Discussion
Censorship resistance is the only way to make sure you don't censor out the truth. Otherwise you're always in fantasy land.
💯 - The problem is educating users about their role in all of this. It's easier to have mods and out the shelf managing bubbles on behalf of users than convincing most people to put in the effort and have a less passive attitude towards social media content and self-moderation.
Tbh most people don't care as long as they see a clean feed. If they do see problems that's when we can educate them, also I really like amethysts "5 people in your contact list have reported this post" feature.
The "clean feed" issue is actually a pretty hard one to solve though. I don't want algorithms (with a passion). But then again, even standard Nostr content (Libertarian / bitcoiner maximalist stuff) will send a lot of folks running at first glance. Long before they even encounter sex workers, MGTOW, or the truly toxic stuff. And likely before they can find the cats, dogs, photography and artsy stuff. A typical user might install something like Primal, scroll for 30 seconds, label it "crypto-bro tech", and walk away.
Same goes for ActivityPub, by the way. You've got old German naturalists, "legalise weed" folks, Pastafarians, etc... All fine with me, but many people wouldn't consider that a "clean" experience. And that’s before they run into the actually problematic stuff on there.
Even on heavily moderated networks like Bluesky, people are struggling with this. The main problem is that a "clean feed" is subjective.
I think NIP-29 sort of has the right idea. It reminds me of early social media, like Orkut. We need to have easy ways to allow for bubbles to form organically while still preserving Nostr’s decentralised nature for those willing to venture outside their shells a bit.
AT architecture doesn't make decentralisation easy either. Running a local PDS is one thing; running an independent AppView with all the necessary backend components at scale is another. Bluesky will always be driven by centralising forces (including crypto-backed VCs), so the US liberal attraction to it while labeling Nostr as crypto-bro tech is the ultimate hypocrisy. They're just smelling their own farts, exactly like the MAGA crowd do on Truth Social.
I don't see real staying power in either of these networks. They're just products of our times and unchecked polarisation.
Nostr has the best hackable / "web-like-best-effort" architecture of any current socialnmedia protocol I’m aware of. There are a few obscure protocols that solve problems Nostr hasn’t yet, but they’re mostly unapproachable for most devs. So, in practice, as decentralised ecosystems those protocols were death at birth.
As much as the average Nostr user tends to be on a different end of the political spectrum from the average ActivityPub user, ActivityPub is currently the only real alternative to Nostr (as in: you can run your own GoToSocial instance on a Raspberry Pi). Sure, mods from larger instances might blacklist you if you go against the grain, but overall, ActivityPub at least offers actual decentralisation to those willing to put in the effort. They're also bigger and a bit more diverse than Nostr. That said, moderation is a pain point (including for mods themselves, many Fediverse instances are shutting down because of this).
I'm not saying we shouldn’t pay attention to what’s happening on Bluesky or copy some of their ideas (like follow packs), but in my opinion, Bluesky is and always has been overhyped, pseudo-decentralised tech.
I’ve run my own Mastodon instance. And do run some other activitypub stuff too still.
It’s a pain in the ass to host / maintain. The biggest issue it does not scale at all and when you start to interact your infrastructure does get DDOSed when your engagement grows with the network.
I agree. Same story here. I self-hosted Mastodon for five years. Now I'm paying for masto.host and also running my own GoToSocial instance. Mastodon itself is a pain, one viral post is enough to make the Ruby and Elasticsearch processes chew through 8GB of RAM. Plus Masto version migrations can be painful.
GoToSocial isn’t bad though. I may even get rid of full-blown Mastodon at some point, as there’s not much I miss when using GoToSocial. There are also a few other Mastodon-compatible ActivityPub servers at different stages of maturity, each with different trade-offs, just like Nostr.
That said, Nostr certainly has the edge here. It’s kinda amazing that I can run Haven + Nosotros with all the bells and whistles on such minimal resources. It’s a much more feature-rich combo than something like GoToSocial for sure, and it doesn’t require 8GB+ of memory like Mastodon, or a full datacentre, a nuclear reactor, and privileged access to proprietary software like Bluesky 🤣.