makeasnek

It's just a different protocol that makes different trade-offs, so it can't use AP protocol. Nostr is an underlying protocol in the same way that AP is, so you can build twitter clones, reddit clones, video streaming services, etc on top of it just like you can with AP.

Nostr's key difference IMO is where your identity lives, and nostr decided not to have it tied to a particular instance. AP decided to have it tied to an instance, that is a pretty fundamental part of the AP protocol and is the same way e-mail works.

Having your identity being tied to an instance is not great UX imo. Bans happen, not always for great reasons. Instances die or close up shop. Having to re-do all your subscriptions, losing your comment history, etc just because your smaller instance closes is pretty annoying and pushes people to more stable, centralized, large instances.

This is why I prefer nostr over mastodon, it's basically the same in every key way except that your identity is not tied to your instance. I believe nostr devs are working on a reddit clone like lemmy or kbin, but it's not done yet. Their twitter/mastodon clone is great though.

Yeah absolutely. I'm sure these things will get worked out in time, I'm just glad we're moving in the direction of federation and decentralization.

I really expected the crypto bro problem to be much worse than it was, perhaps it was worse before, or maybe it has something to do with which instances I'm connected to or the auto-filter? Crypto stuff often shows in "trending" for me, but has never ended up in my feed as a dm, reply, etc.

The "trending" functionality in both mastodon and nostr has been pretty lackluster imo, it's always like "did you know FIVE WHOLE PEOPLE tweeted about #caturday". I imagine it works well on some instances, but getting a "trending across instances" metric seems like a software engineering problem neither platform has solved well yet.

I post about !boinc@sopuli.xyz a bunch on mastodon hopefully to get some excitement from astrophysics folks, there's tons of cool boinc projects doing astrophysics research. Science runs on twitter, and many scientists are desperately searching for an alternative, imo it's only a matter of time before they all end up on mastodon or nostr.

Love Dr Becky and would love to see her join fediverse. Might be worth dropping a comment on one of her videos

This is mentioned in "other" it's easy to miss. Both of these services essentially do the same thing different ways.

Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc are all built on top of activity pub which is the underlying protocol. It's easy to understand because each "use case" of this underlying protocol has a different name. Mastodon isn't Lemmy and Lemmy isn't Kbin but they can all talk to each other to some degree.

In Nostr's case, the main "use case" is tweet-like functionality but there are other functionalities like streaming video, but they're all called "nostr" which is a bit confusing. Nostr's tweeting interface is built on the underlying protocol called nostr which is a bit confusing.

At the end of the day, both platforms are essentially using the same underlying concept which is "we have one base protocol for passing messages around and then specific use cases like twitter clones or reddit clones are built on top of it"

Nope. In terms of user diversity and people I'm interested in, Mastodon is winning hands down.

Glad you liked it :)

Each federate within themselves but they don't federate between each other. But there are "bridge" type services you can use, for example, if you want to follow a mastodon user or an RSS feed on nostr or vice versa, it's just that they're bolted on after the fact as opposed to being smoothly integrated with the rest of the protocol. Like having one bot which automatically re-tweets stuff from one platform to another.

!boinc@sopuli.xyz is the final level. Using your Pi to cure cancer and identify asteroids

Love seeing content like this, just regular people talking about why Linux works for them. Kudos, enjoyed the post!