Replying to Avatar Derek Ross

If Nostr is truly easier and more flexible, why don’t people use it or talk about it? I’ve listened to every one of your podcasts and loved every episode, but it’s frustrating to hear nearly every guest praise ActivityPub or AT Protocol. When you bring up Nostr, perfectly, in context, it gets no real discussion. To me, that signals they either don’t care about it or don’t really believe in its potential.

I agree we could improve in this area. I thought we were moving forward after the discussions at Nostriga, where clients started experimenting with managing keys and bunkers for users who wanted that option. It worked like the familiar email/password login flow, but since then, those clients have either shut down or moved on, and no further progress has been made.

Someone has to lead the way. Right now, most of the content is “yay Bitcoin” or “yay Nostr” because those are the core communities. We branch out into topics like art, music, cats, homesteading, carnivore, and health—but it often circles back to Bitcoin in some form. What we really need are genuine content creators producing original content beyond Bitcoin adjacent topics.

I don’t think it’s entirely true that all content is Bitcoin related. While much of it is, I’ve seen people share music, artwork, surfing videos, and more that resonate with our smaller user base. So there is variety, it’s just not the dominant flow yet. Bitcoin remains king and will remain king until someone else consistent posts content that resonates well within the community or brings their own community here.

Algorithms themselves aren’t the problem, it’s closed, forced algorithms that are. I think we agree here. What we need is better discovery through feed marketplaces and DVMs. Primal is currently the best at this, hands down. Still, DVMs aren’t perfect. They can be slow, offline, or unreachable at times. I also like Damus’ local first approach as a viable alternative.

I wouldn't use AT Protocol (as BlueSky is actually centralized). ActivityPub, on the other hand, is fantastic if you know what you're doing.

nostr:nprofile1qqspsxwjy4edm65k53xplljqqn88hurqyzmtkgsfcseteq35zkz2exg22ftyy knows a thing or two about ActivityPub, as he uses it actively instead of #nostr.

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both of these protocols are broken and not decentralized. activitypub isn't better than atprotocol, it's just a different master.

How is ActivityPub just as centralized as AT Protocol? As far as Sokio and I are concerned, the federation for ActivityPub is what decentralizes it to a certain extent.

server admins can ban and censor you. you can't migrate your content or profile or contact list if they decided to ban you or completely take down their server. it's a broken model. it only works if every single person spins up their own server instance.

While this is completely understandable, I don't understand the centralized part. Sure, there are slivers of decentralization, but not to the point of BTC.

At least the Mastodon developers won't be implementing age verification, as the main Mastodon devs in Germany said they had no possible way to implement it.

You can only access your graph through a (for you) central server. ActivityPub only decentralizes the value it extracts from the users, who get to own absolutely nothing. Even if every user had an instance, their identity is effectively controlled by their domain name registrar, so at best you can be a tenant in that paradigm.