SOS! 🛟 Gonna need someone smarter than me to explain how the #ActivityPub protocol is different than the #Nostr protocol? Thx. Sorry I’m slow. lol. #asknostr
Discussion
I’m right there with you! I need help figuring this out as well 😂
ActivityPub
Like email, but for social media: Your account lives on a specific server (like your email has an address)
Nostr
Like a giant public bulletin board: No accounts, just messages tied to digital keys posted on digital billboards with the ability to republish across all other billboards
I tried Mastodon on and off for a year before I gave up. I couldn’t understand why accounts on one server could find and interact with accounts on other ones, or why anyone would choose one over another. It felt fragmented and confusing, and boring.
I can definitely see the boring. If you upset your server admin your whole account can be wiped away. Even if you have a server with a good free speech policy, the fact they can do it will still chill free speech to a degree. Nostr might not be perfect, yet, but it at least gives us the option for free speech which is way more fun than being fed groupthink.
As far as I know the most significant difference is that you have an account on one of the Activity Pub servers and your profile, identity and followers are in the hands of the server admin. When they ban you, you have to start over with a new account on a different server.
(better validate with someone who knows activity pub better than me)
The "Celebrity Analogy"
ActivityPub/Mastodon => An instance is like an agent/publicist you work exclusively with. You tell them all your gossip and they're the one that other people go to get your gossip.
Nostr => You have multiple agents/publicists that you tell your gossip to, and other people can get your gossip from any of them.
In the Activity Pub model, the server and the client aren’t separate. It’s essentially a bunch of small twitters which all talk to each other. It’s the Federated model.
A bunch of smaller digital nation states speaking the same protocol.
Your identity is tied to whatever server you join. When you leave that server, that identity, and all connections are lost.
The nostr model separates these things.
Identity is tied to a cryptographic key which you own.
Relays(servers) pass requests from one person to another. One key to another.
Clients exist separately from servers(relays).they provide an individual who has a key, a way to publish to relays with that key, and request events from other keys(people)
In the Fediverse, if the server you were a member of blocked the posts of one person, or a whole other server, you could no longer see or interact with them unless you left and joined another server.
In nostr, if some person ran a relay who decided they were going to not relay notes from someone, you could just add another relay to your client to see their notes. The relay operator was able to act on their (censorious) conviction, and you are still able to route around it without losing your social graph.