makeasnek
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 2 months ago:
It’s just as scalable as fedi, I’d say it’s even more scalable since relays don’t need to communicate with each other, which reduces the cost to run a relay. The average user experience is basically identical. They download an app, it connects to a set of default relays (or they can choose some manually if they want), they tweet.
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 2 months ago:
Because you can choose which relays to connect to and you typically connect to multiple relays. On Mastodon/fedi, an instance controls your entire view of the fediverse unless you make a separate account elsewhere and check it separately. You can’t follow or be followed by users or instances they block even if you want to. They also control your identity, since it’s tied to a relay/instance. If your relay shuts down or your account gets banned, you have to make a new account elsewhere, re-follow everybody, get everybody to re-follow you, etc. It’s a mess.
On nostr, instance/relay admins only control that goes through their specific relay. If you want to follow somebody blocked by that relay, you are connected to other relays and the signal can flow through there. You don’t need to check multiple relays separately. If your relay closes, you don’t lose your account/identity.
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 2 months ago:
A relay admin controls what goes through their relay. A user controls who they follow and who follows them. If you want, you can just auto-ignore all DMs directed to you by people who aren’t in your follow list. Also remember that your DMs have to come through a relay, presumably you are connected to relays you trust the moderation policy of, so toxic users can’t use those relays to DM you.
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 2 months ago:
Read the first bullet point:
- Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 2 months ago:
Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:
- Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
- On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
- On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can’t stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated “public squares” according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn’t blocked you).
- On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it’s not, so this doesn’t happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it’s clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
- Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.
Why I think nostr will win lemmy.ml/post/11570081
- Comment on OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion 3 months ago:
It can. Lightning transactions are as easy and lightweight to process as e-mail.
- Comment on OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion 3 months ago:
Except it’s not. Lightning is incredibly decentralized, you can run a full lightning node on a raspberry pi. Look up a graph of lightning network, looks just like any other decentralized system
- Comment on Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption 3 months ago:
Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, there is no “mining” in a traditional sense, so its power consumption is more akin to e-mail than mining crypto. But proof-of-stake leads to centralization over time, which is antithetical to what Bitcoin people want.
- Comment on OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion 3 months ago:
It’s been letting people be their own bank for 15 years. You can send transactions across the globe for pennies in fees which confirm instantly using Bitcoin lightning. The supply has remained capped at 21 million. It’s doing exactly what it said it would do without a single hack or hour of downtime 24/7, 365.
- Comment on The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes 3 months ago:
“Not everybody will use it and it’s not 100% perfect so let’s not try”
- Comment on The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes 3 months ago:
Putting it on the blockchain ensures you can always go back and say “see, at this date/time, this key verified this file/hash”… If you know the key of the uploader (the white house), you can verify it was signed by that key. Guatemala used a similar scheme to verify votes in elections using Bitcoin. Could the precinct lie and put in the wrong vote count? Of course! But what it prevented was somebody saying “well actually the precinct reported a different number” since anybody could verify that on chain they didn’t. It also prevented the precinct themselves from changing the number in the future if they were put under some kind of pressure.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 3 months ago:
There is no “delete a user from the internet” button. It doesn’t exist. Even if a single admin could ban a user from entire network, which is giving immense amount of power to any admin, all that user has to do is make a new account to get around it. That’s true for Nostr, AP, Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, etc. This is why spam exists and will always exist. AP or nostr or whoever isn’t going to solve spam or abuse of online services, the best we can do it mitigate the bulk of it. Relays and instances can share ban lists in nostr or AP, that can be automated, that is the way to mitigate the problem. There is, however, a “delete a person from society” button we can press, and that is LEOs job. That, conveniently, also deletes them from the internet. It’s just not a button we trust anybody but government to press.
As we get stronger and stronger anti-spam/anti-abuse measures, we make it harder and harder to join and participate in networks like the internet. This isn’t actually a problem for spammers, they have a financial incentive, so they can pay people to fill out captchas and do SMS verifications and whatever else they need to do. All we do by increasing the cost to spam is change that kinds of spam are profitable to send. Other abuse of services that isn’t spam have their own intrinsic motivations that may outweigh the cost associated with making new accounts. At a certain level of anti-spam mitigation, you end up hurting end users more than spammers. A captcha and e-mail verification blocks like 90% of spam attempts and is a very small barrier for users. But even that has accessibility implications. Requiring them to receive an SMS? An additional 10% but now you’ve excluded people who don’t have their own cell phone or use a VoIP provider. You’ve made it more dangerous for people to use your service to seek help for things like addiction, domestic abuse, etc as their partner or family member may share the same phone. You’ve made it harder to engage in dissent against the government in authoritarian regimes. You’ve also made it much more difficult to run a relay, since running a relay now requires access to an SMS service, payment for that SMS service, etc. Require them to receive a letter in the mail? An additional 10% but now you’ve excluded people who don’t have a stable address or mail access, etc. For a listing to be placed on Google Maps, maybe a letter in the mail is a reasonable hurdle to have, after all, Google only wants to list businesses which have a physical address. For posting to twitter? It’s pretty ludicrous.
I generally trust relay admins to make moderation decisions, otherwise I wouldn’t be on their instance or relay on the first place. And my trust becomes extended to other admins they work with and share ban lists with. And that’s fine. But remember that any person with any set of motivations can be a relay or instance admin. What I don’t trust is any random person on the internet being able to make moderation decisions for the entire internet. Which means that any approach to bans would need to be federated and built on mutual trust between operators.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 3 months ago:
Yes very true!
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 3 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.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 3 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.
Are there moderation tools to propagate bans across relays quickly?
Relay operators can share ban lists like they do in AP. Relay operators can only directly control their own relay, not other relays.
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 more 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.
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”.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 3 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.
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 3 months ago:
- You don’t need a w3c standard to have a protocol that is open source and used globally, it’s just one way to go about that. You can also have standards which are not made through w3c but are made through some other governance body, or you can have standards where the standard just kind of evolves from a bunch of different devs trying different versions of things until there’s one main way which floats to the top since everybody prefers it.
- Relays on nostr, which are the equivalent to instances in ActivityPub/mastodon/lemmy can set their own moderation policies, defederate from other relays, etc all the same as in ActivityPub. The moderation abilities are basically the same. This means relays can choose what content they allow and ban users/topics/etc. The key difference is that you are by default connected to multiple relays. So if your relay blocks a user you really want to follow, you can keep following that user and see them in your feed, they just don’t show up for other users on that relay. So you get the best of both worlds: relays have curated, moderated public squares while not reducing your ability to choose who to follow and who can follow you.
- Comment on The Verge - The fediverse, explained 3 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 (fedi) if anyone is curious. lemmy.ml/post/11570081
- Comment on Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public 3 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
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
It’s baked in pretty deep to the protocol and to the concept of instances. This would be like making an e-mail address that’s portable between e-mail servers. Maybe AP can pull this off, but it’s going to be quite a change.
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
Relays store:
- Content posted by users connected to their relay
- Content posted by users of other relays that their relay is connected to
“Accounts” are private/public keypairs. You don’t have a username/password at a specific instance, you have a public/private keypair you can use to authenticate your identity.
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
But then what is a relay? See if a relay doesn’t hold an account and cannot ban/moderate directly content they serve then what’s exactly happening?
A relay is like an instance in AP. It hosts content and relays content from other relays according to its own moderation policies. The difference in nostr is that most users are usually connected to multiple relays, whereas an AP a user is connected to one ‘instance’ and their instance connects to other instances.
I also wonder if it’s a bit of a legal minefield. See I’m running mbin here. I get content from many other mbin/kbin/lemmy instances. Usually they have pretty good moderation and content is removed on my instance too. But, if someone raises a legal complaint with me directly, I’m required to act on that and moderate on my own instance. Which I can do. It seems like you’re suggesting that’s not directly possible with nostr?
This works identically in nostr. You as a relay admin can block/delete content on your relay and set whatever moderation policies you like. You can also de-federate from other relays if they have poor moderation.
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
Interesting hadn’t heard about this thanks for the link!
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
Except that ActivityPub and Nostr’s moderation functionality is basically identical. Relay/instance operators can block users, filter content, set their own moderation policies, and defederate from other instances with weak moderation policies. The difference is that if your instance admin blocks you from following somebody you want to on AP, you need to make a new account at a new instance and check that account seperately. If your instance admin does that in nostr, it’s just a matter of adding another relay to your list and now you can keep following/being followed by/DMing that person.
Protocol wise, you can absolutely use a portable identity with ActivityPub. Every user has a key pair that us used to sign and verify their posts, and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to use the same key for multiple servers. Nobody actually implements a scheme like that but you could use keys instead of ActivityPub usernames to label accounts, if you wanted to. You could even use multiple servers the same way nostr uses multiple relays!
You can do this, but your account is still tied to the instance. If somebody sends a DM or tweet to skullgiver@lemmy.ml but lemmy.ml no longer exists, all the public keys in the world don’t solve that problem. In nostr, tweets and DMs are directed at a key, not at a user at a particular relay.
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
Nostr does all that too.
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
Torrents won because of search. Each torrent site maintained an index of torrents and you could search that index. Nobody could pollute the index with nonsense entries because the index was curated by the site admins.
There was no good way to search ed2k or gnutella or the other P2P systems. There were many independent indexes (hosted by nodes) like Torrents, but they were not curated by any trusted custodian. Anybody could publish an index, and your client would fetch all nearby indexes and search through it. These indexes, because they were not curated by trusted custodians, and because there was no cost to publishing a list with a bunch of nonsense in it, lead to a terrible spam-filled search experience.
Federation is great when you have multiple repositories of information and users choose which repository they prefer. That’s what Torrent search sites did. If you need a single repository that is in sync for all users and is curated in a P2P manner and you can’t trust all participants of that system to be “good actors”, that is where you need a system like blockchain, there is no other decentralized way to solve that problem.
I wrote a lengthier post about federation vs blockchain as data storage mechanisms if you are interested lemmy.ml/comment/8051480
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
You don’t have to do anything with crypto, it just supports crypto integration if you want to tip other users. Just like reddit did. It’s an optional feature.
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
But people already have Paypal and understand how to use it. Most people don’t understand cryptocurrency, and don’t want anything to do with it because of its association with scams.
Fair. It’s an optional feature, you don’t have to use it. The benefit from the platform perspective is that the fees are stupid low so micropayments can work well. Like 1c on $5 low.
Also, I looked in to Nostr a bit for this and do you seriously think profile links like this will catch on with people?
The nostr username schema isn’t great. There’s a couple protocol proposals to simplify them, they will look a lot more like username@website.com in the future. AP currently is doing way better at this.
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
I’m sorry Ada, but you’re just wrong here. I don’t know how you are missing my bolded sections explaining how nostr and AP work identically here.
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
Every relay sets their own moderation policy. They can block users, they can delete posts. They can block other relays and “de-federate” from them. Same as AP. Early in mastodon/lemmy/etc relays didn’t differentiate themselves much on moderation policies. As problems came up on some servers, they started to do that more, now there is a big difference between different instances. Same can and will happen on nostr, there is already some differentiation, just not as much as it’s a smaller platform.
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.
Same thing happens in Nostr, that relay will get defederated. A bigot can still post to that relay, but their posts won’t be propagated to other relays. All the bigots will filter into the few relays that allow them to post. Same as AP.
- Comment on I love Mastodon and ActivityPub. But I think Nostr is going to win. Here's why. 3 months ago:
But user have to be technically minded enough, and willing, to set up a crypto wallet to do this.
True. That would be true of any platform which allows tips, you’d have to connect to some source of money whether it be paypal or crypto. Paypal’s fees would be prohibitively expensive but it would be theoretically doable. Either way, it’s a <5 minute setup process if they care to do it.
Interesting I didn’t know AP supported E2E. I guess it’s Mastodon that doesn’t support that element of the AP protocol then?