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?

  • Sean TilleyMEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    Architecturally speaking, Nostr is really cool, and has some great ideas. I think their approach is way better than what we have with instances, but discovery seems to be a fair bit worse, and most of the landscape seems to just be right-wing crypto bros. I’ve also heard from some people developing for Nostr that it’s “easy to learn, but messy”, in terms that you’re basically always trying to figure out compliance with various NIPs, rather than just following a particular protocol standard.

    I think the Fediverse would absolutely benefit from a system that didn’t tie user accounts to instances, and made use of a similar relay system.