Nostr Web Client

I stumbled across a Mastodon link and it appears to be a social media refuge of the blue tribe. George Takei is posting there. If Truth Social and Gab (and Twitter?) are where the red tribe goes to chat, is Nostr the refuge of the greys? And will we stay balkanized, or can Nostr bring us all together? 🤔

https://mastodon.online/explore

Ademan (Temporary) 2y ago

Mastodon is part of the decentralized fediverse, there's a lot more than just mastodon.online there's mastodon.social, and ~10k other servers. I run thebag.social for libertarian/voluntaryist types. Users on thebag.social can (but almost never do) interact with users on mastodon.social but we interact a fair bit with the rest of the network.

nostr:npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8 used to run bitcoinhackers.org too nostr:npub1vwymuey3u7mf860ndrkw3r7dz30s0srg6tqmhtjzg7umtm6rn5eq2qzugd used to live over there.

fiatjaf compared the fediverse unfavorably to nostr when he created nostr. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mastodon-and-similar-programs

nostr certainly has advantages over the fediverse (you own your keys and therefore your identity on nostr, on the fediverse you have a user handle that is tied to a particular server, and essentially owned by the server operator, like email) but I still prefer the fediverse so far (it probably doesn't hurt that I own my server and therefore concerns about identity ownership are pretty much moot).

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Discussion

Marakesh 𓅦 2y ago

What do you prefer more about the Fediverse over Nostr? More users and/or interaction? Or more diversity of topics? (I'm not Fedi, so I don't know firsthand). I clicked the link to your site but was put off when asked to sign up with my email address. I love the way you can use various Nostr apps without having to sign up for each one.

Ademan (Temporary) 2y ago

UX is vastly superior, media handling isn't an afterthought, pubkeys are annoying as user handles (Even now I get two results for @ nvk when I'm typing a message, and I just hope it's the one with more followers, iris doesn't even indicate which one I'm already following)

There's definitely a much wider diversity of topics, like you mentioned, the blue tribe has a big presence on the fediverse too, there's also commies and honest to goodness nazis (whatever you feel about that, I think it makes a good case for the fediverse's anti-censorship properties). There's a *lot* of non-bitcoin technical discussions, retro technology, anime, general nerd culture.

I haven't put much thought into that landing page, here's a way to see a feed of (almost) all of the traffic thebag.social is aware of on the fediverse though: https://thebag.social/timeline/fediverse Note that the way the fediverse propagates messages, thebag.social has a pretty limited view into the fediverse as a whole. Discovering and following people on other servers automatically widens that view, though.

As for the email requirement, I actually never set up email so you can enter any bogus email if that's putting you off ;-) I probably should figure out a way to remove that from the signup form.

Ademan (Temporary) 2y ago

> I love the way you can use various Nostr apps without having to sign up for each one.

That is definitely another major weakness of the fediverse, even though the ActivityPub protocol is capable of doing arbitrary things, it needs to be supported by the server you sign up with, and the most popular servers (mastodon, pleroma, and misskey) all only support social media type protocols.

Technically pleroma is flexible enough for arbitrary other use cases but no clients have been written to take advantage of it, to my knowledge.