Isn’t nostr something something Bitcoin?
Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. lemmy.ml/post/11570081
banghida@lemm.ee 9 months ago
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
It has an optional built-in tipping function where you can tip users (and receive tips) if you like their posts. Just like reddit had. Pretty cool imo but not required to use the platform.
banghida@lemm.ee 9 months ago
It is still rather cringe it is joined with Bitcoin at the hip, it even uses secpk1.
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
If you want a platform with built-in tipping, you can’t use PayPal, the fees make microtransactions impossible. If you don’t like the Bitcoin feature, you don’t have to use it. Bitcoin has a market cap that puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. Higher than Sweden. It’s been doing its thing for 15 years. People may say they don’t like it, but if you decide to not use any platform or service which accepts or uses Bitcoin, your circle of places you can use is going to continue to get smaller. Have fun not shopping at Safeway or any other major grocery store since they all have Bitcoin ATMs. Have fun not using mutual funds or other investment portfolios from major banks since they all have degree of exposure to Bitcoin. You choice to avoid it is yours alone, but it seems like a weird thing to be mad about and hate.
Crypto is full of scams and rug pulls and bad actors. But Bitcoin has kept its promises to faithfully relay transactions without a single hack or day of downtime for 15 years. They are not the same.
Asudox@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’d just like to inerject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Nostr, is in fact one of the clients using Nostr as its protocol to communicate with other platforms using the Nostr protocol. You see, ‘Nostr’ is just the protocol. But when you add the wide range of available clients, it becomes a fully functional fediverse. So, it’s more fittingly dubbed clients powered by Nostr!
bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social 9 months ago
i also would like to interject and say i don't trust anyone involved with the development or promotion of nostr.
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Yes very true!
9point6@lemmy.world 9 months ago
ActivityPub is a w3c standard, which IMO is a big plus over nostr which doesn’t have an established independent steward for it.
Also isn’t there the thing where users can’t really be banned on nostr? I’m not sure where I read that, but that’s going to kill any mass adoption if that’s the case.
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
9point6@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I see what you’re saying about it not needing a standards body, and of course that can work fine, but for me it’s an advantage that AP is maintained by a body independent from any specific implementation. An equivalent would be if the AP spec was defined by the Mastodon devs and community—not a bad thing, just not as good in my mind.
The relays thing I think was what the unable to really ban comes from. Are there moderation tools to propagate bans across relays quickly? Some users need to be booted off the network entirely and swiftly sometimes, we’ve seen several cases of this in Lemmy already with users posting horrendous shit. I’d be concerned that one of my relays would lag on banning (timezone differences for moderators or whatever innocuous reason) and these users achieve their goal of people seeing the shit they post. For some people this might trigger PTSD, which is why I say it would be a huge barrier to mass adoption until that issue is resolved.
The user portability aspect is the main advantage of it that I can see, and it looks like a pretty clever solution to the issue. Though personally speaking, I only really care about my subscription list, which I sync between two accounts already using my lemmy client. I understand some people might care more about the other stuff though (particularly on microblog platforms)
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Before we get into the weeds here, let’s start with an important basis premise: Moderation ability, at a protocol level, from an instance/relay admin perspective in nostr and AP is identical.
Relay operators can share ban lists like they do in AP. Relay operators can only directly control their own relay, not other relays.
Relays sharing ban lists help can solve this problem. I would argue that we don’t want to give that power (to ban a user from the entire network) to a single relay admin or even a couple relay admins (since anybody can be a relay admin), so broad consensus of some form needs to exist. A relay admin doesn’t need to be able to ban somebody from the entire network if they simply disagree with that user’s post, they can just ban the user on their own relay. There is value in having public squares with varying degrees of moderation, among other reasons, because laws about what kind of speech are acceptable vary country by country. There is value in having mainstream platforms which refuse to host some kinds of content and having that be a different moderation policy than the one used by the government, for example. Remember that legality and morality are not the same and that there are differences in what is illegal vs illegal in different jurisdictions.
If the user is doing something which is very illegal, which I believe you are referring to, that is a job for law enforcement. Neutral networks like the internet are traditionally policed “at the edges”. We don’t have gmail proactively filtering for objectionable or illegal content because of the consequences that come from that privacy invasion, false positives, additional computational load, reducing reliability of sending/receive between email carriers, etc. Comcast is not inspecting packets as they fly through their network at a the speed of light, delaying them, and determining if they should be passed or not. It’s the internet, they just pass them through. Instead, we say “this is an open, neutral network and if you break the law, LEO will deal with it”.