Most people agree that Social Media is broken and that we need to find new solutions. Max DeMarco embarked on a journey to find out more about a new invention called NOSTR. This is his documentary about that journey and his interview with key players.
I’ve actually been on Nostr myself a few months (and did my own video about it). As with most alternative networks, you see who you put in your feed.
Which issue are they trying to solve? The censoring and control issue goes away with federated systems but there is the cost of having a running network. The corporate networks charge you the fee of personal info so it doesn’t cost actually money.
In all honesty the biggest issue I see is that social media eventually leads to us seeing what most of society is really like… boring, bigoted and stupid. This exists everywhere, it’s only that smaller networks like Lemmy just dont have the numbers to make those issues be so prominent.
Well, I’d certainly see it still more like ActivityPub. Only different is there are no actual login servers. You get 8 default relay servers that help relay your messages, and there are over 200 I think. Nostr is a different way of doing ActivityPub, but your identity stays with you (not on a server). A week after I tried it, I did this video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mSyMCJlSwA trying to explain some of the differences and similarities (like I did before for Lemmy, Mastodon, etc).
Sure there are differences but my question was really about what the new problem they are trying to solve. The local storage of your identity seems to he that big thing and I wonder who was asking for this. Seems like more of a nuisance than anything else, having to manage that data yourself.
The identity ownership is very key as it is a big issue with centralised and decentralised social networks. Hubzilla comes close with its nomadic identity, but that still has to be moved from server to server (or you host your own Hubzilla server). In this way Nostr’s identity is seamless as you register once with your public/private key, and whatever app or Nostr web service you use, it is synced via the relays, and you can post from anywhere (no imports/exports/restores). Secure Scuttlebutt has peer-to-peer identity, but each peer is a different identity. You can “merge” them, but it causes masses of issues with syncing new posts etc.
The other thing it is solving is there is no dependency on a server login nor a server to publish your posts. Any one, or more, of available relays makes your posts available. It has a clever way of letting followers know what relays you use vs what they use, so they can always follow you. And by the way Nostr actually has a Lemmy type service too, but I see very few were actually using it (or know about it). I think I touched on it in my own video when I looked at Nostr.
To me, it is quite an interesting network as real effort seems to have gone into addressing some common shortcomings. We could see that the Zot protocol was more advanced than ActivityPub, but guess what (like VHS and Betamax) ActivityPub won in popular usage. And of course this year ActivityPub got W3 open standards approval for social networking.
That said, I’m not sure how the ActivityPub protocol may be overhauled to support some of the solutions above. It is a whole different way of managing identity. It becomes this protocol vs that protocol. Yet there is a Nostr-ActivityPub bridge so maybe something is possible.
Reminds me a little bit of Tragedy of the commons.
Right? Stuff from the “old days” is still popular and usable. We can still email people, create private groups on WhatsApp/Signal/whatever to avoid algorithms, and subscribe to blogs by RSS (or email newsletter if unsupported, usually). In fact, it’s never been easier.
Just delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever and move on.