this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
17 points (84.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43780 readers
882 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Good info thanks. I was looking for a technical answer but seem to be getting a few political polarized responses instead. I'd no idea.
Anyway, I'll have to look up what a "map-reduce query" is. :)
Do you think there's potential for a large, popular, and fast relay to become a sort of gatekeeper, with big centralized dominance? Like if Meta setup thousands of fast relays everywhere and started injecting advertisement attachments to user messages? Or collect info on each key so they can eventually ID and track you? Even if the user message are E2E encrypted, a relay could probably still attach an advertisement payload into the message somehow, no?
I really don't know what I'm talking about. Just chatting really.
MapReduce is term pertaining to a software data retrieval architecture/process (also known as divide-and-conquer). The simple version is that instead of asking one super big database that knows "everything" you ask multiple smaller databases the same question i.e. "what all posts do you have from [email protected]?" (this is "mapping" a query to mutliple sources) and each database returns 0 or more results, then the query interface joins the results together ("reduce") to a single response. This is common in "big data" because you can more efficiently optimize the query by parallelizing it across many machines/workers/nodes. There are additional optimizations that can be implemented such as caching common queries or data-sharding (items a-f on node 1, items g - k on node 2...).
I don't think Nostr protocol is immune to the development of big centralized popular instances. Especially if something like Threads integrates and becomes the "default" client with millions of users over night. Users, in general, will always gravitate towards content and community. But, I think Nostr has a slight edge over ActivityPub in handling that problem by the user having no direct dependence on any one particular host.
I'll have to read more into the Nostr protocol specifically as it pertains to privacy, tracking and content injection (ads).
I'm by no means an authority on ActivityPub nor Nostr, I apologize if that may have been surmised. I too am just chatting.