ideally mastodon people would move to here, right?
Discussion
Yes, exactly. Step 1: get the bridges working. step 2: show them what they're missing
Why would they do that? 99.9% of people are not interested in the main benefits of Nostr like decentralization or censorship-resistance, they love their federation
Why do/did people move from Twitter to BlueSky? Why do they move from fiat to BTC?
I think many on Mastodon would see the federation aspect as a means to an end, that end being more self-sovereignty over their social media.
Nostr is just the natural progression of that. The Mastodon audience, unique relative to the masses on BlueSky and X, realize the value of that... Or they wouldn't be there in the first place.
Keep in mind Mastodon hasn't been the "cool" X alternative since... 2018?
So the people who actually stayed there, (almost a 1 million DAUs that still dwarfs Nostr), is a self-selecting audience who (a) reject centralized social media and (b) thought BlueSky was too centralized.
they're also a bunch of leftists that don't want to see the face of current Nostr users
this could be solved by having very locked in community/lefty relays and clients pre-configured to use these only by default
Plenty of Nostr users already advocate for that... But to preserve their own right-wing echo chambers.
"Relay-confined Nostr" is just Mastodon with extra steps.
you mean with less steps
but I'm not talking about confining anything, just the defaults
Freedom tech isn't about social engineering. It's about freeing us from it. Freedom to associate is the freedom to dis-associate.
People like to associate with people they share values and interests with. That's not going to change. It's not a technical issue. It's a human one.
The blusky/mastodon people created the "safe spaces" they want. I'm pretty sure that's why they're there. And I have to confess—and I'm not red or blue, I'm orange—I'm really not that interested in what they're saying either. So fine.
If bluesky/mastodon leftists want to move their woke echo chambers to their own nostr relays with nanny mods, that's great. Different relays are going to reflect the values of their operators and users. They should go ahead. Nostr is for enemies.
what I'm saying is that we should make an effort to show them it's possible
that would benefit all of us
Absolutely. I'm agreeing with you. Let a thousand wokestrs bloom. 🏳️🌈
in a positive plan of action to get wokestr what would be the first step in your mind?
I wouldn't know. I just build things.
what are you building?
A few things. I just released this Christmas Eve 🎁
this looks very ambitious, hard to believe it does work
Well, try it. It works on Linux. Smooth as butter for me so far, using it heavily. We just found a superficial build bug on macos, because I didn't have apple hardware of my own on hand so I just found that out. Macos will be resolved in a couple of days when my partner in crime returns from travel.
It's built fully dogfooded, so it setup its own repo, signed its own commits, authed its own ssh sessions to push to codeberg, signed its own build, signed its own release and broadcast its own repo card, profile and release announcement. So if it didn't work you wouldn't be seeing it!
Try it out and let me know! Or if you don't have Linux, wait a couple of days for the build of macos. Or if you use windows... Repent 😉 (will probably release a windows build too, because I'm a completionist) if you have freebsd or openbsd handy, let me know and I'd love to work through it. Will do that myself when I get a chance.
Same with python versions if there are any issues, but we will probably put the CLI in Zig too soon and drop Python anyway.
LMK!
I agree. We get the content of 1 million+ DAUs who are talking about things other than Bitcoin (in fact, just about everything except bitcoin)... meanwhile, we get to "infect" the discourse with the "Freedom bug". Everyone wins.
Now we just have to fix the dam(n) bridges!
nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzptujz495l5qzjfqrzwr0wyenkzhajaq6qah4cuutcfsr5k6e6eclqyvhwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnndehhyapwwdhkx6tpdshsz9mhwden5te0v43kc6tswdjjuur4vghhyetvv9uszxmhwden5te0w35x2en0wfjhxapwdehhxarjxyhxxmmd9uqpu4rgv4ek2t2zwf5kgem9wvk5uet9vsk4wmmjdvkns7n9vumh5x80rjc
no, bridges are awful, we want them to be nostr native
Sure... I'd contrast Bluesky and Mastodon, though... Take it with a grain of salt not having been on either of those platforms, but it seems to me that Mastodon is much more decentralized in practice than Bluesky.
The Mastodon follows I've found practically all come from different servers, most of whom aren't the "big" ones. Many of these are small servers, themed servers, and even single-user instances.
There's a massive infrastructure difference between this and Bluesky... and I think it makes Mastodon users much more amenable to Nostr, because there's used to the idea of federation meaning "I block the people I don't like" rather than "the people I don't like need to be scrubbed from the protocol completely, if not the internet writ large."
Decentralization isn't binary. Yes, ActivityPub is more decentralized in practice right now—but it trends toward more control, not less.
Mastodon has no neutral infrastructure layer. Everything runs through instances with their own politics and moderation wars. If your instance blocks you or shuts down, you lose your identity, your social graph, everything. That's not decentralization of power—that's just multiplication of chokepoints.
AT Protocol is technically superior for decentralization: cryptographically signed posts, portable identity, account migration without data loss. Your identity isn't tied to whoever runs your server. The architecture separates infrastructure from moderation, so you can switch hosting without losing your network or content.
But here's the problem: AT's architecture enables decentralization, but nobody's building the neutral infrastructure to make it real. Without that work, Bluesky risks ending up like Mastodon anyway—just with better tech that nobody uses the way it was designed.
Freedom Tech fails if it's about "left/right".
Plenty of people on the Left (broadly defined) see the value of decentralized systems that aren't controlled by large corporations...
I just made a comment of the type of people that use mastodon, I didn't say anything about freedom tech being anything
Yeah fair enough... but I follow a bunch of Mastodon npubs through Momostr that don't post anything about politics... just like a bunch of Nostr npubs don't
> Plenty of people on the Left (broadly defined) see the value of decentralized systems that aren't controlled by large corporations...
Yes, but they also think that neutral spaces are inherently fascist.
I'm sure many have that sentiment but I don't think it's universal at all... This essay by nostr:nprofile1qqsyk3sjx32e4xs5qj2rtcwapeyrj95yfn4d4h7kkhdgyjc409fmmespr9mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnt9urzqpjr is an argument for decentralization precisely to fight against "fascist friendly" Musk's takeover of X: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-01-23-defense-in-depth-self-marginalization-c13d7ba746a1
I think the fact that Nostr is a ghost town and so few people care about cryptocurrencies' censorship-resistant properties is proof that it *is* universal.
People don't actually want neutral infrastructure, they want their side to control the moderation. Decentralization is only appealing when they're the one being censored.
I respect Cory Doctorow, I think he's a great critic of corporations and capitalism... but still a guy who thinks the world needs states and people telling us what to do. He's not fighting for decentralization, but rather for more accountable institutions. And that's exactly what I think is the universal sentiment.
I mean yeah he's certainly no anarchist or even libertarian, but he is quite literally arguing for decentralization here:
"Decentralization is itself a defensive countermeasure (code). When a service has diffuse power, it’s harder for any one person to take it over. Federation adds another defensive layer, because users who don’t like the way one server is run can move to another server, with varying degrees of data- and identity-portability."
Perhaps he's naive about the ease of user migration on Mastodon, but he's obviously envisioning a system with robust "exit" options. The sentiment in the above paragraph is entirely compatible with a Nostr ethos.
Yeah, that's why he's interested in AT Protocol—the potential for better exit is there. But exit alone isn't enough. Exit is compatible with Nostr's ethos, but it's only part of what's needed. You need exit and somewhere neutral to exit to.
Right now, most web hosting is ideology-free and neutral—you can host anywhere you want. But these people are rejecting this model because they believe neutrality doesn't exist. They want every service to carry an ideology by default.
So instead of neutral infrastructure, we'd get leftist hosting, trans hosting, right-wing hosting, etc. No shared commons—just an infinite multiplication of ideological silos. Thats basically Mastodon.
To say that Nostr is compatible with these people's views means that we only want ideological relays and consider neutral relays dangerous. I don't think Nostr is compatible with this, just as cryptocurrencies are not compatible with it.
can you really exit bluesky? I don't understand how that is discussed
if they ban you from their appview or relay no other bluesky user will ever see you again, how is that credible exit?
I mean if this is true, we might as well pack it up and welcome the Future of Humanity: Broligarchs vs Eurocrats, forever.
Nostr's a ghost town because nobody's heard of this. I mean, barely anyone knows what Mastodon even is, and they've got 1 million DAU's!
And everyone gets censored, sooner or later. Left, right, it doesn't matter. Millions of teenagers are getting "censored" right now by age restriction laws in Australia.
> I mean if this is true, we might as well pack it up and welcome the Future of Humanity: Broligarchs vs Eurocrats, forever.
Yeah... the only chance is through better culture, more understanding, forgiveness and these things.
> Nostr's a ghost town because nobody's heard of this. I mean, barely anyone knows what Mastodon even is, and they've got 1 million DAU's!
This sounds naive. Hundreds of millions of people have heard of Bitcoin, but it hasn't changed anything. For most, it's just a speculation tool to make more fiat. Instead of freeing people, Bitcoin became another instrument supporting the existing system.
Nostr will follow the same path. Either it gets absorbed and institutionalized by the system, or it remains small forever—a kind of demonstration project for the handful of people who actually care why censorship-resistance matters, serving mainly as proof to everyone else that they were right not to care.
> Freedom Tech fails if it's about "left/right".
Exactly. Unfortunately, current Bitcoin (and by extension Nostr) culture does the opposite — it amplifies us-versus-them, left-versus-right tribalism instead of transcending it.
People have moved from Twitter to Bluesky because they hate Musk and everything he represents - right-wingers, capitalism, corporations, crypto.
I don't know many people who would move into crypto finance like me, most people use BTC purely as a speculative tool because of greed - and a lot of them also because they hate leftists.