I was trying to scrape a website briefly for research purposes.

Fetching the HTML with curl using the correct combination of headers worked fine, but when I tried to do it from inside my program it returned an error 403, exact same headers, same IP, same URL.

Eventually I found out that the website had Cloudflare in front and Cloudflare did client fingerprinting based on the TLS algorithms advertised or something like that, such that curl and browsers were allowed but not anything else.

It worked when I switched my code to using libcurl.

This is both stupid and dystopic. How did we get to this situation?

It is not expensive to run a relay though. If your relay is only used by a few users the cost is probably less than $1/mo (there are no such cheap VPSes out there, but you could be a tenant on someone else's server), same if you host stuff on your local desktop and expose it to the internet with Cloudflare etc, or even an Android phone.

I am not trying to win the argument of how easy it is to run a community or a relay, though. The entire point of Nostr is that most people don't have to run servers.

It is probably true that it in practice it is easier to run a BitSocial community (again, Nostr relays are not just communities, they are a bunch of things), but I'm not super excited about IPFS. Are you sure it works? I was super excited about IPFS many years ago but all I got was disappointment, wasted time and lost data. I don't think it can ever work. If it seems to work for you I would bet it is because they introduced some hardcoded bigserver centralization in the mix and everybody is relying on that without even realizing.

There is a cost to connecting, routing, finding, hosting and serving data. On Nostr these costs are clear and obvious with the concept of relays. On IPFS that cost is distributed to people who never signed up for that job.

This makes Bitsocial communities even more like Nostr relays: you said it was free to run a Bitsocial community, but now you're saying I'll need basically a server online 24/7, even if running in my home. This is equivalent to an HTTP/WebSocket server required for a Nostr relay.

Nostr relays can also run on rented hosting infrastructure.

They can also run on alternative domain name systems like .bso (although no one does this because we are not that crazy yet), we do have some relays running on .onion.

But I don't care about the similarities between Nostr relays and Bitsocial communities, it's ok if they're completely different to me, I was just making a comment.

On Nostr you don't have to "share a relay". You read from people's relays directly, and they read from yours. But this is for the Twitter-style microblogging interface that BitSocial apparently doesn't have, so it's irrelevant here.

BitSocial communities are _like_ a relay in the sense that there is someone who "owns" them. Of course there are differences, but there are also similarities.

Nostr relays can be treated like closed or semi-closed communities too.

You mean nosmero.com/? In a brief look I couldn't understand how they're doing paywalled content, I also don't know who is behind that site, but I wish they considered github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/2156 and provided their feedback. It's independent of payment methods and not tied to zaps or anything.

A generic standard that multiple clients implement would be better than some specific platform that does their own custom paywall scheme.

Aside from that it looks a somewhat like Nostr, but more limited, less chaotic, and incredibly over-engineered.

I don't know if I understood it correctly because it's painful to read all this AI text but it looks like they have all these claims about cryptographic identity (and unnecessarily each identity has to keep track of a log of all its metadata operations, like Scuttlebutt) but then all the content is at mercy of a specific server run by a community (or, more likely, they will host virtual servers for every community), and then you have to log in with Google to each different server (I did that) so I assume I'll have a different identity on each server, which defeats the entire purpose. It's better to just use Discord or one of those simple Discord alternatives.

It looks like they're trying to solve a small and simple problem, but shoved in too many new "protocol" concepts at the same time and now I would be skeptical that anyone will attempt to implement their protocol or build on top of it without relying on their software or their infrastructure, since everything is so complicated, who knows, maybe the AI will build everything.

Some people think Bitcoin doesn't have to scale and get adopted enough to become money, it can just be a "store of value" forever.

The first thing is that these people don't really believe in "storing" anything, they want their "value" to go up, not to be stored, so the discourse is already skewed from the start.

Meanwhile all the value Bitcoin has today and all its price growth came from the expectation that it would be used as money (i.e. means of payment etc) at some point.

Because random pubkeys stored on blockchains are just worthless bytes, if we stop making moves towards the only real goal (commerce adoption), then eventually markets notice and all the side "store of value" and related discourses are exposed to reality.

Remember those people that used to say Bitcoin was a ponzi scheme -- I don't know, Peter Schiff, Jorge Stolfi? Their takes were nonsense to me at first because I had in my mind that everybody believed that Bitcoin would eventually become money, so there was no way this was a game of the greater fool, everybody would benefit, even the last person to buy Bitcoin on Earth would benefit from it.

But no, these people just assumed Bitcoin would never become money, and with that assumption their reasoning makes perfect sense: if Bitcoin doesn't become money then it is nothing but a ponzi scheme -- as most of the shitcoins clearly are.

And now we have all these self-described Bitcoiners who think the same, don't be one of them. And please make them wrong again.