nostr never goes down

jandrese 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If nostr went down would people even notice?

	▲	nout an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If any major nostr relay goes down, no one notices. That has happened many times, the network is very resilient to that.
	▲	jonstaab 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		probably not

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pfraze 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All support to other decentralizers but nothing never goes down.

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nout an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The comparison here is to something like TCP/IP. TCP/IP never goes down. TCP/IP is a protocol, the servers may go down and cause disruption, but the protocol doesn't really have the ability to "go down". Nostr is also a protocol. The communication on top of Nostr is pretty resilient compared to other solutions though, so that's the main highlight here.

If tens of servers go down, then some people may start noticing a bit of inconvenience. If hundreds of servers go down, then some people may need to coordinate out of bound on what relays to use, but it still generally speaking works ok.

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jonstaab 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

1000x redundancy makes it vanishingly unlikely. Although I know we're due for a pole shift so all bets are off I suppose.

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numpad0 an hour ago | parent [-]

Wasn't aware there are ~2k relays now. Have inter-relay sharing situation improved?

When I tried it long time ago, the idea was just a transposed Mastodon model that the client would just multi-post to dozen different servers(relays) automatically to be hopeful that the post would be available in at least one shared relays between the user and their followers. That didn't seem to scale well.

	▲	jonstaab 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Getting clients to do the right thing is like herding cats, but there has been some progress. Early 2023 Mike Dilger came up with the "gossip model" (renamed "outbox model" for obvious reasons). Here's my write-up: https://habla.news/hodlbod/8YjqXm4SKY-TauwjOfLXS The basic idea is that for microblogging use cases users advertise which relays their content is stored on, which clients follow (this implies that there are less-decentralized indexes that hold these pointers, but it does help distribute content to aligned relays instead of blast content everywhere). Also, relays aside, one key difference vs ActivityPub is that no third party owns your identity, which means you can move from one relay to another freely, which is not true on Mastodon.