Today, @moneyball and @fiatjaf kicked off a conversation on Twitter exploring the idea of Stacker News integrating with Nostr.
I thought it would be fun to expand on this brainstorming session here, and see what SN folks think.
A few questions…
- How many people here already use Nostr today?
- How strongly do you feel about whether or not SN should build a Nostr integration?
- What might an ideal SN <> Nostr integration look like to you?
I think if Nostr solves some need for SN, then it makes sense to integrate, but integrating just for the sake of integrating (bringing another dependency) is bad idea in my opinion.
So far I think the main problem nostr solves is censorship resistance for broadcasting (ie twitter), because the relays are simple and users own their ids (much better than mastodon). So that's something SN could get from nostr, although I think it will bring many interesting challenges.
Why break a perfectly working application?
Good point. What might the least intrusive version of an integration look like?
Would it be valuable to Nostr users if SN posts were visible on there without changing the experience for SN users?
SN is a read-only relay, and Nostr clients can subscribe to it. Everything posted becomes a Nostr event. SN user profiles define the lud06 metadata field set to username@stacker.news and can receive tips directly from Nostr users.
thanks! i like the idea of opening up tipping to non-SN users
bingo
this would be wild. the rate that we're iterating on nostr is incredible.
Two ways I think you should consider this:
Displaying public keys and embedding the last 5/10 nostr posts to SN profiles would be valuable to SN users.
A Nostr bot which cross posts headlines from SN to Nostr would be good for driving traffic.
A directory of SN profiles + public keys would be the logical and valuable next step. Currently Nostr relies too much on Twitter for this. This feature would potentially benefit both SN traffic AND Nostr users.
I think just showing links to nostr posts as embeds like twitter or youtube would be enough "integration" from SN side.
I think what SN is really missing is a public (authenticated) API.
Then stuff like this can be built on top of it instead of messing with the code of SN like this:
nostr is cool but I don't think it's a good idea to entangle different applications.
With a public API, one should be able to write a bot and send every post or comment on SN automatically to a nostr relay.
Part of what makes SN work as a circular economy is the closed ecosystem of it, right? Like the whole pay to post and get paid from comments doesn’t really work if you open the floodgates.
More exploration needs to be done. I know there are nostr relays that make you pay to post, but SN has more than just that. SN is quite feature-full right now.
Sure, but NS can chose not to show and/or reward those posts and/or comments that aren't paying, keeping the circular economy of NS, just as a larger and more open circle, as well as much more resiliant and fault tolerant, which is good, in my opinion.
To me, that defeats the whole premise of the platform, but maybe your idea can be more fleshed out to explain what you mean
To me that reinforces the premise of the platform, by making it not a platform anymore, while, at the same time, increasing it's resilience and tolerance to fails, when it becomes a decentralize system, not a centralized platform. I'd say, it also might make the cost of operating it lower, although I don't know if that might be of any concern at the moment. Perhaps @k00bideh might want to through some light in that respect.
SN's incentives would need to be enforced in a nostr-based implementation - meaning pay and get paid would need to apply on SN-compliant clients.
If that's achievable, then SN's economy could migrate without problem.
I'm not that involved at a technical level to know for sure, but from what I can understand listening to the developers, the protocol is so simple and open that clients have plenty of room to do things, and therefore that should certainly be possible to implement at the client level. Also, from what I'm seeing people doing in so many different clients, I'd say that it should even be easy. (Again, I'm just a lurker, not an insider, hahaha).
Cool! I'm not saying migrating is trivial (for SN or users), but it's like possible in some fashion.
Well, if you are in conversations with @fiatjaf, then nothing (or almost nothing) is impossible...
On a related matter... what's the preferred way to suggest new features or improvements to SN? Is there any official way I might have missed? Or perhaps the daily discussion thread is the best place?
Anyway, I'd like to suggest something small about notifications, and I'm afraid I'm not gonna be able to help myself and go ahead and do it right here, right now. Sorry! :-)
I like the way notifications work, they are quick and efficient, but the only thing is that when you get a bunch of them at once, because you haven't been around for a while (too bad we have the stupid tendency to sleep for a few hours every day), replies to your own posts or comments don't stand out very well, as do notifications about your rewards.
I'm thinking that'd be easier to see them if they were to be labeled similarly to rewards are with the nice yellow-ish "your post stacked X sats". Maybe something like "someone replied to you" (or something similar) in a different color?
After posting this, but with enough time to edit and ad this last paragraph, I've realized that the bold in front of comments makes that function, but it hasn't been that "visible" to me before. I still think that a little label of a different color might be nice and helpful. :-)
Proposing new features in the daily discussion is good - others can chime in. If there’s some consensus on the problem or the approach to take, then it’s best to make a GH issue
Cool, thanks! GH meaning github, I guess?
As long as SN doesn't get flooded with LN invoices and spam. I feel like they serve different purposes. Maybe there could be a Nostr tab at the top to differentiate. SN could also enable login with Nostr key.
Count me as a huge SN fan who is using nostr every day. I do think some type of integration would make sense. I am also an old but rarely contributing Minds member,, and I know Bill Ottman set up a nostr relay for that network. I don't know the technicalities, but that could be one path.
Stacker News could do what Minds does using NIP-26 Delegation.
I don't think it's a good idea to integrate with Nostr at this moment.
Both Nostr and Stacker News are relatively new, so they likely have many features in development.
Integration would likely require a significant amount of developer time.
Instead of fully integrating, perhaps it would be more efficient to simply add a field to the Stacker News user profile where users can input their Nostr public key.
Using NOSTR Go implement. LFG
I'm about 50/50 SN and nostr for daily social media consumption at this point. Done with Twitter. Minimal integration needed. I like having the two different options personally. Maybe just a way to embed a nostr event into a SN post like you can a tweet.
i use stacker and nostr pretty much daily, it could be good, if done right
I think it's more nostr that should integrate with sn, by formalising in nips the features for paying to post to a relay, tipping, and web of trust etc, all of them still sorely missing in nostr atm imho.
Or should sn just become a nostr client that curates content, a bit like a layer 2 on top of nostr, as described here https://read.pourteaux.xyz/p/the-moral-imperative-of-a-distributed?
Nostr is a protocol, it's clients a relays the ones that need to implement all of that. NS would do it, if it really happened to use nostr as its backend. It'd be amazing.
Nostr is the hype right now, and I have used it but it's buddy and the clients are awful to work with, I can understand the excitement but its a terrible user experience
I think SN can have some integration but not relay on it for any serving of information. Sure you could duplicate the information to a relay if others want to use SN feeds in Nostr
Maybe you could add login with Nostr on your stacker news
You could add your public key to your SN account for a follow on Nostr
One thing I could see though is SN DMS running on Nostr, since the user experience is not yet catered for on the site
We are too early and def need more mature clients. I've read that some relays scale better when used in conjunction with PostgreSQL.
There's plenty of room for improvement, we'll get there, i have no doubt.
Totally, we will see better severs coming online to support relays, database compression and the rendering will be faster. I think right now its a spam all which just create a bunch of redudant content, later relay owners will not want to waste resources and we will get things like paid relays that have better up time and support as well as white listed relays and application specific relays that are optimised for a certain content and data format
I am just keen to see how it all evolves
Much agreed.
No need to rush, but indeed, having things not rely on a central server will be a net plus in the end. But I think there are several more pressing things to focus on before worrying about idealistic choices. Unless someone from the Nostr community steps in and does the groudwork to port everything seamlessly. But I imagine we're not there yet.
this is way over my head and I don't understand any of it.
To prevent flooding with shitcoin spammers, there could be a filter to only show NOSTR posts of those that made an account. That is, those who logged in via WebLN on stacker.news like it works today.
Should integrate, stacker news would be a cool nostr client. Like a better version of Damus. In my opinion the main advantage would be, giving stacker news interoperability with the rest of the blooming nostrverse. Already stacking more on Damus than Stacker….
SN could integrate with nostr the same way it integrates with twitter. Post a nostr "tweet" as a post and SN offers a click through preview. Other than authentication, I don't know how they could be integrated further without turning SN into a cluttered mess.
https://rsslay.nostr.net/
almost there
Isn't that the inverse? This uses stacker.news backend in nostr frontend, but the idea above is to integrate nostr backend int stacker news frontend, if we wanna put it easy. still cool though!
At minimum add NIP-05 :)
I like the posts of everyone suggesting very small integrations like link previews etc.
You have a working (i assume) business model here. So if someone can come up with a more full implementation of building SN on top of Nostr itself, I would let them pitch that idea too you (what would you gain from it? maybe they have an idea in their pitch.
I use SN daily and Nostr almost daily...
I don't quite see why there should be an integration between these two.
Maybe some optional feature? Like adding public key to profile and then having your own Nostr feed to a separate tab?
I share my thoughts on putting SN on nostr here (still very interested in doing it): #57574
Half-measures like NIP-05 and simply publishing everything to nostr are immediate term interesting. In general, I don't really like half measures but if it's what people want I will work on it.
So we don't have enough spam on SN, now we could bring even more spam from nostr?
imo this would be a waste of time. Stacker News works great as it is, adding nostr would likely require a pretty big changing in how it works and would require a lot more maintenance.
Yes, I use nostr as well.
I Don't Like Learning New Things.
LOL
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