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To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your identity is tied to a server. Yes you can port it, but it’s a hassle. That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.

This also means your reach and what you see depends on your choice of server. I very much don’t want that.

It’s also confusing to non-technical people. Join Mastodon! But which one? How do I pick one?

Technically speaking, Nostr is better. Your identity is a key. Servers are just dumb relays.

Unfortunately it seems to be nothing but crypto bros talking about crypto, or was last time I checked. Nobody uses it.

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> That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.

Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little server, to the point that it doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem. I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but close-enough.

>everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little serve

Only if it's simple for the average person

And only until an admin of a big sever dislikes something you say and adds your server to the censorship list on fediseer.

> To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your identity is tied to a server

In contrast to Instagram, Facebook and co?

A handful of servers vs thousands.

Are you on Instagram?" is easy to understand for someone not on it; they search for "Instagram", install the client app, sign up and done.

"Are you on Mastodon?" doesn't work the same way as they would need to pick a server to sign up against, which seems like an important decision (what happens if I pick wrong? Do I have to pick the same server my friend has? And so on?).

> Are you on Instagram?

> Are you on Mastodon?

In both cases, you have to share the user handle, which is just a bit longer in the latter case.

> what happens if I pick wrong?

You move to another server.

> Do I have to pick the same server my friend has?

No.

You and I both know the answers to those questions; my point is that the average non-technical user does not and this presents significant extra friction that Instagram doesn't have.

(this kind of attitude of asserting technical superiority and blaming non-tech users for not understanding it and not willing to bother figuring it out is exactly why the free/libre software movement achieved zero impact with non-technical users; you have to meet your users where they are... or a competitor will happily do so.)

If you're not being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, you are welcome to search my username and "mastodon"/"fediverse" to see my thoughts on it in more detail and why it will never be a serious competitor to mainstream social media platforms. Happy to engage with serious arguments.

To me it just looks like some kind of fear of a new thing, because technically there is nothing really complicated about Mastodon. Still, I do understand that switching to a new platform corresponds to some non-negligible effort and one would have to substantiate it with sufficient benefits. We, technical people, should not feel superior but explain that the benefits are stronger than the downsides and switching is worth it in the long term, especially due to the ongoing enshittification of all popular for-profit platform managed by megacorps.

Agreed, nostr makes a lot of sense when you read about it and then you go there... Once.

Moving to another mastodon instance is simple. It takes 2-3 clicks and off you go. I think what you say was probably true in the past, but today, nothing could be simpler than taking your stuff to another instance.

Just to say that I'm using NOSTR on my apps, most people using those apps don't even know about NOSTR at all but they all enjoy the quick login procedure without emails nor phones.

Any libraries you recommend? Do you host a dedicated relay for your own apps?

I've tried some of the libraries for Java, didn't like the way the author programmed them so just ended up using the most relevant part which was the NPUB/NSEC key pair generation and the function to verify signatures on the JSON messages.

The rest of the protocol isn't difficult since you basically just need to send JSON back and forth. The advanced options are complex but they're basically exotic cases for the most part.

I've enjoyed NOSTR a lot but feel that the definition of "relay" has been lost in recent times and NOSTR relays are today a set of huge servers that host data and act as databases, rather than the original goal of just connecting people in P2P style.

For my apps I'm developing a platform where relays go back to the original definition of "relay" and devices connect to each relay as a connecting bridge to engage in P2P between themselves using webRTC and bluetooth.

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