trust

How do you prove you're real?

Each human being is unique and creative in their own way. It is hard to fathom anyone wanting to be an impostor. Impostors exist, and it can be a challenge to know the difference.

If you meet someone in real life, it is easy to exchange your npubs, but what happens when you don't?

In nostr you can tie your account to your website as a way of verifying you identity through what's called a NIP05. In some nostr products, you can see your name with an @yourwebsite.com This is particularly useful for content creators, proving you're the author, or you belong to that organization.

To help tell you apart from bots, some websites offer NIP05's. It doesn't end with your domain, it ends with theirs, but it is still one strung higher in the ladder of trust.

Combine that with other trust signals to reveal that unique mixture that makes you, you: Your interactions with the community, creating and sharing your own content, sharing what you find interesting, in other words, just being you is a trust signal.

What makes you who you are?

Getting back our data

Apps are a bridge to the services we want, from social media to health apps. We express part of our lives through them. Many apps are built around advertising from data gathering, but new doors are opening for building trust & giving back control to people over their content, money & identities.

Many apps are built to track and remember as much information as they can about us, instead of getting only what they need and building trust over time as new services are needed, or through developing stronger relationships with consumers.

From the moment you download an app, it can gather data & keep doing so even when we're not using them. It's as if, before we sit down at a restaurant to place an order, they already have our contact & payment information, & more access than the "gossip" of the town would know.

What they could know is hard to imagine: A full list of our friends, family & acquaintances, our user content (emails, photos, recordings...), where we live and where we are at any moment in time, demographics and psychographics (sensitive info), what we buy, the websites and places we visit....

We are often using "free" services in exchange for our data, which is used and sold for advertising. This often comes at the expense of privacy & security. However, an app does not have to be free to gather our data. How many services do you subscribe to that have poor privacy practices. Do these practices develop consumer loyalty or is it invasive and spammy? What are better ways of building sustainable products?

Many times we are locked into using an app, because we need access to their services & if we choose to delete our accounts, we cannot take our data with us. Building trust & accountability can come with offering choices to consumers, & those can come from giving us control over our data.

It is a joy to see how self-custody bitcoin apps, and many nostr apps, often choose to gather as little data as possible. This is a path to replacing the advertising incentives, which foster ecosystems for data gathering, instead of for empowering products. More paths are in the works, like Web5 by TBD & the community at large.

How will these efforts encourage the growth and development of alternative creative solutions for sustainable product building that protect the individual's privacy and give back control of data & identity?

Who'll be the service providers of the future? What will they prioritize when building their products? Will they discover that instead of gathering information obscurely in the background, they can walk other paths to develop stronger loyal relationships with their customers?

Will most people understand the importance of being in control of their identity, choosing levels of trust & privacy, knowing they can deny or revoke access to their information? Will they be able to carry their identities back with them, just as we can walk out of a restaurant?

On Spam

Something is out there...

As your notes float in nostr cyberspace and get shared between relay servers, something else is out there too. No, it's not an alien creature from a sci-fi movie, it's spam. A bit like galactic trash, it can fill global feeds with mountains of gibberish, preventing real content and conversation from happening.

One of the ways some in the nostr community are addressing spam, is through paid relays. At this moment, the relays offering this service, use it like a ticket in, where you pay a few sats (1,000 to 5,000) to cross through their gates. Spam is generated in such large numbers, that having to pay relays, can add up quickly, hence probably deterring its practice. Less spam leads to a bit of zen, or perhaps eden.

Another way to address spam is to have home feeds based on follows and their follows, and global feeds based on specific relays. Many nostr clients are adding unique settings that can be tweaked not only to prevent some spam, but to shape your own experience.

Nostr thrives on freedom of expression. There is no perfect solution to address spam. Multiple avenues with different approaches will let people choose their nostr paths, whether they have sats to give or not.

What solutions are you seeing to address spam?