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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this article and the accompanying discussion from lobsters is very relevant. Though the article itself is a bit one sided in favor of nostr, it doesn’t do a great job arguing why a relay really is better
Very coincidental that you just posted this. I’ve been looking into p2p apps and Nostr caught my attention. Unfortunately like most p2p stuff it seems that most people using it are crypto affliated which is a big turn off.
The more I looked at it though nostr didn’t seem that interesting to me as a protocol compared to other p2p protocols like ipfs, Yggdrasil, i2p. Manly because it still seems to centralize around relays and the effectively ended up being your server. From my understanding its easier to move from relay to another since you can publish to multiple relays and your identify is just a key pair so your ID is “portable”. The big thing I see from Nostr is a priority to build apps on top of their protocol, compared to the other p2p protocols.
I think it would be neat if there was a non crypto affiliated social media platform built on top of a p2p protocol that did the following
- Use key identify system so your ID is portable and not tied to a single identity server
- All data is locally stored on your machine by default with the option to pin it to a server similar to the ipfs pinning servers
- Since it p2p, built with the idea that your peer maybe offline and queue sharing posts until they are online. The pinning servers could also act as an always online client for you to store messages. Like a bouncer in IRC
- No public feed, since it would be a moderation nightmare, you can only see what your followers post and what they reshare. Probably there would be feeds from trusted people you could subscribe to. This shared feeds could be a great way to build communities like in the fediverse
- Built on a p2p protocol that handles thing like NAT punch through and peer connection so anyone’s device can act like a peer without needing some server to relay messages to them, or having to port forward on their home connection. Nostr doesn’t appear to do this, since it relies on all messages passing through (and hosted by) relay servers. So your own device can’t act as a peer on Nostr.
These are the things that would make p2p social media more interesting to me than activitypub. Sadly as far as I can tell Nostr isn’t really this, and I’m pretty sure none of the other protocols I mentioned have build an app like this on top of them.
maybe Peergos? I’m not sure, seem to match up on Goals but IDK about execution: https://github.com/Peergos/Peergos?tab=readme-ov-file
Sounds a bit like Plebbit, though that is more about P2P “communities/boards” that a user starts and others can post to, rather than a microblog type platform. Unfortunately it also has a strong association with Crypto communities as its founders come from that scene. It is built on IPFS.
What you describe also has similiarities to Secure Scuttlebutt and its successor PZP , which are both unfortunately abandoned but layed a lot of groundwork for asynchronous encryption key based networks.
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.
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.
As of more recently:
- The identity system is still the same, keys aren’t rotatable and still the core of your account. Outside of edge cases like Frost Bunkers (outsourcing key management to a cluster of third party servers), or platforms like DiVine letting you register with an email, keys remain pretty much the same.
- Private infomration like DMs have been altered. They’re still E2E encrypted, but now only the people involved in the conversation can request a copy of the encrypted DM (I assume that’s what you’re referring to, but I may be mistaken).
- Media attachements are usually uploaded to Blossom servers now. Standard notes still only embed remote media, but the ecosystem has a semi decentralized means of hosting content, and most clients will have a more standard ‘upload and share’ type of feature that most other platforms/protocols have.
- The more recent outbox model (on supported clients) allows you to set the relays that will host your content and replies/reactions to your content, diversifying the ecosystem away from a handful of big relays. Software like Ditto also provides a more Mastodon community style experience - even to the extent of supporting the Mastodon API.
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.Wow, that’s bad. I would hate working with this so much.
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?
The identity management is a big one. I’ve had my ActivityPub account get nuked when Nerdica offline, and my current ActivityPub server (Trom) is sometimes slow and misses remote events. Having an identity I control means that I don’t get my account nuked if something breaks, and I can participate within communities without being tied to their infrastrucure if the community is great while their infrastructure is not. It also works across different forms of servers - no needing accounts on Mastodon, Pixelfed, Writefreely, and Peertube in order to experience each form of social media on the network - on Nostr I can just use my same account across the network. It also makes me more tempted to host my own infrastructure, since if I get a case of the stupids, I can’t accidentally nuke my account.
I also like the protocol’s simplicity. It’s pretty lightweight, and pretty easy to extend with some custom code. While custom extentions would break normal stuff (adding custom stuff to shortform posts is just going to make your stuff not work with other people’s clients), creating something like a chess app or geocaching app is pretty easy. Even if said apps wouldn’t work with your standard shortform or longform clients, they’d still interact with other apps using the same custom code, and be useable with a standard account.
And, while I seem to be a minority in this thread, I also like the moderation structure of Nostr. There’s a few different ways to approach that:
- I use Nostr like RSS, I follow people I like and see their content - and I moderate it like I ‘moderate’ an RSS feed, i.e. choosing who I do and don’t want to see.
- There are other ways to moderate though, for example, by pulling people you follow from the whole network while only setting your global feed (if your client supports a global feed) to pull from specific relays.
- Or you could use something like Ditto, which is a Nostr relay behind a Mastodon front end. Ditto gives users a local feed and global feed (though I beleive both can be enabled or disabled), with the content on the Ditto server being capable of moderating content in the exact same way any Activity Pub server can (including accessing content or controlling moderation via the Mastodon API).
- Last, if I was famous or had people trying to spam me, I could also set my inbox relay (place where people send their replies on outbox model supported clients) to a relay I control, then set rules/filters on who’s allowed to reply and/or what content replies could contain.
This is helpful thanks, seems like ditto is an interesting middle ground.
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.
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