Stuart Bowman

Building Satellite

https://satellite.earth 🏴

Public Key

npub1lunaq893u4hmtpvqxpk8hfmtkqmm7ggutdtnc4hyuux2skr4ttcqr827lj

NIP-05 Address

_@satellite.earth

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs07f7srjc72ma4skqrqmrm5a4mqdalyyw9k4eu2mjwwr9gtp644uqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3yamnwvaz7tmsw4e8qmr9wpskwtn9wvfgh3cl

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

purplepag.es

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1lunaq893u4hmtpvqxpk8hfmtkqmm7ggutdtnc4hyuux2skr4ttcqr827lj

Show more details

Last Notes

2024-08-15 20:31:26

👀
#note1jj7…th2r

2024-08-07 22:50:46

Really excited about @npub1lt6…p8hj !
I’ve been saying for a while now that someone should make couchsurfing on nostr…Couchsurfing around 2010 was like the greatest thing ever, and it was such a tragedy when the admins sold out and rugged everyone who had built up connections. Building it on nostr is a great use case showing how we can preserve social capital.
#note1jp4…c6sk

2024-08-06 22:42:16

Just fixed an extremely subtle bug on Satellite CDN caused by cache settings. The blossom /list endpoint would sometimes return metadata for files that were deleted. Thanks to @npub1klr…7gxc for helping me discover this!

2024-06-30 20:27:42

Industrial tech capable of driving the basic cost of living to near zero has existed for over a century.
Social tech to prevent politicians from funneling all the gains toward warfare has existed only since 2008.
Forget about UBI.
This is the humanitarian case for hard money.
https://cdn.satellite.earth/b00e3dfa85e45119a1a13f79467110e58b30b3ee01cb3c4543e108d7acf9bb8c.png

2024-06-25 20:07:58

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It does not support NIP-96. It does support Blossom though. @npub1n0s…lahe

2024-05-11 16:50:47

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Iran.
Sucks as an American not being able to for bullshit political reasons

2024-05-11 16:16:09

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Yeah, north of SF

2024-05-11 06:51:56

I can see the northern lights from California right now
https://m.primal.net/IFaT.jpg

2024-05-03 21:39:07

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Let’s gooo

2024-05-03 19:33:12

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Oh I didn't know that, interesting

2024-05-03 02:52:09

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Yeah if it happened literally overnight the rate of btc being produced would increase temporarily until the difficulty adjustment kicked in. This is just a thought experiment though.

2024-05-03 02:34:02

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Ok if mining is free (like *actually* zero cost in the sense that energy is not longer scarce) we've circled back around to proof of stake haha

2024-05-03 02:28:16

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Let’s push this further toward the theoretical extreme.
Suppose energy became one million times cheaper (and thus people could turn on a million times more miners—a million times the current hashrate for the same electricity cost).
The difficulty would simply adjust to make it a million times harder to find a block. So why would the price plummet if the supply stays the same?

2024-05-03 02:18:34

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I’m not sure about that. Seems to me that the absolute price of energy is not relevant, i.e. the only way you can make money (amortized over long timescales) is having access to cheaper energy than the average miner

2024-05-03 02:06:42

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I’m contemplating it as a thought experiment. I think the price of btc would stay the same while the price of gold (and other commodities) would decrease

2024-05-03 01:46:29

Seems like privacy is upstream of fungibility

2024-05-03 01:44:20

Suppose as a thought experiment that the price of energy fell by a factor of one thousand.
What would happen to the price of gold?
What would happen to the price of Bitcoin?

2024-05-02 04:48:30

That would be so cool if there was an AI inside your laptop that you could grant keyboard/mouse control to and that you could communicate with verbally, and it would understand what you were asking it to do in context of what was currently on the screen. Basically like you're always screen sharing with your AI helper. Since it would have access to everything this would probably only be workable if you were running locally or self hosting. In any case I wouldn't be surprised if UX converges on something like this in the near(ish) future

2024-05-01 02:36:16

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Very true

2024-04-30 14:18:39

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What do you mean?

2024-04-26 20:16:45

Facing resistance is a signal you’re solving the right problem
#note1vw0…zp9k

2024-04-24 05:19:51

Years ago I bought into the idea that deflationary currency was unworkable because it would make raising capital too hard—that inflationary money was a necessary evil because to do otherwise would be to set a floor on interest rates equal to the real purchasing power accrued simply by holding the currency. I would guess that this remains the number one misconception among informed, intellectually honest critics of bitcoin.

2024-04-24 02:00:30

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The Satellite communities are getting a major upgrade soon. We’re building a dedicated app

2024-04-22 22:25:35

Cool
#note1g99…dn35

2024-04-17 01:36:07

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Good to hear it uses NDK, I came here to ask that!

2024-04-15 15:48:43

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Are you using ‘sqlite3’ or ‘better-sqlite3’?
If you enable write ahead logging better-sqlite3 is about an order of magnitude faster.
I’ve also heard that Bun’s built in bindings are even faster than better-sqlite3 but I haven’t tested it myself

2024-04-14 16:53:32

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@npub1ye5…knpr

2024-04-13 03:58:50

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Wait so are you running monitors in all those cities?

2024-04-12 22:49:25

Honored to be in such company
#note1z3u…2cg6

2024-04-08 21:08:41

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Yeah the past and the future are an abstraction. Which isn’t to say they aren’t real. Abstractions are real.
Still it’s an odd feeling to realize that there never has been, and never will, anything other than the present moment. That there really is no “whenelse” to be. Not even like as a metaphor, but like *actually*
I can perceive this only fleetingly. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to be able maintain this awareness- maybe some people can.

2024-04-08 17:40:44

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I sense a rabbit hole. This one goes deep.

2024-04-06 21:21:56

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nostr: npub12262qa4uhw7u8gdwlgmntqtv7aye8vdcmvszkqwgs0zchel6mz7s6cgrkj
> relay based communities add connection overhead
Increase connection overhead? Hmm maybe if you're aggregating community posts. But if you only want to see the posts from a specific community, and you only have to connect to one community-specific relay, that would actually *decrease* connection overhead. It's a different use case than global nostr.
> not everyone can run one
We're fixing this :)

2024-04-06 20:53:58

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Cool, what are you running, Stirfry?

2024-04-06 20:43:33

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> Nostr is still very centralized. There are a few big relays that everyone needs.
Agree, and one of the reasons for making communities based on relays is to massively increase the total number of relays. Instead of 10,000 communities using 10 relays, there should be 10,000 communities using at least 10,000 relays.
I think non-community-specific relays will still be useful to bootstrap the discovery of other relays.

2024-04-06 20:30:04

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If it censors people, you can fork it

2024-04-06 19:57:21

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> Feel moderation should happen at the relay level rather than at the message level
You are 100% correct. Building communities on top of the protocol is too complicated. Communities should be based on relays, like how nostr was supposed to work all along.
Me and @npub1ye5…knpr are building this right now.

2024-04-06 19:48:23

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Yes, communities will rise again!

2024-04-05 18:54:47

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Hey!

2024-04-05 18:54:04

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So totally working now? What was the issue? If it's a bug I want to know about it!

2024-04-01 21:16:09

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Haha yes 🤣

2024-03-30 20:39:40

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> radical honesty requires anonymity and privacy
In a political context, yes. When dealing with strangers, security is a precondition for honesty. Maybe it's a bit more complex when considering the interpersonal or even "intra-personal" dimension.

2024-03-11 00:52:54

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I don't wanna spoil anything but... @npub1ye5…knpr

2024-03-11 00:40:51

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A way to move media, not just metadata.

2024-03-11 00:36:20

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It's actually not a bad idea haha

2024-03-11 00:17:12

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The key thing was relays. Standardizing the transport layer to something simple and dumb. Digital signatures are the magic, transport just has to work.
The main thing about the old version of Satellite that I gave up switching to nostr was deep integration of BitTorrent (which is why I have been trying to make that a thing in nostr this whole time haha)

2024-03-10 20:14:37

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Yep. The “Satellite protocol” as I used to call it 🤣

2024-03-09 01:02:53

This was a fun conversation! #note1m8f…xe0x

2024-02-01 14:24:44

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The difference is that nostr identities are portable

2024-02-01 14:09:51

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I'm rebuilding the communities around dedicated relays you can run yourself

2024-02-01 13:56:13

Coming soon to a Satellite near you #note1yxa…rfc9

2024-01-26 22:04:02

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I'm curious, is the worker relay using IndexedDB? Really cool!

2023-12-30 20:22:36

Test!

2023-11-30 23:51:41

Anyone looking to share accommodation? #note1wk5…3xq7

2023-11-20 21:32:28

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Because a market is a computer that takes time to discover what the viable niches are, and when you change some macro-variable (such as the purchasing power represented by a unit of currency), the model of what those niches has to get recomputed.
The analogy to biological evolution would be changing the value of a joule.
(I think)

2023-11-20 21:23:02

Something less obvious about inflation is that it also destroys information

2023-11-03 06:45:08

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Hahaha

2023-11-01 23:14:03

So I don't miss any clients for my "subcommunites of nostr" talk - what are the clients that have at least some support for NIP-72, other than Satellite? So far I have:
- nostrudel by @npub1ye5…knpr
- nostr.kiwi by @npub1alp…6dsn
- zapddit by @npub1ltx…z40t
- Amethyst by @npub1gcx…nj5z
Who else?

2023-10-31 09:50:06

I think I've been to 7-Eleven four times today

2023-10-30 09:29:45

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Love to hear it!

2023-10-18 20:18:56

So I’m not making this up - I specifically remember seeing this tweet last year and being like hmm what’s Nostr?
Now I’m working on it full time.
Honestly huge thanks to Twitter support 👊 #note17ud…kywl

2023-10-14 21:16:45

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> Create a new kind and use the moderated communities NIP
Currently working on implementing exactly this

2023-10-09 00:06:40

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Wow that must have been pre-nostr, nice to see you here! Thank you 🙏

2023-10-05 03:26:24

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Lmk when you got something, would love to check it out

2023-10-05 02:41:00

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Really good idea

2023-10-02 22:46:38

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Any thoughts on what will replace captchas?

2023-10-02 19:05:37

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> With a Web of Trust based on follows that scarcity starts with the user's follow list
I agree and I think that's a great way to think about it — but obv this only works for users that are already following people. The question of how to make a "general" trending feed (to show by default to non-signed-in users) seems like a different, separate thing.
A general trending feed is not 100% mandatory (like it's totally possible that you just have to start following some people to see new content, nostr will keep functioning) but I think that it could really help nostr for two reasons:
1) In the short term — faster growth. Lowering the barrier to adoption by showing people interesting stuff immediately.
2) In the long term — avoiding stagnation by not having followers be a prerequisite for visibility/virality.
I think it was George Hotz that said something like "algorithms promote class mobility", which I agree with. If you are some anon poster who is totally unknown but you have really amazing content it would be optimal to surface that content so that person can actually gain followers. Tiktok works because their algo identifies "underpriced" stuff and pushes it up. People are looking for opportunity and it seems they're willing to engage with dystopian systems to get it, so I think the realistic move is to work on a credibly non-dystopian alt version of that opportunity machine (that works even better in edge cases where you'd normally run up against censorship)

2023-10-01 20:38:46

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I think PoW is necessary to tilt the balance of power toward defenders in the spam war. But there's still the question of what is "interesting" content. WoT is probably the best thing we have right now, i.e. the "note that was upvoted by trusted user is considered popular" approach. But even in a web of trust, the long term solution can't just be total number of followers (even when considering followers of followers of followers) because it's trivially easy now to create an army of fake people. A determined adversary could boost their own signal. On a fundamental level there needs to be a source of scarcity to ground the web of trust in finite reality (like how btc uses the energy conservation principle). The way I see it, scarcity in a social context can be:
1) A hand-picked list of "trusted root nodes" of the web of trust (so not actually decentralized) or,
2) Derived from something else that is scarce (so probably money)
This is my current understanding — by no means do I think like I have this all figured out!

2023-10-01 19:46:01

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Necessary but not sufficient imo

2023-10-01 19:19:17

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Curious what the basic metric is for measuring "hotness" — is it number of replies, zaps, some web-of-trust thingy? For Satellite I'm using a rolling sum of zaps received in the past 24 hours to surface content that these (presumably) not-spammy pubkeys have either posted themselves or interacted with, but I'm not completely satisfied with this because it's still trusting lightning network servers to not forge zap receipts, and it could totally be gamed if you were determined enough. Client side algos are a huge win for decentralization but damn it takes some work

2023-10-01 19:01:31

The question of how to design a trending feed in a way that is simultaneously
1) Interesting
2) Hard to game
3) Actually decentralized
leads down some deep rabbit holes

2023-09-30 16:58:33

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Yep that’s the issue. Long form on todo

2023-09-14 02:12:14

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Yes absolutely! I’ve been working a major new feature for Satellite the last couple weeks which is why updates have been slower than usual - very much looking forward to getting it deployed as there’s a bunch of other stuff that needs attention

2023-09-12 23:25:27

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@npub1jef…n4ce

2023-09-12 23:24:19

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Yep that's definitely the problem — the "/" is breaking the way that Satellite parses the URL of the community. I need to fix the UI to disallow that! If you recreate the community with URL-safe characters like dash or underscore it should work fine.

2023-09-02 04:46:45

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They're like subreddits. If you make a community you're the admin and you can appoint other moderators as well. When somebody posts into your community, their post goes into the modqueue. If you or another mod approves the post, it moves into the main feed. People can upvote/downvote posts. There's also a setting where you can use zaps as the upvote mechanism.

2023-08-21 21:31:48

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Hey there, are you on Satellite? (I'm the developer) In @npub1der…xzpc 's post, "Faces" is the post title (using the NIP-14 "subject" tag under the hood). If some other client is interpreting that as a hashtag I'm not aware of it

2023-08-08 21:56:42

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Much of Satellite's code was written whilst listening to metal - maybe it had an influence :D

2023-08-07 19:48:08

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Oh I see, like breaking up an essay into a bunch of parts that you can individually reply to. I'm pretty sure Twitter got rid of the char limit (or maybe just for blue checks, not sure...)
I'm open to increasing the "surface area" for reactions on longer pieces of content. Perhaps the right approach for nostr would be working this into long-form content with a UI where you can respond to highlights

2023-08-07 04:27:30

Hey everyone I just pushed a big update for Satellite!
Redesigned front page layout, added mobile nav and other new design stuff, plus some pretty significant performance optimizations.
I'll do a full write up tomorrow.

2023-08-07 04:20:47

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Hi I'm the developer of Satellite — I just pushed an update with a redesigned layout, it should hopefully make navigation a lot better

2023-08-05 01:46:19

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I want some like this for me and my friends haha

2023-07-30 02:30:18

Reminder that https://satellite.earth now supports two modes for ranking posts in communities:
- "Voting mode" (which is like Reddit, where you upvote/downvote stuff) or, alternately,
- "Zap mode" (where readers upvote posts by zapping them) and posts with the most sats appear at the top of the feed.
Whether to rank posts by votes or by zaps is a decision left to the community admin.
The default UI is voting mode — so if you're an admin and you want to enable zaps for your community on Satellite, just select the checkbox for "zaps" under Admin Settings > Voting Configuration.
https://cdn.satellite.earth/12513e1942f790e169d89edcf3f2e3af0e0ae52534eb9006e27e4a335dd61cef.jpg
https://cdn.satellite.earth/dca4fbd8558d2e88ac76c1bb72fa8e9b980a4f81fe31f6402375553e752c2914.jpg
https://cdn.satellite.earth/42b01553a069478ea8a1631902758e9d3e6c3cc18384b4cf42274fee02f5ba97.jpg

2023-07-26 06:00:08

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008
Could be a big deal

2023-07-25 14:54:55

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So you can already toggle between the one panel view and two panel view by clicking the "<" arrow in the header of the thread view, (although it doesn't actually expand the width of the text, it just centers the view and hides the list of other threads.) Or do you mean making the list of posts fullscreen?
To your second point, making a standard posts-only reverse chrono would be pretty easy, I could just add a toggle to show/hide replies. If I was going do that I would add the option for both the main feed and profile feeds.
Currently I'm redesigning the front page to handle communities better so these are good questions..

2023-07-25 13:59:12

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@npub1dy7…ljz5

2023-07-25 13:58:43

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There is actually! @npub16zs…92l7 and @npub180c…h6w6 were asking about this the other day too - if you go directly to https://satellite.earth/cdn#upload it will skip the animation and open the media page automatically

2023-07-19 18:22:31

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@npub17nd…950x 's n/Art community is quite active.
But yeah, most of the communities are just sort of "there" without much activity. I think that's to be expected at this point. I'm working on a couple things that I think may start the flywheel moving

2023-07-17 05:01:56

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This was actually my initial take as well. But thinking about it a bit more, I don’t think it’s just filtering/classification. We already have hashtags and lists for that. Communities have different norms, formats, inside jokes etc. which make people reluctant to post if they know it’s going to main

2023-07-17 02:45:37

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Ah I see. But other event kinds would still appear on main by default, like if there was a community for kind 1063 photos. I guess the question is how big of a deal this will become in the future as communities develop and specialize in non-text-note events, i.e. if having a general way of preventing an event from showing up on main is worth the additional complexity.

2023-07-17 01:13:43

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> After a person clicks the submit button after composing a community note, he will see two popups from the signer extension . Not sure if that would startle them as generally only one is expected
Good point. Although when posting an existing note into a community, the user will only be signing one event. (that's actually one additional benefit of this approach, it allows users to "pull" other notes into communities with kind 4549 events, just like how mods can pull events into communities with kind 4550 events)
> When someone zaps or reacts to a community post, we need to make sure to count it against the post request and not the approval event or the orginal kind 1 event if it exists. Is my understanding correct?
Correct, that's my understanding as well. Zaps/reactions would go to the post request, since that event will be present and indexed on relays.
> in case the user doesn't want the new note in their feed, there will be no "e" tag in their post request, right?
Actually I think it *would* make sense to include the 'e' tag so that clients can query to find all the post requests for an event (this would be relevant when an existing note was posted-requested into a community).
> I think it is a neat way to ask A client not to look for the actual event.
Well clients that don't support communities are not going to pull the kind 4549 post-requests in the first place, right? So they'll never have any reason to look for the actual events. And clients that *do* support communities won't need to look for the events since they already have the actual events (they can parse them from the content string)
Thanks for the in-depth response, and please let me know if I misunderstood any of your points!

2023-07-16 19:09:01

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Satellite update: deployed "conversations" tab
Now you easily can keep track of (and get notifications for) all the threads you've recently been involved with. You can even reply directly in from the notifications UI without having to navigate to the thread.
Check it out.
https://cdn.satellite.earth/be919f3a3f6cdedc76f2f476ad779bd7e8675bdf35040835044cf82410ac2089.png

2023-07-16 18:23:52

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@npub1gcx…nj5z So here's an idea:
Instead of tagging a post with an 'a' tag to request that it goes into a community, the user publishes a new event that contains (stringified in the content field) the event he wants to post into the community, like how reposts work. This community post event would contain 'a' tags of all the communities the user wants to post into, as well as the 'e' and 'k' tags for the stringified event (just like kind 4550). For the sake of discussion, we can call this a "kind 4549 post request"
When mods create a 4550 post approval event, they can just copy the content string of 4549 post request event. All the tags are the same, so the person who created the request can still get notified that the post was approved.
If a user only wants his post to show up in communities, he creates whatever kind of event but does not publish that event directly — rather it gets posted as the content of a new 4549 event
If the user wants the post to show up in the main feed as well, he can publish the original event as well.
I like this solution it means event existing event kind can be posted into a community, not just text notes. (like long form, media, ect.) Communities would just have a modqueue of 4549 events.

2023-07-14 00:16:36

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It does

2023-07-13 22:40:27

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Disambiguating Community Forks
I noticed that people have been linking to nostr communities without including the admin's pubkey in the URL, e.g.
just https://satellite.earth/n/dwadziesciajeden
instead of the full URL https://satellite.earth/n/dwadziesciajeden/npub1xpuz4qerklyck9evtg40wgrthq5rce2mumwuuygnxcg6q02lz9ms275ams
It might seem like a minor issue but I think handling this ambiguity is actually pretty important for UX — subreddit's were useful because you could refer to them by name like "r slash [whatever]" and it was obvious what you had to type into your web browser to get there. On nostr it's trickier because there can be multiple versions of a community, each namespaced to the pubkey of its admin.
To deal with this, I just pushed an update showing a page at the bare URL that lists all the forks of community.
If you're signed in and Satellite detects that you're subscribed to one of the forks, you'll be redirected there automatically.
In a future update I might make it so that non-signed-in users get directed to the most popular fork.

2023-07-09 19:10:43

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Noted

2023-07-06 06:43:59

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So I just checked a bunch of relays and couldn't find the metadata for the community — do you know which relays it was published to from nostr.kiwi? If not I would recommend trying to republish the community. As long as it has the same name the new version will just update the old one.

2023-07-03 16:10:28

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AI Powered Mod Tools for Nostr Communities on Satellite
Hey everyone, I want to tell you about something I've been working on — I wasn't planning to post about this today because it's not ready quite yet, but I noticed that @npub1l2v…ajft had created a new nostr community n/AI this morning — and it just fits too perfectly.
So here goes: I'm working on a feature that will allow community founders to "spawn" an AI moderator to help detect and defend against spam, organize their community, and eventually do a bunch of other things.
I believe this capability may become an essential tool for nostr to survive the coming onslaught of AI-powered spam. It seems to me that if we really want to have a realistic chance of maintaining public, human-led social spaces, we have to match AI with AI. It's not something we can afford to leave on the table.
On a technical level, nostr is a perfect fit. The shared, permissionless, data architecture means that each community's AI can "live" on Satellite's server (or any server, actually) and, after having been nominated as a moderator, proactively sign events with its own pubkey just like a human.
The AI will be given a simple task: *Enforce this community's rules as written*.
So the human admin of the community can essentially set policy to be implemented by the AI. For example, if the AI decides to remove a post, it can be instructed to explain why it removed the post, and to specifically cite the "legal basis" for its action. Human admins will be free to tweak the rule, overrule the AI's decisions case-by-case, or remove the AI from its position of authority.
It's very interesting to consider where this leads, and what other things an AI that "lives" in a community may be useful for. For now I'm focused on getting an MVP with this mod stuff deployed on Satellite asap. I'm genuinely curious about what it will take to make this work well in practice.
If you want to open your own thread on the AI/Nostr intersection, here's the link to the community https://satellite.earth/n/AI/npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft
I'll be writing a lot more about this.

2023-07-03 14:35:46

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I've seen a few of these alt-social projects pop up on Hacker News and elsewhere the last few days. Feels like there is a huge opening right now.

2023-06-29 21:35:20

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Works on Satellite
@npub1zdr…qha9

2023-06-29 20:31:15

Just pushed an update — quoted notes now render properly in discussion threads on Satellite (finally!)
https://cdn.satellite.earth/2f71e9565b592e9dfa51e9d0a88b748eb80d405f961165172ef29d945a042318.png
Even when there's multiple nested quotes (like a note quoting a note quoting a note), it still works.
https://cdn.satellite.earth/9214c8e747c7186a6bae08e4b2f4b6c5fe8a02002d2b82b1ecc074da47389d4e.png
I stress-tested this with some @npub19md…6vzk threads and it looks great, e.g. https://satellite.earth/thread/note1502qdl2dvnxc4pg67hp60y2s7xs2g86lxn6d0058c64l3z4qnsrs7kkzzx
Let me tell you, this was a tricky bit of coding — but as the saying goes,
To iterate is human... to recurse is divine