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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for the best solution winning but here's the perspective of a regular end user.

When I read about nostr I see code examples and cryptography charts.

When I read about Mastodon (fediverse) I just run docker-compose up and I'm in business. That is what made the fediverse breakthrough and nostr not.

It needs to be user friendly for both end users and sysadmins for it to catch on.

Also unrelated to all that, I'm kinda skeptical about any system that claims to be resistant to censorship because it will become a hotbed of racists and bigots online. On one hand certain parts of the fediverse take moderation too far, but on the other hand you can't have a platform with zero moderation. It would be chaos.

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This is a tech forum. We tend to enjoy discovering and exploring new technology that's alpha quality and not yet ready to hit the shelves, and maybe we'll help them get there.

Nostr is a couple years old. How old is Mastodon? Of course it's not grandma friendly yet. No one is trying to sell it to them just yet.

I don't get this common and frustrating criticism often posted on here for any new project and idea. Every major breakthrough has started as a buggy, half-arsed project with many shortcomings. Pointing that out is not very constructive.

Regular end user…. docker-compose? We have very different concepts of what a regular user is. Surely, generating a key pair must be infinitely more easy than setting up docker?

There are many perspectives on what is user friendly. What helps the docker case along is its accessibility and availability to people. A lot of people know about it, so a lot of people have played around with it enough to use it.

PKI is not on the same level of accessibility and availability as docker, not even close.

The proof is to simply look at what took off and what didn't. Yes this is a tech forum but it's also a startup forum, and startups take off because they're accessible to people. Same goes for nostr, it will take off when it becomes accessible to regular people.

And even that has many different aspects. If self-hosting is an important aspect, as fediverse nodes for example, then it must also be accessible to self-hosters. That is where docker-compose comes in for the fediverse.

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