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

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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    ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Just like AP, the bigot can join another instance/relay, if an instance has bad moderation policy, your relay can block that instance/relay entirely.
    
    By your own admission, this doesn’t happen though. One relay is the same as the other, and that’s because the bigot can just use multiple relays as well, making the effort of an admin blocking them largely a waste of time.
    
    They can do this in AP too.
    
    They can’t though, because on AP, an instance that constantly spawns bigots with throw away accounts gets defederated, and that means that bigots have a barrier that doesn’t exist on Nostr. On nostr they can create unlimited accounts and use unlimited relays to broadcast their content, relying on the admins to block each and every account manually (which they generally won’t do, because what’s the point?), which ultimately leads to the end users having to play whack a mole with the bigots.
    
    There’s no way to solve this unless we start requiring a passport photo with every account or a payment or something
    
    I don’t have any answers for you. But I can tell you that I actively prefer APs implementation to Nostr’s because APs current implementation is safer.
    
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