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.
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.