The crypto might actually be a good bootstrapping mechanism to give this some start of critical mass. I like the way you can kind of get your hands on the messages and the encryption. It’s more versatile because it’s basically built-in in the end encryption so even if the social media feed is garbage, it’s still a nice network that you can use for into end encrypted messages.
Discussion
Sorry “end to end”
Also, the idea that you can connect to multiple relays, makes it a little bit more free speech friendly. I do find over on mastodon I go out of my way to be nice when people are saying really stupid things because I’m afraid that someone’s going to block me and accuse me of mansplaning and put pressure on my instance to ban me or something. There’s obviously trade-offs with this but I think you have a lot of freedom on the client side to filter your feed, we’re on mastodon it seems like there’s lotta pressure on the instances to keep the trolls off.