to understand how Nostr is able to function without signing up for accounts anywhere, it's really useful to understand public key cryptography, a.k.a. asymmetric cryptography. the main way of doing that is the RSA algorithm. Bitcoin uses secp256k1 elliptic curve cryptography instead, which is considered to be more future-proof since it's more resilient to quantum computer attacks.

i no longer remember how my Nostr key pair was generated. i just got one from somewhere at some point and stored it in BitWarden (a password manager i strongly recommend)

i like how npubs are barely any shorter than the hex public keys they're meant to shorten.

oh, well, particularly trans people tend to get death threats and other kinds of hatred on Twitter, which is unpleasant

in all fairness, i could call Nostr "just coinbros" if i wanted to stereotype it, but really, what i personally see are two crowds who actually have a lot in common. they're just coming from different places.

i find Fediverse people rather hard to put in a box. they're all over the place. you've got the geeks who like the tech, the LGBT people who fled Twitter, woke activists, legit hammer-and-sickle communists, and also people who aren't quite so easy to label, such as the people from noagendasocial.com.

you mean why are you talking to Nostr users despite using Mastodon? because of https://mostr.pub

that's not what i said, no. if Twitter owned it, it wouldn't be an alternative. that's like saying Instagram is an alternative to Facebook, but Meta owns them both, so it's the same company. like Nostr, Mastodon isn't owned by anyone or operated by any one person or company. it's free and open and not centrally controlled.

i don't think so. maybe the whole thing just escaped your radar? it happens sometimes. there were some news stories about people escaping from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk took it over. it's the biggest alternative to Twitter right now.

to be honest with you, it's a little bit of both. the Fediverse - where i have lived since 2017 - is a nice place but it's also a bit anti-commercial and it's harder to code stuff for it. Nostr is more money-positive and easier to code for.

it depends on what you mean, but to give a wrong but good-enough explanation: Facebook only has one server and it's at facebook.com. you can't use it from anywhere else.

it's hard to recommend a specific server, but what people usually do is sign up for something like mastodon.social, mastodon.online or mstdn.social and then later they find a permanent home elsewhere. i have a server at berserker.town myself.

not familiar with member.cash. the top servers are these. https://void.cat/d/9PukEcFTVMVVaqsKaKecF1.webp

plenty of them. it's been around since 2016 and has about 1.8 million active users.

the relay names on Nostr remind me of the server names on the Fediverse quite a lot.

these = https://fediverse.party/

a very broad definition would include all of these social networks - most of which are incompatible - but in the most common sense these days, people mean anything ActivityPub compatible, with Mastodon being the most popular server software for that. i suspect Nostr may have taken some inspirations and lessons from it, but wanted to make it more decentralised. on Mastodon, you're still relying on making accounts on specific servers. the ability to migrate identities was added a while back, but you can't bring your posts with you, so it's still a bit limited.

it has a tendency to mess with your relay list in my experience.

(a notable exception to this rule is noagendasocial.com, the Mastodon server of podcaster Adam Curry's show No Agenda, plus all the vaguely rebellious self-hosted Pleroma instances out there)

i'm already seeing far more straight women here than i tend to see on the Fediverse. it's great that the LGBT crowd has a hangout, but i like to just have an even mix of demographics, and that mix is a bit skewed toward nerdy, LGBT and left-wing on the Fediverse.