Techpriest Baunach on Nostr: # SSB: King of the Mountain This began as an appreciation, and I wanted to just focus ...

# SSB: King of the Mountain

This began as an appreciation, and I wanted to just focus on the positives of SSB, but it is difficult to express those without expressing the negatives that throw those positives into sharp relief.

So to begin, the main problem: being online and server first.

I'm going to talk about Nostr and the Fediverse together, since the former is an improvement of the latter.

They both suffer from the same critical problem, data is stored in a central location. For Nostr: the relay, Fediverse: the instance. It's someone else's computer. And when that computer goes offline, it breaks the network. A central point of failure.

Now here's where Nostr pulls away a bit, I've seen plenty of projects aimed at providing a local relay to serve as a backup, which is cool.

But the fundamental problem, is that the structure is thus that a central server is where the data lives, and the intermingling of accounts happen.

This server is going to get fat, it's admin will have to consider legal issues, and due to it's necessity for the network to function, must minimize downtime.

SSB had the same problem at first: pub servers. Essentially an SSB account, that followed other accounts, thus keeping a complete copy of their posting history on the server. New accounts could connect to this pub and easily get integrated into the network, updates were quickly propagated, but again, everything was in one place.

Now, that wasn't as much of a problem for SSB. Accounts can sync over a local network, so even if a pub server went down, the network could still function, it would just be slow, and literally peer to peer.

This was solved with room servers. They don't store any data, just facilitate the handshake between peers so they can sync directly with each other. The legal problem was taken care of for room runners, the necessity of being constantly up was already lessened, but now that it was cheaper and easier to run a room server, there could potentially be more rooms than there ever were pubs, thus granting a redundancy not previously possible.

But technical capability and resilience cannot overcome burnout. There's a handful of SSB passion projects still in development, but all the big ones have died out, for various reasons.

The major reason is you can't make a living doing good stuff for humanity. It's tough getting funding for something that will make people less reliant on corporations and governments. Crowdfunding can only get you so far.

And yet, SSB still wins. Despite how difficult it is to work with, being offline and local first is going to win every time.

There are other reasons as well, one of my favorites, is community moderation. I'll see a flurry of block events from people I follow, and go to check out the offending account to see if I should block it as well, and there's already nothing there: it was blocked out of replication range.

This leads to small, (sometimes) interconnected, communities. There are pockets of the network I will never see, and those far outside the norms of my community, who will never see mine.

It brings the noise to signal ratio down to manageable levels, spam gets swatted fast, trolls get blocked so they can be in their own community of one.

True freedom of speech, in that you will suffer the consequences of your words.