices. The transport & exchange of messages is almost incidental, and indeed, Nostr over shoebox or carrier pigeon is possible. This allows a lot more flexibility with how the network can form distributed connections, allows great offline capabilities, allows creative relays & creative/selective distribution mechanisms to form.

Nostr is an excellent base layer. The base specs are quite short & direct. It's a protocol one can happily implement in a weekend.

Nostr has incredibly wild applications, because it is a simple extensible base. There's a wide variety of interesting capabilities that have already need accepted as Nostr Implementation Possibilities, NIPS, that grow & build on one another. Nostr base protocol is just a start, just the seed of an idea, one that's meant to be iterated on & expanded, and it's so easy & direct to do so. This is the biggest advantage by far; I cannot stress this enough. Not trying to do absolutely everything & making a modular simple protocol to start building & iterating from is all the wins, is the Bazaar to the ambitious Cathedrals. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips

Nostr is by far the most malleable, most open set of possibilities, the most grow able, of the social networks we have. Everything else seems to have been designed to arrive somewhat fully formed, ready to go, but Nostr's strength is that it doesn't purport to know every use case & to have a total picture of what it is. It's a much simpler idea, with much more focus on finding out the uses.

I've changed views a lot. I absolutely intend to spend a significant fraction of my life working on interoperability & interoperation, in trying to find & capture the essences that are the same. I identify a lot with the value system you're presenting. I'd felt a bit morose originally that BlueSky/@ had made their own fresh take.

What's charged is my mindset. I'm no longer coming with such a view of scarcity. Of insisting we work together.

You know who gets everyone in a big meeting room & then decides what to do & builds that architecture out? Corporations. In contrast, I think the organic growth model is a huge win here. We can cover more ground, better assay where the rich & nutritious veins are, better explore the many ecosystems of possibilities with an organic model.

It's all still so early, we're so young. ActivityPub, Nostr, BlueSky/@.... they barely have antecedents and none are proven. We are in free-form mode, none of us know what to do yet. You mention RSS, but that's a read-only medium. That attempts to explore the bounds of that didn't get that far: Google Buzz, the Salmon Protocol. OpenSocial. They weren't necessarily bad techs but we never really figured it out, democratized it, pulled it off.

We have multiple different explorers now, and I like it. The ability to keep making useful growth, is, I think, what counts here. ActivityPub has shown some decent flexibility in going across-mediums, but we don't have a ton of extensions, a ton of new modes for it (I think Akkoma, an Elixer-based fork of Pleroma is the most boundary-pushing, and reaction-emoji is their main defining claim to fame). BlueSky is brand new and we have no idea how far it'll go, but it also has a lot of really neat compelling web-oriented ideas in it's core, of signed DIDs that let it be web without having to rely on http:// and dns:// and give us self-sovereignty. Nostr I think is incredibly fantastically compelling, for it's hackability, and what a huge roster of incredibly smart & sharp "Nostr Implementation Possibilities," (https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips). What a beautiful phrase that captures so much essence of where we are: finding possibilities.

Right now, we need to emerge a shit ton of complexity. We need really wild off the wall stuff. We need lots of ideas & possibilities. We need growth & exploring bounds. Once we have some actual experience building these things & running them as smaller scale individual/microcollective operators & peers, I think then we can focus a lot more on narrowing down & coming together & deciding where and how to meet.