4 May
2023
4 May
'23
2:58 p.m.
Hi,
Greg wrote:
I fear that we oldtimers no longer fit in the Internet
of the 2020s,
and to communicate with modern people we'll have to use Gmail or some
such. O brave new world!
SMTP email originally had dumb servers and smart clients. The servers
had to know enough to route, but much was left to the client allowing
experimentation, tailoring, etc.
The Facebook, Twitter, ... silos are smart servers and dumb clients.
The power shifted.
There's a new simple protocol, Nostr. A client is smart and creates
‘events’ which are pushed to its choice of relays. A note is signed
using a cryptographic key pair. The public key is the user's identity.
Or rather one of them. A relay is very dumb. It just stores the note
and gives it to any client who comes asking. Different types of events
are being standardised. Clients can gain ever more smarts for dealing
with different kinds of events.
Nostr isn't tied to a particular company; it's a protocol. It's gaining
traction, e.g. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has been using it for a
while. You'll see public keys in bios, e.g. the npub... in
https://twitter.com/jack/
https://nostr.com is one rabbit hole.
I suggest any further chat about Nostr moves to coff(a)tuhs.org.
--
Cheers, Ralph.