When Twitter changed hands, Mastodon, a social network made up of autonomous servers arranged around particular themes, subjects, or interests, started to grow quickly on the promise of decentralization. However, Mastodon is still based on servers whose administrators can censor or shadow-ban users’ material or manage their usernames and identity. That’s the crux of the matter.
As big tech and legacy media collude with governments to control the narratives and censor dissent, people are searching for alternative locations and social media platforms where they can exchange and propagate ideas and their creations without running the risk of being de-platformed, censored, or canceled without much in the way of appeal.
With NOSTR, no one can restrict you or your content because it uses a decentralized protocol, and you own your login and key. You can choose who you communicate with, who you follow, and what you don’t want to see, but you can’t restrict other users’ content in any manner or stop them from seeing your stuff. Nobody can.
It’s a pretty straightforward protocol with lots of room for customization, ensuring that users can always communicate with one another regardless of what specific relay server operators decide to host or not to host.
This is basically what made MOB quit hosting Wolfballs, in seeing that lemmy has some of the same defects that Mastodon has that NOSTR will allegedly fix (I think); idk why he didn’t just leave it up and then transition to NOSTR when ready though or create a smooth transition to a NOSTR instance or something if NOSTR will make Lemmy / Mastodon approaches seem obsolete
also I would like if someone could point me to a user guide or if we could create one on getting up and running with NOSTR
so far I know you need to find a NOSTR client and download it, then you need to find instances to connect with…
I don’t know which instances to choose, or how to run a server, and didn’t download a client yet (best clients to pick?)
I think NOSTR has also been compared to Secure Scuttlebutt which might be worth a look and post: https://scuttlebutt.nz/
https://infogalactic.com/info/Secure_Scuttlebutt
edit: https://awesomeopensource.com/project/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
https://snort.social/
Seems pretty good and intuitive. Its built in react. Mostly crypto bros trying to get crypto similar to discussions except it actually works.
I’m still learning and wondering how to enter the space.
I can host a relay I guess. I’m researching the different ones.
I hear even minds is now nostr compatible.
I have not found a client that supports groups. Or have not found the feature. There is the one reddit clone but they require crypto to sign up. That will turn 99.99% of people away. It will avoid spam yes but also it’s first five users.
The important thing I want out if it is to take moderation away from the admin and put it to the users themselves . This works really well with twitter style social media. Maybe it won’t work well with communities when by nature communities need some kinda moderation to be on topic.
Could we use the Exploding Heads RSS feed to automatically post to it?
Yeah that would work fine but it would all look like it’s coming from a single user unless your app registered each user with a private key somehow. it would take some dev work.
We already have RSS feeds for each community as well as the total site. We could start there. Do you know if there is an app or utility we could feed that into?
It sounds like that would take some dev work. Seems like a common ask so i’m sure someone will implement a rss to nostr forwarder. I don’t think it would take but a week or so of effort there would be zero ui.
I would keep an eye on nostr apps for something you like.
https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
I was thinking about building out my own relay so I can better understand the protocol and then I would be better suited to write fun stuff like that.
Thanks for the info
https://rsslay.nostr.net/
Do you think this would work?
Looks legit! I’ve never gotten into RSS feeds so I’m not a good person to talk to about it.
I see each user has an address xxx@xyz
Is this portable?
Is it tied to a particular app or relay?
What determines it?
To what I understand a user is identified as a private/public key. Some kind of identify marker is generated but a user can not be impersonated (as long as their key is secret) and can absolutely move to another “Instance”
But if the user is using a Web client, the web client could ban them. And a relay could ban them. But as long as they own the private key than can move to another client and send their messages to multiple relays. ( I love that model because then admins don’t have to feel pressure to ban anyone because everyone knows they can just forward their stuff to another relay. )
A mobile/local client is really the best option for people who want absolute control over their identity but a web site could make it easier for them to sign up. It’s more convenient. I imagine most people will use web apps but people who care more about privacy and ownership will use a mobile/desktop app.
It will be interesting to see how this evolved in practice.
Wasn’t Twitter, Signal, What’s App based on open protocols originally?
None of them ever had the ability for the user to own their identity. Which is what is so novel about nostr imo.
Everything we do in the fediverse can be achieved with email, xnmp. It’s nothing new. But lemmy has proved that it’s not enough. The censorship is often even worse than on facebook/instagram.
With nostr a cellphone is effectively it’s own instance. and it’s so effiencient. By breaking it up into multiple relays you really distribute the load. a handful of people with with a good internet connection can compete with twitter.
Mastodon doesn’t scale as easily. A big server still has to run load balancers, take ddos attacks head on.
A single relay going down will do basically nothing to the nostr network. No body should even notice.