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Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why.

This is exactly why I won’t use Nostr. What you’re describing here isn’t ideal for many folk that are part of marginalised groups. When each individual has to individually block every bigot only after being exposed to their bigotry, then the vulnerable folk don’t hang around. This is doubly the case when there is nothing stopping the bigots from just creating another account after burning their first one.

In Nostr, each relay can set its own policies. Relays can and do establish policies for acceptable behaviours. If you want a strict content policy, connect to relays with strict policies. You won’t have to individually block any users or relays/instances. This is essentially the same as mastodon. The difference with nostr is that you can connect to multiple relays, so a single relay, where your identity is tied to, cannot block you from following who you want and seeing whatever content you choose.

This is also something that activitypub communities do better, because they are communities not relays.

“Hope users donate” didn’t work out well for the previous iteration of P2P discussion spaces: forums. The fact is, hosting online discussion forums gets costly quickly, especially if you want them to be reliable. Hell, even IRC servers which serve only text can get expensive to host.

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ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

In Nostr, each relay can set its own policies. Relays can and do establish policies for acceptable behaviours.

Sure, but it’s still each relay admin playing whack a mole with bigots as they pop up with new accounts.

On AP, because identities are tied to instances, the instance admin can kick the bigot and they’re gone for everyone, before many folk ever see it. And if there is an instance with admins that don’t deal with bigots, the admins can defederate from the entire instance.

Nostr doesn’t give you any of those options. An instance is just a generic relay. No community, no differentiation, no protection for vulnerable folk. Which is fine if your goal is “free speech” but not so good if you’re a member of a vulnerable minority just trying to connect with people/communities without having to be super on guard.

I left twitter to get away from an environment like that. I’m not going to head back to a federated version of the same thing

The fact is, hosting online discussion forums gets costly quickly, especially if you want them to be reliable.

Absolutely. I admin several AP instances, including the one I’m posting from now. We have crowd funding to help, but we are still out of pocket running it, but that’s fine, because the reason we run it is for the whole community aspect I’ve been talking about.

I have zero interest in paying out of pocket to run a generic relay that will probably end up being used by the very people I’m trying to avoid.

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- makeasnek@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  On AP, because identities are tied to instances, the instance admin can kick the bigot and they’re gone for everyone, before many folk ever see it. And if there is an instance with admins that don’t deal with bigots, the admins can defederate from the entire instance.
  
  Same with Nostr. Relay admins can ban users and relays who don’t have good moderation. The difference is, if you don’t agree with that ban, you can: connect to other relays and route around it AND keep using that relay because you like the content on it. And there’s no need to make a whole new account at another instance, login to it separately, etc.
  
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  - ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    In Nostr, your relay gets to make and enforce it’s own content policies just as easily as it does on AP
    
    And yet they don’t.
    
    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, and once they’re blocked on enough relays, they’ll just make another throw away account. 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.
    
    I agree, there needs to be an answer here that lets people keep their identities tied to them rather than an instance, but the nostr approach isn’t it. It just leads to everyone for themselves, which is fine for some people, but it’s exactly what many other folk were trying to escape by coming to the fediverse in the first place.
    
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    makeasnek@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    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, if an instance has bad moderation policy, your relay can block that instance 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 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.
    
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