This is a story from August 2023, and was covered in many outlets (I quote here NYT for reference only)

Federal regulators continued their crackdown against employees of Wall Street firms using private messaging apps to communicate, with 11 brokerage firms and investment advisers agreeing Tuesday to pay $549 million in fines.

Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Bank of Montreal were hit with the biggest penalties by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Together, the brokerage and investment advisory arms of those four financial institutions accounted for nearly 90 percent of the fines, according to statements released by the regulators.

Original NYT

Archived version

I see. Do you think it is a honeypot?

I share your sentiment. But from a technical point of view, I can’t fathom interactive maps without javascript, which is typically blocked by hardened browsers. TBF I think their cause would be better served if they open sourced their data so that people could explore them with arbitrary clients.

That’s a more accurate branding.

We reached the point were robot drivers are dicks also

Isn’t it already like that with tractors and some phones?

Some US bank got in trouble for using it internally.

I don’t think anyone took those seriously as private messengers. On another note, I think Maduro cracked down on WhatsApp as well, and called Venezuelans to cancel Meta altogether. Or something.

About the technical side of my response. I have difficulty understanding your concern, because from what I have seen so far, NOSTR is a protocol and has different implementations. As a protocol it is very liberal since it mostly goes on to specify the structure of the “event” data type. In the specification I saw that it specifies signing and verifying notes with private/public key pairs, but I haven’t seen yet where on the protocol level it requires Bitcoin Lightning. Is it possible that you have looked into a specific implementation which elected to use such cryptographic keys as to make it interoperate with the Bitcoin blockchain to start with? In that case, the articles linked by the project mention that the protocol is simple and can be implemented “in a weekend”. That means that instead of even forking it at all you can roll your own in your chosen framework?

I have had a look into Nostr. My remarks perhaps will start a whole other thread but I will express them. For one thing, I had a quick look at odysh some time ago, and I have left with a sour taste about the connotations of ‘censorship resistant’. Don’t get me wrong I am of course against state censorship, but I (unironically-please say otherwise) wonder if there is more to this phrase than nazi dogwhistling. Within censorship resistant social networks is there a) the possibility to mass block, mitigate harassment brigades, tag nazis, and combat other types of toxic trolling and brigading? b) is there absolutely any level of moderation possible, including and going beyond the possibility to go back and delete stuff posted by trolls, or even illegal stuff like slander, hate speech, revenge porn and worse? I can’t start a discussion about censorship resistant networks if these conditions are not met, because so much dogwhistling has, well, “smuggled” these meanings into the term, and I am reluctant towards it.

If that is the case, then it arguably be an extra step for new people to join. I fear that not many will unless already familiar with Bitcoin etc.

orm of authentication, I’d be very interested. I’m obviously not going to roll my own auth from scratch….but as I see it, tying BTC to it could prevent MANY people from giving an otherwise very promising tech a chance.

I am not quite familiar with the overlap between Bitcoin and authentication. In fact it seems I assume they are totally separate things. If you care to explain further or point me to the right resources?

Sure, I understand Matrix fine. On the contrary, I don’t get why people find it harder to switch to than Discord?

Sure, the use case is remote to say the least, but the decentralized thing is appealing. I will have to wrap my head around the bitcoin registration thing, since I am not familiar with crypto. But I did imagine something like decentralized exchange or shops as part of community organizing. In that manner you can, for instance, support web creators within a given community etc. So, perhaps the use case not that far as it initially seems.

add much richer functionality here to turn a poll into a proper group decision-making tool

This wording shapes my thought better than I did in the post.

Um, does community organizing have to be secret to be immune to trolls and bad actors?

Absolutely cool. I will have to revise all my internalized cyberpunk imagery though.

convince friends to switch to firefox from chrome

Ah yes, you reminded me of this gem https://contrachrome.com/ (It is Scott McCloud’s Webcomic against Chrome’s data mining)

Agreed. This area of skills completely evades me though. So, yes, if you have some tips on that, they will be well received.

this shouldn’t be the main argument because people don’t really care about it now but it can be a nice secondary one

I do think that recommendation algorithms are a big culprit for the widespread scrolling addiction epidemic. Smart phones and social media platforms have positioned the population in readiness to consume ads and propaganda. So, I think this is definitely among the main arguments.

Plus note people were arguably repulsed when it was leaked that Facebook performed a sentiment analysis psychological experiment on them.