But then you need to trust on a centralized institution again with all it´s downsides, right? Not sure what a relay is, but if it is similar like a server run by you, how would other users know I run it?
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How are you not trusting witnesses?
A relay is just another word for your server/hosting. When you login to a front end you will see all relays available and you can add it to your profile, and run with mutlples or spin up your own
Here's instructions on how to create a nostr relay
OK, but then Nostr is much more for IT-savvy persons only than Hive is.
Blockchains operate a consensus algorithm that is almost trustless. It is possible for anyone to validate the actions of witnesses themselves and even if that is not done, we can see that the system inherently incentivises and pressures the consensus witnesses to not introduce foul play. The only real way that the witnesses could cause problems for free speech that was undetected would be if they all colluded, no-one checked the situation and the people who were censored or cheated never spoke out. That situation has never occurred, to my knowledge. If witnesses collude and the community finds out, there will likely be a fork if the witnesses can't be removed - which is what took place when Hive was created from Steem.
At what cost? Forking reduces the security since its subsidised by the tokenomics that is the incentive to hold the data for others. Also if you fork why waste resources holding data you don't care about and thus prune the blockchain you fork
As the chain gets bigger it reduces the amount of people with the resources to do manage and you always have to trust a set of witnesses, moving the trust assumptions to a different party at great cost doesn't remove trust
In a situation where a chain has been corrupted by nefarious witnesses, the choice to not fork is the one that reduces security. I'm not sure why security would be reduced due to financial incentive in the way you are stating.
Whoever runs the fork can do so in whatever way they prefer. If the users don't like the way the fork is setup they can fork their own version.
If the processing requirements exceed the level of hardware that can be procured by the amount of rewards paid to the witnesses, then mitigation can be put in place that involves sharding, pooling or other strategies. However, we have never reached a point where this has happened.
I have already addressed this in previous comments.
The main purpose of using a blockchain and consensus algorithm to handle social media posts is to perform operations that Nostr seems to not be capable of supporting, e.g.
I haven't used Nostr so I might be missing some things, but after reading about it, it looks like there is no guaranteed backup of posts/data. If you send your posts to a server (relay) and then the server is deleted, it seems like your posts would be lost - but maybe I missed something.
If that´s the case, that would be completely ridiculous. And no competition to Hive whatsoever.
By the way, I am a witness now, would you please vote for me? Many thanks.
Pretty much, yes. I did already vote for you but then removed it after reading your neuralink post.
Oh. Well, I think we can have different opinions in some topics. I thought we would be overall on a similar wave-length.
Thinking differently is fine, but there are limits to that when the future of humanity is at stake. AI represents the end of life on Earth when embraced. This has been predicted for 1000s of years - a parting of the ways where the majority of people destroy themselves through denial of their own internal essence.
We should embrace new possibilities. At least, you are using computers as well, right? With your argumentation, one could have said, computers bring the end of the world, enslave humans, manipulate and oppress them.
Not all possibilities are valuable. Any external technology does indeed pose a threat to the ultimate evolution of internal capacity, however, some is more extreme than others. AI cuts straight to the core of the spirit of life itself, bypassing emotion and the individual will. It is a rapid pathway to suicide. You will find if you make enough of the unconscious conscious that there are many programs operating within the human condition that equate to most people having an unconscious death wish, this is a very perilous situation and only a tiny number of people will resolve it. AI insertion into neurology guarantees evolutionary failure.
Yes that's my understanding if a relay nukes your content its gone, but you can post to multiple relays and "trust" that one of them would hold it because nuking peoples content wouldn't be good for people using your relay
Or if you want complete control just run your own relay
Full decentralisation does rely on each user being able to run their own node/server/relay, so it's a noble goal. However, without a consensus of the kind that is achieved on Hive, for example, many needed features are missing.
From what I can see, most of the items in the list of failings of Mastadon on the Nostr Github page also apply to Nostr.
Can you provide an example of features that are missing that would require consensus?