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Comment by janandonly | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand why people want to switch over from Twitter to Mastodon while it carries similar problems as the blue platform:

1. Instead of being blocked or shadowbanned by Elon Musk, you can now be blocked or shadowbanned by the Mastodon instance admin. 2. Making connections with other Mastodon instances is non-trivial. 3. Exporting your data and connections is not supported on all Mastodon instances.

Why aren't more people switch over to Nostr? I know Nostr has seen “meteoric” growth [1] and it's easy to find your old twitter contracts again [2] but somehow Hacker News is very quiet about this open protocol and all the various clients and implementations [3].

[1]. https://stats.nostr.band/

[2]. By using tools like https://www.nostr.directory/

[3]. https://nostr.how/

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What is it with crypto people and contradictory statements:

--- start quotes ---

truly censorship resistant and decentralized social media platforms

Relays are like the backend servers for Nostr. They allow Nostr clients to send them messages, and they may (or may not) store those messages and broadcast those messages

if you notice that your Nostr client feels slow, it's most likely due to the relays that you're using. It might be worth adding a few more relays (or removing a few) to your client.

most people expect that paid relays will be the norm in the future.

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I don't want to be on a platform that doesn't have a mod that I trust and will do most of the dirty work for me. I want to have fun, not extra work.

You can have a mod on Nostr, basically by only subscribing to servers operated by such mods.

In Nostr, users multi-post their tweets to “relay servers”, and relay servers push it to you. Follow actions are a type of tweets as well so all relays can know who you are following. You can also have as many relays as you want.

Isn’t it going to waste a lot of bandwidth, you may wonder. It does!

Huge benefit of Nostr architecture is that your identity is based on your generated private key and optionally a DNS name you happen to own, so any server operators’ opinions about you won’t affect your identity.

This happens a lot with existing platforms, not limited to Twitter. “Yesterday evening I took pictures of gorgeous Egyptian sand hills, and since this morning Google left me saying I violated them, now even the embassy says they can’t verify my nationality status” - can’t happen on Nostr.

> know Nostr has seen “meteoric” growth [1] and it's easy to find your old twitter contracts again

I used the tool to find my Twitter followers on Nostr and of the ~300 people I follow a grand total of one, Jack Dorsey, is using Nostr. He's apparently the second most followed account and gets about 90 likes on his posts.

Tbh the reason nobody talks about it is probably because barely anyone's using it. The global feed is just one guy spamming JSON dumps

> Integrated with lightning, Nostr enables new value-for-value business models that have the potential to be more fair.

I don't understand this.

They should've capitalized Lightning, probably referring to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

The "value-for-value business models that have the potential to be more fair" is the bewildering part.

Value-for-value is a buzzword for crypto based micropayments and tipping.

i just want to follow interesting people on a platform that isn't trying to manipulate my emotions to farm engagement. mastodon wins on the latter but loses on the former.

i wouldn't mind if substack notes took off, i'm willing to pay for what i'm looking for.

If a social network has no ability for moderation of any sort, it's gonna be DOA.

The issue with being unmoderatable is that it means that you will wind up with a network dominated by the worst people. In general, people don't like to hang out on a website with literal (or euphemistic) nazis. If there isn't a way to prevent people from having to deal with that, they're not going to go to your site/service.

Sure, mastodon is moderated on a per-instance basis, but you can always just move instances. If you consistently cannot find an instance that lets you stay, that's likely more of a indictment of you then mastodon.

That is just a narrative that Mastodon instance operators insists to appease Apple/Google authoritarianism, and also literal German/French authorities, not what actually matters.

> but you can always just move instances.

It's never "just".

It's relatively easy. My personal instance is my third account overall. The others transferred my followers and setup a redirect.

Nostr has scalability and some spam problems. I agree with many of your points but it’s a bit too rough for a “general availability” in its current form.

> 1. Instead of being blocked or shadowbanned by Elon Musk, you can now be blocked or shadowbanned by the Mastodon instance admin

Don't pick random instances, get together with friends and family on a community-owned instance. Or run your own. The whole point of getting away from Twitter is to own the means of communication.

You can also get blocked or shadowbanned by nostr relays, and the incentives to run a relay are even worse than for Mastodon

> 2. Making connections with other Mastodon instances is non-trivial.

Lies, there is literally nothing to do to connect to other instances. Subscribe to an account there and you're plugged.

> 3. Exporting your data and connections is not supported on all Mastodon instances.

Goes back to point 1: don't go to a generic universal instance.

Why so much FUD ? Why the hate ? ActivityPub has real issues, but those are not it (in fact, it's a pretty good indication that you haven't used the network to know what you're talking about). Just like nostr has issues, but if we're going to ditch Twitter and centralized communications, why lie ?

> get together with friends and family on a community-owned instance

Do you think if I had friends that I would be on social media?

My friends and family are more likely to already have Facebook or Discord, and are unlikely to successfully navigate Mastodon onboarding even if it made sense for that use case.

I hate Facebook but Discord is already fulfilling the role of a common space.

> and are unlikely to successfully navigate Mastodon onboarding

That's the point: take your community with you on your own instance and recreate your AFK network inside computers. Don't let them go through the hassle of choosing an instance, do it for them if you know how it works.

> Don't pick random instances, get together with friends and family on a community-owned instance.

That isn't a social media, that's a mailing list. Won't even have to be on the Internet, you can put up a physical bulletin board and the result would be the same. Might as well drive to their places with packs of cans in the back. Discord/Mattermost works too.

> Why so much FUD ? Why the hate ?

It's not FUD or hate or exaggerated non-issue when a ton of instances are blacklisting the very top second and third and some bunch of top 20 instances. I understand that getting held responsible for users' legal responsibilities is naturally never worth Gargron's time, but if everyone has to to justify blocking pawoo.net(850k users), mstdn.jp(350k) and misskey.io(150k), totaling >17% of total ActivityPub population(7900k), there is clearly a family of elephants in the room.

> Instead of being blocked or shadowbanned by Elon Musk, you can now be blocked or shadowbanned by the Mastodon instance admin.

I'm the admin on mine.

> Making connections with other Mastodon instances is non-trivial.

It's been entirely automatic for me?

> Exporting your data and connections is not supported on all Mastodon instances.

Pick accordingly?

My plan is actually to set up a mastodon instance on my own domain exclusively for myself, and I will be the only user. From what I can see, people from other mastodon instances will still be able to interact with me and my posts?. Is that your experience?

Yes. That's my setup as well.

Only downside is the "local" timeline is... pretty empty. You won't find new people to follow in there, but you can always browse other interesting servers' local timelines if you're searching for more.

I think lots of people want some moderation, which Nostr makes impossible.

Sure, I don't like Elon running it, but I'd like somebody keeping the Nazis out. With Mastodon, you can pick a server that fits your moderation preferences.

It also doesn't help that the current Nostr audience is a very cryptocurrency-focused crowd, which a lot of people (myself included) find yucky.

There's one really big and important (for me) difference - Elon Musk doesn't run Mastodon. I just don't want to use a product he's associated with.

The other one is... all the people I want to follow stopped posting on Twitter and moved to Mastodon. Network effects work.

I wish that was the case for me... I look back at twitter and they're tweeting like "lalalala nothin to see here, just ignore elon klol?"

Meanwhile maybe 10% did make the move to mastodon and I followed them instantly. The problem? All they talk about is twitter.

Easy enough to set up a filter on Mastodon to hide all mentions of Twitter.

> Why aren't more people switch over to Nostr? I know Nostr has seen “meteoric” growth [1] and it's easy to find your old twitter contracts again [2] but somehow Hacker News is very quiet about this open protocol and all the various clients and implementations [3].

It seems that lots here need a lesson about how network effects work in order to understand why little to no one is interested in moving to such niche social networks which appeal to only weird techies, furry garbage or crypto zealots and bitcoin maximalists.

Both are hopelessly utopian and don't even have a slither of a chance in beginning to challenge Twitter. Nostr might be too early to tell but I already don't like where it's going with its over ecclesiastical preaching of bitcoin. But we have given Mastodon 7 years, and that is enough time to conclude that it has failed to challenge Twitter or even take off.

From my perspective Mastodon has clearly took off. My bubble already has much daily fresh content.

Well that proves my point. Not only one tiny anecdote isn't evidence or a network effect, it is mostly techies continuing to complain about Twitter that are there, not those who don't care about technology, that is still using Twitter; in the hundreds of millions. Daily.

Even attempting to bring up the daily number of users on Mastodon after 7 years would be extremely painful to mention since Twitter still remains unchallenged.

This is before even mentioning the friction of 'Choosing an instance', already being the first barrier to entry being a failure for the user.

I don't really understand what you mean by 'challenging twitter' in this context. Why does the number of DAU matter? In what way are Mastodon and Twitter competing? Twitter is a business that needs to make money to survive. Mastodon is a federated network of services run by individuals and groups under a variety of arrangements.

I've been on Twitter since the first year. I watched it grow and change for the good and bad. I find I use mastodon far more these days. Pretty much daily. Why? The people I want to interact with are on Mastodon discussing the topics I want to discuss.

For me there is simply no comparison anymore. Mastodon wins hands down because: 1. signal to noise ratio is 1000x better and 2. the responses to my posts are high quality, faster, and 10x more than I get on Twitter (where I have 10x the followers).

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