I’ve been using mastodon for a month or two now. I never used twitter but thought I’d try it out for fun since I love this new fediverse experiment.
Then my mastodon instance started experiencing some downtime and I wondered what happens in this scenario. It seems if the goal is to have lots of smaller instances and decentralize social media, then instances, particularly those not run a big companies (who can reliably fund things for years on end and sell ad space on their platforms), will come and go and users will lose their identity or home base each time this happens along with all their followers and their connection to the wider social graph. This seems not great.
It seems that nostr might actually be a fix for this. In nostr:
- You publish to multiple relays (essentially instances) and anybody from any relay can follow you.
- Your messages are signed by your key so you can prove they are authentic.
- If your relay goes down, people can still follow you via other relays
- You can change between relays without losing your identity. Your post history and followers follow you, not [email protected].
Doing some reading, it seems people’s main criticisms of nostr are:
- Interface isn’t as pretty. Looks like this has come leaps and bounds in the past six months but of course could always use more work
- Populated by crypto bros. This seems like not an issue long-term, there’s plenty of crypto bros on mastodon, you can just not follow them if you don’t want to see them. The idea that you can “tip” with a tweet or whatever nostr’s term for that is seems pretty interesting.
Basically, at a protocol level, nostr seems better in some important ways and the cons don’t seem protocol related but userbase and UI related.
What am I missing on the pros/cons list? Anybody got experiences to share?
Nostr is not moderatable, so it’s already full of ads. It will just continue to attract spam. It’s a great idea, but it doesn’t work in real life. At least not yet.
can’t users block stuff???
New users don’t want to be required to block 1000 accounts when they first start, that’s more friction to joining a new social network. I mean Lemmy users already get turned away by the Lemmit bot and that’s just 1 single account to block lol literally like 2 clicks.
I think it can be helped by having sorta community tools. Like subscribing to blocklists. Users could even publish their user blocklist and someone can subscribe to it as well or just instead of subscribing to them. and we alread have tools to block domains, urls, users, magazines so we don’t have to block accounts individually. I have curated my feed quite a bit just by over time taking out stuff here and there. Heck I will block at a group level much easier than a user level. That is I put more scrutiny before deciding to block a user.