makeasnek

Sounds like somebody gave you some incorrect information re: banning.

• You don't need a w3c standard to have a protocol that is open source and used globally, it's just one way to go about that. You can also have standards which are not made through w3c but are made through some other governance body, or you can have standards where the standard just kind of evolves from a bunch of different devs trying different versions of things until there's one main way which floats to the top since everybody prefers it. Nostr has the NIP (Nostr improvement proposal) process which has been used to make standards for everything from video streaming to calendar events/invites.
• Relays on nostr, which are the equivalent to instances in ActivityPub/mastodon/lemmy can set their own moderation policies, defederate from other relays, etc all the same as in ActivityPub. The moderation abilities are the same. This means relays can choose what content they allow and ban users/topics/content from other relays, etc. The key difference is that you are by default connected to multiple relays. So if your relay blocks a user you really want to follow, you can keep following that user and see them in your feed, they just don't show up for other users on that relay. If a relay blocks you, you can't post content to that relay. So you get the best of both worlds: relays have curated, moderated public squares with trending hashtags and tweets while not reducing your ability to choose who to follow and who can follow you.
• Identity portability is another key feature: if your instance goes down, you don't lose all your DMs, followers, etc.

Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon (fedi) if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

Good for who? Where does value move when your currency is reduced in value by an expansion in the supply? To regular people? No. Lower and middle class people are the ones who have the most cash, they have a higher ratio of cash to net worth than rich people who can put their money into assets. They have an emergency fund. They are saving up to become property owners.

Humanity survived and grew total economic output for millennia before inflationary paper currency came around. Inflationary paper currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm not saying we should go back to the gold standard, but that ended in 1971. That's pretty recent.

If you live in a hyperinflation environment, you will spend your money on anything because it's better than holding onto that money and see it become worthless. It might seem silly to own 12 blenders, but buying yet another blender is a better investment than simply sitting on your money for a month in Turkey. At least a blender can blend and maybe be re-sold at a later date. That effect still happens in mildly inflationary economies: we are incentivized to buy goods and services we don't need because the alternative is just slowly watching our money lose value. This is not a great incentive to have baked into our financial system when we live on a planet with finite resources.

On the other hand, if your money is expected to retain or gain value, somebody has to really convince you to part with it. Does that mean products are built to last? Built more repairable or sustainable? Perhaps. You will still buy things of course, everybody needs stuff, but at least the incentive is trending in the right direction instead of towards needless consumption.

What if:

• Our government didn't have the ability to print money? What if going to war meant raising taxes?
• We took the control of the money supply out of their hands and instead used free and open source software to create money and move it around?
• Our economy wasn't predicated on a target 2-3% inflation rate? What if you were not incentivized to spend your money because it's just losing value every day you don't spend it? How might our consumption/production patterns change? How might that impact sustainability?
• The government couldn't move money from the 99% to the 1% every time a bank needed to be bailed out? What if they didn't print away all the value of money you earned? What if when the economy grew, the value of your money increased just as it would naturally if somebody wasn't printing away the difference?

How might the world look different?

Don't try openshot next, it's even worse.

It's baked in pretty deep to the protocol and to the concept of instances. This would be like making an e-mail address that's portable between e-mail servers. Maybe AP can pull this off, but it's going to be quite a change.

Relays store:

• Content posted by users connected to their relay
• Content posted by users of other relays that their relay is connected to

"Accounts" are private/public keypairs. You don't have a username/password at a specific instance, you have a public/private keypair you can use to authenticate your identity. It's like your name vs an e-mail address/username. An e-mail address is an account you have at a specific entity, this is like an activitypub username user@lemmy.ml. Your name isn't tied to a specific instance or even a single government database (since you can be identified by name in databases of multiple governments), it's just your identity. Your key in nostr works just like an identity or name in that sense.

But then what is a relay? See if a relay doesn’t hold an account and cannot ban/moderate directly content they serve then what’s exactly happening?

A relay is like an instance in AP. It hosts content and relays content from other relays according to its own moderation policies. The difference in nostr is that most users are usually connected to multiple relays, whereas an AP a user is connected to one 'instance' and their instance connects to other instances.

I also wonder if it’s a bit of a legal minefield. See I’m running mbin here. I get content from many other mbin/kbin/lemmy instances. Usually they have pretty good moderation and content is removed on my instance too. But, if someone raises a legal complaint with me directly, I’m required to act on that and moderate on my own instance. Which I can do. It seems like you’re suggesting that’s not directly possible with nostr?

This works identically in nostr. You as a relay admin can block/delete content on your relay and set whatever moderation policies you like. You can also de-federate from other relays if they have poor moderation.

Interesting hadn't heard about this thanks for the link!

Except that ActivityPub and Nostr's moderation functionality is basically identical. Relay/instance operators can block users, filter content, set their own moderation policies, and defederate from other instances with weak moderation policies. The difference is that if your instance admin blocks you from following somebody you want to on AP, you need to make a new account at a new instance and check that account seperately. If your instance admin does that in nostr, it's just a matter of adding another relay to your list and now you can keep following/being followed by/DMing that person. It's the best of both worlds: relays can set their own moderation policies and cultivate a certain vibe, users and their identities are not locked in to the moderation policies of the instance(s) they are connected to.

Protocol wise, you can absolutely use a portable identity with ActivityPub. Every user has a key pair that us used to sign and verify their posts, and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to use the same key for multiple servers. Nobody actually implements a scheme like that but you could use keys instead of ActivityPub usernames to label accounts, if you wanted to. You could even use multiple servers the same way nostr uses multiple relays!

You can do this, but your account is still tied to the instance. If somebody sends a DM or tweet to skullgiver@lemmy.ml but lemmy.ml no longer exists, all the public keys in the world don't solve that problem. In nostr, tweets and DMs are directed at a key, not at a user at a particular relay.

Nostr does all that too.