awesome-fediverse VS nostr

It's always the same comment: X is different from A, therefore X is not a good replacement for A.

The whole point of federation is to avoid the problems we're seeing with Facebook, with Instagram, with Reddit, with Twitter: control over your internet content. Not having a mega-corp bent on maximizing profits and using you as a milking cow, but instead have a say and have actual power in how communities are built and managed. It is 100% expected that Lemmy or KBin is different from Reddit. You say that's not a good user experience, but I challenge that assertion: I say it's not a bad UX, but it's a different UX, and you don't want to change. Well, if you don't want to change, stay on Reddit, that's not a problem. But if you're going to investigate what the fediverse is, please learn what it's about, how it's built. Don't expect to find the same old world you know, that's on purpose !

> It makes no sense to me at all

You're on HN, a forum where members pride themselves in being intelligent enough to dig around, learn by themselves, be different, hack around. You haven't made efforts understanding how the fediverse works, or why it's different, and your conclusion is _not_ that you should investigate, but that you should complain that it's too different. I don't understand this reasoning.

I think an issue in the mentality in this forum is that people mostly expect products, ie a package that is made by an entity and that is served to users. The package is expected to be complete, shiny, wonderful, the entity is expected to do whatever it takes to convince users. It's an asymmetry that is completely opposite to the whole concept of being a hacker, which is supposed to be the H of HN.

Here's a good post explaining what the fediverse is about: https://medium.com/@VirtualAdept/a-friendly-introduction-to-...

And here are a few links and resources if you want to go deeper: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

most main instances of the fediverse (I think): https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

> I applied for mastodon

which server?

there are multiple server-side platforms too, incl. some forks, so if mastodon.social is not for you – look around for better lighter alternatives (as well for self-hosting)

start around here: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse#applications

Some resources if you're interested in learning more: https://nostr.com/ https://ron.stoner.com/nostr_Security_and_Privacy https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/ https://nostorg.github.io/clients/

I think your best bet here is Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays): https://nostr.com https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

Nostr isn't a federated platform like Mastodon or Lemmy, it's more similar to the AT protocol created by Bluesky, whilst being far simpler to understand and write apps using it. The nostr protocol is defined by a series of NIPs (Nostr implementation possibilites https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips), the most basic of which can be implemented in a client or a relay in 50-100 lines of code in any modern programming language.

Each user runs a client, anyone can write a relay or run any of hundreds of existing implementations, both clients and relays can choose to support a number of NIPs. Users have a public-private keypair, and distribute notes to relays signed with their private key, which are verified by relays. Clients subscribe via websockets to any number of relays (I usually have 20-30), and receive notes from all users on those relays' databases, or filtered by the public keys of the users you're following. Relays for the most part don't communicate with each other. If you're ever blocked or banned from a relay, you'll still be able to have your notes seen as long as you have at least one relay in common with anyone who wants to see them. I run my own as well for extra resiliency.

At the moment there's ~50 standardised NIPs, which add features like likes, zaps (bitcoin tips for notes), user status, post expiration, mentions, search, DMs, and public chats. Nearly all of these are supported by popular clients and relays. While nostr is primarily used for social media at the moment, it's already possible to build upon as a protocol for pretty much any online service.

The total active user count on most public relays I'd estimate is somewhere around 500k to a million, though the nature of the protocol makes it impossible to estimate its true size. The perceived community on most relays before following anyone frankly can get pretty cancerous, mainly due to a lot of clients sorting notes by new by default, so I can only hope to high heaven it'll improve as it grows.

Though like any new non-centralised platform, it's more difficult to get started on for most non-technical users as they have to pick one of hundreds of clients to install, and requires caution to never leak your private key and be very wary of which clients you trust it with.

I hope this was not too technical and all over the place. If you are interested in knowing more please ask me or check out https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr or https://nostr.com/get-started

Without movement on this [1] I can't see adoption.

[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/issues/97

I think the next stage is decentralized social media. Something like nostr (1) where there’s no centralized entity determining the algorithm to boost. It’s up to the individual to follow users.

Perhaps the next challenge would be human verification, even with this protocol we’d need something to index public people by to handle discovery.

Even before LLM’s became as mainstream as they are, most social media platforms were riddled with spam: affiliate marketing, drop shipping crap, and people who are running some sort of con.

1 - https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr already has 8k stars on github

Considering that Reddit might not be able to negotiate better pricing for API usage, it's worth considering a different approach. The future of social media seems to be moving towards protocols rather than specific platforms. This means that instead of relying on a single platform like Reddit, Apollo should focus on using a protocol called NOSTR (you can find more information at https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr).

Holding me back from posting updates of what I had for breakfast is the problem of private key sharing with services that I can use in order to post updates of what I had for breakfast.

A client or service will inevitably be compromised. And with it, the private keys of all using it whether stored by the service or logged on entry by a compromised system.

Private keys should be chained, master->subkey, with subkey the public key of the service __or a solution like that or that ends in the same result. When (not if) a service or key is compromised, the key can be blacklisted and/or any key co-signed by a compromised service blacklisted.

I'm confused by the oversight. It's also been raised here https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/issues/97

Until then, I'll have to keep my updates of what I had for breakfast to myself.