- Note: “relay” is the nostr term while “instance” is the AP/Mastodon/Lemmy term. They are functionally very similar and offer the same abilities to ban annoying users from “public square” type spaces. Moderation works identically.
- In AP/mastodon/lemmy you are connected to one “main instance” and then connect to other instances “through” that instance. In nostr, you are typically connected to multiple relays and access content more directly.
- Nostr is an underlying protocol like AP is for Mastodon/Lemmy. The main use of nostr currently is as a twitter/mastodon clone, but it has other interfaces as well (calendaring, video sharing, etc) that I am less familiar with.
- Both networks are decentralized in nature
AP/Mastodon/Lemmy
- Instance admins on your instance and the instance of the user you are DMing can read your DMs, block them, or modify them without your knowledge or the knowledge of the receiving user
- If your instance goes down, so does your access to the wider network. It will take your DMs with it, and your identity.
Nostr
- Relays cannot read the content of your DMs as they are encrypted. They can only see that user A is DMing user B and approximate DM size. (This upgrade reduces that visibility further)
- Relays cannot manipulate DMs as they are encrypted and will fail a signature check
- No relay can prevent you from DMing another user as your client will automatically route the DM through another relay (unless that user has blocked you, which they can do).
- You can receive DMs from anybody as long as one relay lets your DM through (and you are usually connected to several)
- Your DMs and other content is replicated across multiple relays. Downed relay? No problem. You don’t lose your content or your identity as your identity is a private/public keypair not “user @ instance dot com”
Bluesky
Idk anybody care to fill this section in?
Image source: nostr post
I checked out Nostr relatively recently and it seemed to me it was full of cryptobros and extremely right-wing people (libertarians, Trump fanatics. A ton of racism and queerphobia, also a bunch of conspiracy thinking). Has anything changed?
While I can see the value in speech that doesn’t exist at the whim of our corporate overlords, these are people who’d get beaten up if they tried to speak the way they do online in front of real people.
The corporate overlords are inherently right-wing, which is why they fund, build, and embrace those platforms. There’s no revolt in joining them.
Libertarians are not right-wing lmao
Nostr is culturally vaguely american, and it’s hard to distinguish the libertarians from the Trumpists there (I’ve seen several posts saying “Trump will be better for Bitcoin”, for example). Libertarians and republicans both sell themselves as “small government”.
“Leftist libertarians” generally call themselves anarchists, in my experience.
Yes, you’re thinking of Libertarian Socialism, which is what I predominantly subscribe to.
They are in the USA, just not of the specific MAGA lunacy.
You must be American. You should research Libertarian. It’s one step before Anarchist.
No, I am European and I am painfully aware of the right-wing ursupation of the originally anarchist term “libertarian” in the USA.
Still some of those, as with any social media platform. I have come across a few objectionable things, I just blocked and moved on. But you pick who you follow so you pick who shows up in your feeds. Each relay has their own moderation policies, so (like Lemmy), you can pick relays which suit your moderation preferences (which effect the “trending notes”/public square section). Most nostr apps by default upon install will ask you if you want to automatically filter out crypto/nsfw/foul language/etc. I picked at random and didn’t enable many of the filters.
I’ll stick with AP for now but I’ll keep an eye on it, then.
For becoming something noticeable Nostr firstly need to go beyond just a bitcoin maxi discussion platform. Currently it’s just a decentralized Parler.
It definitely started as mostly crypto bros, kinda like how lemmy was 100% tankies, but it’s gotten better. Lots more human rights activists and scientists and even just regular people on there now. A lot of human rights/privacy activists/orgs are joining up to it after nostr got some promotion at their conferences. Ultimately your feed will be who you follow so luckily you’re in control of that. The default settings for most nostr apps even include a filter to remove anything crypto, NSFW, and other controversial topics related.
Still very early days for all these platforms.
I have a hard time trusting something that advertises itself as “uncensorable”. Good moderation requires censoring (and this is an okay version of censoring, it’s not like your human right to be on a specific fediverse community).
Not being able to censor sounds like an easy way to become the nazi bar. Or in the case of nostr, I guess the blockchain/cryptocurrency bar.
Lemmy is “uncensorable” and offers identical moderation abilities in the “public square” aspect. E-mail is “uncensorable”. Uncensorable does not equal unmoderated. It means if you want to publish something, nobody, not the even the government, can stop you (though they can throw you in prison but that’s outside the discussion of protocol). It doesn’t mean anybody has to choose to listen to what you publish. It does not mean relays have to include you in their list of public tweets. Relays can pick what tweets/etc they show. They can choose what goes through their relay. What they can’t do is stop you and another user from using the protocol to DM each other. As long as one relay allows your traffic through, the traffic will flow. They also can’t stop you from tweeting, they can just choose not to show your tweets. If I want to follow somebody, frankly, it should be no business of a relay operator or the government or anybody to prevent me from following them, just like it should not be the business of the government to decide what books I am legally allowed to read. By building networks which are “uncensorable” we can guarantee that it remains not their business for future generations. So that they can live as free, or freer, than we do.
The internet, as a structure, is “uncensorable”. This is good. Power should be decentralized. The whim of a government shouldn’t dictate how the entirety of the internet operates, and it can’t. People in power love censorship, it is to their advantage that we are not able to organize among each other using common communication platforms.
Anyone following anyone interesting on Nostr? Tried it for a while and while the tech is cool I felt it was missing a good collection of people. All I ever saw was crypto scams and self referential memes/discussions about how cool Nostr is - which I agree - but that’s not what I’m interested in.
Finding good people to follow has been a challenge for me both on mastodon and nostr. But I find just posting and seeing who likes my posts and then following them has got me a decent feed curated at this point. And searching hashtags for topics I’m interested in.
There are some bridges so you can follow mastodon users on nostr and vice versa, but it’s not quite the same. We’re still pretty early adopters on both platforms at this point.
It seems to me that there will be much less relays than there are AP nodes. Users won’t publish/subscribe to hundred of relays (if they did, relays would not scale). Hence more bad content to less moderators, and poor moderation.
Adding client filters would just shift the censorship power to those maintaining them.
There’s a reason Lemmy strongly suggests using Matrix for secure direct messaging and has a place for it on your profile. 🤷
Just feels like a slightly disingenuous take on Lemmy since it’s made clear in a lot of places that its suggested to use Matrix if you want safe user-to-user communication.
DMs aren’t as relevant in Lemmy so I get why securing them isn’t a priority, but in Mastodon or any twitter clone it seems like a relevant feature I’d like to have some security/privacy with. Instance admins, and anybody who breaks into their server, being able to see all DMs seems like a security flaw that should be engineered away. Even Facebook, the place with the worst privacy, has E2E encryption (or so they claim, who really knows)
I’ll just stick with Lemmy as Activity pub is where it is at
Nostr isn’t a Lemmy alternative, it’s a Mastodon/Twitter/BlueSky substitute with more decentralized, secure and private features and i think OP should have pointed that out.
And since Op was comparing the secure and private features of both protocols, ActivityPub surely has improvements to implement for greater privacy and security.
Nostr is an alternative federated protocol. It can be used to make a microblogging application but there’s no reason you couldn’t make a Lemmy clone that uses Nostr instead of ActivityPub. But generally I’m not a fan of the stuff I’ve heard and read about the Nostr protocol so far.
But generally I’m not a fan of the stuff I’ve heard and read about the Nostr protocol so far.
Can you elaborate?
First of all, it seems too technical for normal people. It requires users to keep their own public/private keys in order. I don’t find this realistic for general users.
Secondly, this kind of “anti-censorship” retoric and features. Yes, of course excessive censorship is bad, especially when done by governments. But a forum moderating users requires censorship and it’s not a problem, it is the solution. I’m not sure I like the idea of relays instead of instances.
Lastly, the whole Nostr community is overrun by crypto-bros, which should tell you enough about the kind of people who are excited about Nostr.
Let’s not forget that one of the of the core developers is a fascist and Jack gave them 14BTC:
That anonymous Brazilian is Giovanni Torres Parra, a developer who has also built at least two webpages devoted to disseminating the work of the far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho. Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.
That’s an interesting point. Where are you quoting this from?
Ope, here you go
I’m not sure I like the idea of relays instead of instances.
Relay operators hold almost the same power as AP instance operators, but are much less visible to public scrutiny and accountability for their actions.
Instances mean you’re at the mercy of the admin not to ban you. No one can ban you on Nostr.
Also, it isn’t crypto bros. It’s only Bitcoiners. No one supports the degenerate pump and dump crypto scams.
No one can ban you on Nostr.
Thats exactly the problem with Nostr. You can’t get rid of the bigots. It’s doomed to become a nazi bar.
Also if you don’t like your admin on an ActivityPub instance, you can just go to an instance with admins you trust better or make your own instance.
It’s doomed to become a nazi bar…you can just go to an instance with admins you trust better or make your own instance
Ok, how is that different than Nostr? Don’t like your Lemmy instance admins rolling against your Nazi views? Join a different instance. Nazi sympathetic instance gets defederated by everyone else? Make your own instance.
The entire purpose of Nostr is about true censorship resistance and speech autonomy. That doesn’t exist with AP. Even if you self host, others can block your instance and no one will think twice about why the server is on the list.
Nostr gives you more granular control. You can block the nazis or anyone else. There are projects in the works building the equivalent of a Fediblock if you want to take it that far.
Lemmy is absolute garbage on privacy. I would love a private Lemmy with fine grained privacy controls.
Lemmy is absolute garbage on privacy
I mean, yeah, it is. But that’s because privacy is not what it’s trying to do. If anything, privacy is fundamentally antithetical to what it does. Saying “Lemmy is garbage on privacy” is a bit like saying “Microsoft Word is a terrible IDE”.
It doesn’t have to be.
You could keep the general structure and functioning while improving privacy.
For example, by obfuscating post history, anonymous posting or assigning a user pseudonym per instance/community, auto-deleting old posts/comments. All optional features of course. Let instances/communites decide which of these features they want.
Keep the structure of Lemmy with it’s Reddit-like-ness and instances, but give users, instances and communities more control over data privacy.
Sure it’s harder to implement, you need some minimal-knowledge reputation system, but there is nothing fundamental preventing that from being possible.
The nice thing about federation is that one instance/community can stay the same data-leaking privacy mess, if they so prefer. While others could operate analogous to 4-chan (or anything in between).
obfuscating post history, anonymous posting or assigning a user pseudonym per instance/community
These suggestions sound like a moderation nightmare. This is definitely not desirable.
Moderation belongs client side. Server side moderation is the original sin of sicial media.
