I have seen some critical views on Nostr as a part of decentralized network discussions, but most seem to be focused on culture not function.
What are the functional / protocol differences that make you prefer ActivityPub over Nostr?
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I moved away from centralised social media, because social media owned by multinational corporations benefit from bigotry and rage, and so allow it to fester and grow. They do this by under moderating, or moderating with a bias against the people being harassed and attacked.
So the last thing I would choose to do is go to a platform/network that prides itself on lack of moderation, and requires vulnerable, targeted folk to play whack a mole, with each person having to reactively block individual bigots, one by one, after they’ve appeared and dumped their payload of hate.
The hierarchy of moderation we have here is an underrated feature
I’ve read somewhere that the fediverse has the most moderators per user of any social network because of it’s decentralized nature. Can’t find the source right now though.
So there are no moderation tools / whitelist/blacklists?
In theory yes, in practice, no.
Nostr uses relays. In some ways, a relay is like an instance on the fediverse. Where they differ though, is that a) relays don’t talk to each other and b) users can sign up to many different relays and pull/push content to all of them.
So in practice, in order to see a wide amount of content, you need to end up connecting to multiple relays. And even though a relay does have some moderation capabilities to block content, unless every relay you use blocks the content from the bigoted account, you’ll see it.
If you signed up only to a single relay, and that relay had good moderation, then in theory, your Nostr experience wouldn’t be terrible, but a single niche relay like that will mean you see basically no content. And as soon as you connect to a larger public relay to get more content, you lose all of the moderation advantages offered by your first instance. Which means in practice, there is no incentive to run a well moderated instance.
And so all of the moderation ends up on the end user, who has to manually block accounts only after they appear and dump their load of hate (at which point, the bigot will just spin up another account). Some people prefer that experience, but when you’re the regular target of hate, that approach just doesn’t work for many folk.
So there are no moderation tools / whitelist/blacklists?
This is a good thing: bitchasses need to learn words are harmless & they can ignore them like humanity has done for millennia. It’s not built into the servers. Client-side tooling would handle it, so it’s entirely at the discretion of the user, which seems better to me.
Client-side curation sounds like whitelisting effectively, if you follow only the curated feed and the curated feed resigns all events posted by selected keys, that’s a whitelist and seems like a decent solution for casual users so long as they can find trusted curators and clients that enable them to be easily discovered and subscribed to. What client is best for this currently?
On the flipside, if those “curators” were able to export and import lists of keys to automatically exclude from feeds, that would be very useful for the curators who have to manually or automatically sort events and new users to build their feeds. Is that feature currently available? Eliminating known bot accounts from feeds seems like minimum viable feature set for new curators in the current state of play.
It’s not about that even if you reduce it to purely that. Without moderation every platform becomes infested by spammers, trolls, astroturfers. Topical communities lose focus and communities become little more than hashtags.
Yup, better. Moderation should be opt-in & is better handled at the client: the user could opt-in to a “moderation community” that publishes tags their client would follow. Such curation for anyone who wants that is a better idea. Far better than moderators we don’t get to choose.
So in your world, I could spam the network with CSAM, gore, rape, and everything else and it would be up to a small group of people to filter that out for the rest so they can subscribe to what that small group thinks is appropriate?
Yup, better.
Why is that better?
Moderation should be opt-in & is better handled at the client: the user could opt-in to a “moderation community” that publishes tags their client would follow.
Debateable given that any community anywhere online still needs to remove CSAM and gore and other things.
And what do you mean by “tags” here? Just hashtags or something else? Because a hashtag under a no-moderation concept could still be hijacked.
Far better than moderators we don’t get to choose.
Well I suggest you go there then, because the fediverse will never be what you want it to be.
Why is that better?
User control & flexibility > illegitimate authority. Also, I remember an earlier, untamed, unrulier, more subversive internet than this corporate-friendly crap: it was funner.
any community anywhere online still needs to remove CSAM and gore and other things.
Legal compliance is different from legally unnecessary moderation.
Because a hashtag under a no-moderation concept could still be hijacked.
Not really: Nostr content is cryptographically signed. User’s client subscribes to some content curators who post as signed events their tags for other events. The client processes these tagging events to filter according to the user’s preferences.
Some proposals already exist:
the fediverse will never be what you want it to be
Not the topic of discussion, which is function & protocol.
Legal compliance is different from legally unnecessary moderation.
Right, so there would still need to be moderators. And if they can remove that, they can remove anything.
Not the topic of discussion, which is function & protocol.
Right, but you’re just gunna have an unpleasant time here if you loath all moderation. It’s that simple.
Mostly cultural, with a strong focus from NOSTR appearing to be crypto scams.
This, mostly. I looked into it. But it was too focused on blockchain and not enough on the social apps. It was a dead zone when I checked it out.
I don’t know much about recent developments, but the early version of the protocol had several major flaws:
- Identity is based on a non-rotatable key, other types of identity are not supported.
- No privacy without encryption.
- Media attachments are not supported, all images are stored on a single server.
- Servers only store data and don’t do anything else, so they get abstracted away and everyone uses the same 5 relays (in Fediverse each server has a personality, and that creates a strong incentive to self-host).There are also many minor things that I dislike, for example the use of numbers instead of human-readable names, unusual cryptography and so on.
I’m astonished at the way you broke markdown to degrade accessibility. Special type of evil or inebriation?
of numbers instead of human-readable names
TBF, they have introduced a ‘verified’ system that lets you use human readable names.
I mean event kinds: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips?tab=readme-ov-file#event-kinds
ActivityPub has
NoteandFollow, Nostr has1and3.
See Wikipedia:
The Nostr protocol was first written in 2020 by a Brazilian open source developer known by the pseudonym “fiatjaf” as a response to perceived moderation issues on Twitter, as well as both technical and cultural disagreements with other protocols such as ActivityPub and Secure Scuttlebutt.
Looks like it was never about function or protocol in the first place.
In 2024, in an article reporting on the project’s funding, Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had found two websites previously published by this person to disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right conspiracy theorist.
Sounds lovely and taking one look at a random relay confirms this. The only things discussed there are Bitcoin, “Women-are-evil-because-they-dont-sex-me” and some AI bullshit.
Not mostly about protocol or function, I agree. But if we are to take Wikipedia literally, they had at least some technical differences of opinion vis a vis ActivityPub.
IMO spritely is doing the most interesting work but I don’t understand any of it.
I’m kind of the oppisite in that I prefer Nostr over ActivityPub, but both have their merits. As for technical ways Activity Pub has a leg up:
- Comunities - Activity Pub is built around individual instances, with people able to join communities focused on their interests and/or that have their preferred moderation policies. Some software exists to do similar things on Nostr, but that’s not what most people use.
- Platforms - In a similar vein, Activity Pub is probably easier to make a platform out of, be it Meta making Threads or you making your own social media service for your friends. On Nostr people’s accounts exist outside of the infrastructure they use, so it’d be hard to provide a more unified experience.
- Ease of Use - Activity Pub generally has a lower technical barrier to entry, you can sign up with an email and a password on most servers. Outside of (upcoming) DiVine or using Frost Bunkers, there’s really no easy way to join Nostr without learning how to manage keys.
- Standardization - Acitivity Pub has existed for the better part of a decade, and the protocol hasn’t changed much for a while. Nostr is not only newer, but breaks it’s functionality into various NIPs (rules on how to interpret posts of specific types, e.g. shortform text, longform text, livestreams, etc) of which there’s 100+ official ones (and plenty of unnofocial ones).
What do you prefer about Nostr?
Culture’s enough.
I haven’t tried Nostr, so have no opinions on what the experience of actually using it is like, but cryptographic identity seems like it’d be a better way (technically speaking) of doing things than AP; tying everything to domain names has worked rather poorly – as we’ve seen repeatedly every time an instance goes offline…
I ended up on AP after jumping ship from reddit. I was on kbin first (since it was readable w/o JS and I liked the UI), and then later using the mlmym interface for lemmy as kbin because more unstable and eventually went offline.
I like Nostr over ActivityPub: simpler, more elegant protocol, decentralized, public key signatures, resistance to censorship, anti-moderation.
Content curation is voluntary & left to the client, giving the user greater control/flexibility & preventing moderator tyranny.
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