I try to do the same. Of the open protocols out there, Nostr is the most interesting to me because it still has that homebrew vibe to it. People are coming up with weird ways to interact with nostr that I don't see on the others. More non-btc related content would be great.
Discussion
yeah i agree! well my fav is atproto, but nostr comes before activtypub for sure. excited to pit stuff out on here (before i used it on & off).
I've been watching the Openvibe project, I'm curious to see how it matures. I wish it existed two years ago when I moved from Mastodon over to Nostr.
I suspect the ActivityPub side of things is pretty stable at this point. Nostr has to be a challenge for them because its constantly changing. Openvibe messes up my relay list because a lot of clients have moved to the outbox model. I don't know a whole lot about AT, but I have this sneaking suspicion that as it grows its going to face a lot of pressure to lock things down.
Definitely a lot of moving pieces to contend with.
yeah i’m using openvibe too atm. not sure if it’s messed up relays but i’m replying on Damus right now and it seems ok? idk how to check really
yep, i think because ActivityPub is standardised by W3C they move much slower, and Mastodon’s core engineering team is do small, that even has an open source project, it’s not getting many new exciting changes. i personally feel like microblogging products don’t always need shiny new features, i was kinda surprised that was what Elon seemed to care about so much with Twitter. imo if you have a good functioning product with users and a thriving API then you should be good, but oh well lol.
meh atproto would be hard to lock down. it basically works where all users have a personal data server (pds) and this is where all their posts go (bluesky or other atproto apps). then they send out a message telling relays (which *anyone* can setup) to cache and store the new information. bc of this, there’s an open firehose, which you can view with tools like https://firesky.tv or other… Bluesky could theoretically that public firehose down, but anyone can spin another up with their own Relay, it’s just quite expensive right now (the engineers at bluesky are working on making it cheaper, Jetstream i’d a good starting point.)
sorry for getting in depth about it, but that’s pretty much how it works on the surface, yeah. i think their hardest challenge is making money, since they are a company.
also, they still own atproto (the protocol itself), when it gets stable enough they’re gonna try and move it to a standards group (similar to W3C, but not necessarily them). but yeah the whole thing feels a but experimental still. still a fun protocol though, and it’s cool seeing so many regular people signup and use the app/protocol daily. with things like the bridges, it improves the experience for nostr/fediverse indirectly as well.
That's helpful because I've wondered about the fjrehose. How expensive is it to spin up a new relay?
Someone managed to spin one up for £150, but that was a few months ago before they doubled their user count lol..
The other day I saw someone set one up which didn’t cache or listen for accounts on the official Bluesky PDSs which made it farrrr cheaper since it’s only the people bothering to self host
Jetstream is worth looking into tho