It’s just as scalable as fedi, I’d say it’s even more scalable since relays don’t need to communicate with each other, which reduces the cost to run a relay. The average user experience is basically identical. They download an app, it connects to a set of default relays (or they can choose some manually if they want), they tweet.
Because you can choose which relays to connect to and you typically connect to multiple relays. This is all seamless. On Mastodon/fedi, an instance controls your entire view of the fediverse unless you make a separate account elsewhere and check it separately. You can’t follow or be followed by users or instances they block even if you want to. They also control your identity, since it’s tied to a relay/instance. If your relay shuts down or your account gets banned, you have to make a new account elsewhere, re-follow everybody, get everybody to re-follow you, etc. It’s a mess.
On nostr, instance/relay admins only control that goes through their specific relay. Relay admins can, of course, share common blocklists if they want for anti-spam or anti-abuse purposes. If you want to follow somebody blocked by a relay, you are connected to other relays and the signal can flow through there. You don’t need to check multiple relays separately. If your relay closes, you don’t lose your account/identity.
A relay admin controls what goes through their relay. A user controls who they follow and who follows them. If you want, you can just auto-ignore all DMs directed to you by people who aren’t in your follow list. Also remember that your DMs have to come through a relay, presumably you are connected to relays you trust the moderation policy of, so toxic users can’t use those relays to DM you.
Read the first bullet point:
Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:
Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon (fedi) if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
It’s baked in pretty deep to the protocol and to the concept of instances. This would be like making an e-mail address that’s portable between e-mail servers. Maybe AP can pull this off, but it’s going to be quite a change.
Relays store:
“Accounts” are private/public keypairs. You don’t have a username/password at a specific instance, you have a public/private keypair you can use to authenticate your identity. It’s like your name vs an e-mail address/username. An e-mail address is an account you have at a specific entity, this is like an activitypub username user@lemmy.ml. Your name isn’t tied to a specific instance or even a single government database (since you can be identified by name in databases of multiple governments), it’s just your identity. Your key in nostr works just like an identity or name in that sense.
But then what is a relay? See if a relay doesn’t hold an account and cannot ban/moderate directly content they serve then what’s exactly happening?
A relay is like an instance in AP. It hosts content and relays content from other relays according to its own moderation policies. The difference in nostr is that most users are usually connected to multiple relays, whereas an AP a user is connected to one ‘instance’ and their instance connects to other instances.
I also wonder if it’s a bit of a legal minefield. See I’m running mbin here. I get content from many other mbin/kbin/lemmy instances. Usually they have pretty good moderation and content is removed on my instance too. But, if someone raises a legal complaint with me directly, I’m required to act on that and moderate on my own instance. Which I can do. It seems like you’re suggesting that’s not directly possible with nostr?
This works identically in nostr. You as a relay admin can block/delete content on your relay and set whatever moderation policies you like. You can also de-federate from other relays if they have poor moderation.
Interesting hadn’t heard about this thanks for the link!
Except that ActivityPub and Nostr’s moderation functionality is basically identical. Relay/instance operators can block users, filter content, set their own moderation policies, and defederate from other instances with weak moderation policies. The difference is that if your instance admin blocks you from following somebody you want to on AP, you need to make a new account at a new instance and check that account seperately. If your instance admin does that in nostr, it’s just a matter of adding another relay to your list and now you can keep following/being followed by/DMing that person. It’s the best of both worlds: relays can set their own moderation policies and cultivate a certain vibe, users and their identities are not locked in to the moderation policies of the instance(s) they are connected to.
Protocol wise, you can absolutely use a portable identity with ActivityPub. Every user has a key pair that us used to sign and verify their posts, and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to use the same key for multiple servers. Nobody actually implements a scheme like that but you could use keys instead of ActivityPub usernames to label accounts, if you wanted to. You could even use multiple servers the same way nostr uses multiple relays!
You can do this, but your account is still tied to the instance. If somebody sends a DM or tweet to skullgiver@lemmy.ml but lemmy.ml no longer exists, all the public keys in the world don’t solve that problem. In nostr, tweets and DMs are directed at a key, not at a user at a particular relay.
Nostr does all that too.
Torrents won because of search. Each torrent site maintained an index of torrents and you could search that index. Nobody could pollute the index with nonsense entries because the index was curated by the site admins.
There was no good way to search ed2k or gnutella or the other P2P systems. There were many independent indexes (hosted by nodes) like Torrents, but they were not curated by any trusted custodian. Anybody could publish an index, and your client would fetch all nearby indexes and search through it. These indexes, because they were not curated by trusted custodians, and because there was no cost to publishing a list with a bunch of nonsense in it, lead to a terrible spam-filled search experience.
Federation is great when you have multiple repositories of information and users choose which repository they prefer. That’s what Torrent search sites did. If you need a single repository that is in sync for all users and is curated in a P2P manner and you can’t trust all participants of that system to be “good actors”, that is where you need a system like blockchain, there is no other decentralized way to solve that problem.
I wrote a lengthier post about federation vs blockchain as data storage and reputation mechanisms if you are interested https://lemmy.ml/comment/8051480
You don’t have to do anything with crypto, it just supports crypto integration if you want to tip other users. Just like reddit did. It’s an optional feature.
But people already have Paypal and understand how to use it. Most people don’t understand cryptocurrency, and don’t want anything to do with it because of its association with scams.
At one point they didn’t, and they had to sign up and learn how to use it. But your critique is fair. It’s an optional feature, you don’t have to use it. The benefit from the platform perspective is that the fees are stupid low so micropayments can work well. Like 1c on $5 low. And it makes it easier to do the payments internationally. Microtransaction tips really couldn’t be done with Paypal or really any other competitive non-crypto system.
Also, I looked in to Nostr a bit for this and do you seriously think profile links like this will catch on with people?
The nostr username schema isn’t great. There’s a couple protocol proposals to simplify them, they will look a lot more like username@website.com in the future. AP currently is doing way better at this. I’ll add this to the list in the post of places where AP is better.
I’m sorry Ada, but you’re just wrong here. I don’t know how you are missing my bolded sections explaining how nostr and AP work identically here.
By your own admission, this doesn’t happen though. One relay is the same as the other, and that’s because the bigot can just use multiple relays as well, making the effort of an admin blocking them largely a waste of time
Every relay sets their own moderation policy. They can block users, they can delete posts, they can filter based on keywords. They can block other relays and “de-federate” from them. Relays can share lists of common servers to de-federate from because they host bigots. Same as AP. Early in mastodon/lemmy/etc relays didn’t differentiate themselves much on moderation policies. As problems came up on some servers, they started to do that more, now there is a big difference between different instances. Same can and will happen on nostr, there is already some differentiation, just not as much as it’s a smaller platform.
They can’t though, because on AP, an instance that constantly spawns bigots with throw away accounts gets defederated, and that means that bigots have a barrier that doesn’t exist on Nostr.
Same thing happens in Nostr, that relay will get defederated. A bigot can still post to that relay, but their posts won’t be propagated to other relays. All the bigots will filter into the few relays that allow them to post. Same as AP.
But user have to be technically minded enough, and willing, to set up a crypto wallet to do this.
True. That would be true of any platform which allows tips, you’d have to connect to some source of money whether it be paypal or crypto. Paypal’s fees would be prohibitively expensive but it would be theoretically doable. Either way, it’s a <5 minute setup process if they care to do it.
Interesting I didn’t know AP supported E2E. I guess it’s Mastodon that doesn’t support that element of the AP protocol then?
If you as a user can connect to multiple relays, then most people will do that, making the act of an admin banning a bigot on one relay pointless, because the bigot will still get through on other relays
Just like AP, the bigot can join another instance/relay, if an instance has bad moderation policy, your relay can block that instance/relay entirely.
Which means most admins won’t bother acting except in the most egregious cases, leaving it up to the users to deal with their own blocks.
Admins can block along any spectrum of severity they want, just like AP.
once they’re blocked on enough relays, they’ll just make another throw away account.
They can do this in AP too. There’s no way to solve this unless we start requiring a passport photo with every account or a payment or something. Blocking naughty instances/relays that have weak moderation is the best solution atm.
Nostr does not reduce an instance admin’s ability to block bigots or the relays that host bigots. None of that is different than AP.
The default setup for snort (most popular nostr portal) blocks all crypto-related discussion by default. The crypto bro problem was apparently worse back in the early launch days, but it’s gotten much better.
Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:
Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081