I have seen some critical views on Nostr as a part of decentralized network discussions, but most seem to be focused on culture not function.
What are the functional / protocol differences that make you prefer ActivityPub over Nostr?
I have seen some critical views on Nostr as a part of decentralized network discussions, but most seem to be focused on culture not function.
What are the functional / protocol differences that make you prefer ActivityPub over Nostr?
Compulsory legal compliance still exists: it’s the free, open internet. Did you know laws existed before, too?
Don’t know about that. I think the brief descriptions on websites like nostr.com did a good enough job: there’s not much to get.
It’s a protocol, not a platform. There’s no global moderation/censorship just like there isn’t on the whole internet. Relay operators have full discretion over the content available on their relays: if they want to do more than the bare minimum, they can. Clients are free to subscribe to other relays or multiple. It’s technically free association rather than anti-moderation.
A user can choose to see only the content of followed users: that should eliminate most unwanted content. Apart from that, there’s no perfect moderation solution even on centralized platforms, so there isn’t here.
Client-side filtering remains the best approach for those who care. It doesn’t have to be manual as I mentioned before.
I recall earlier days of the internet when no one gave a fuck about this, and internet rage was just entertaining, easily ignored nonsense. Then it became eternal summer, and tightass n00bs started acting like moderating the entire internet & foisting their dumbass expectations on everyone made perfect sense without ever having to learn the zen of not giving a fuck. That was the start of when it all turned to shit.
I think you will find that most forums before Digg and Reddit did have rules. There is some revisionism from muh free speech types that seek to redefine them as free speech zones, when many were not.
Moreover, many clients and apps that were had much smaller userbases.
The point about the CP here is that you are saying that it would remain technically on the systems you are referring to.
My understanding is that the content is essentially self-hosted, so content removed from relays still exists on the posting user’s client and can be accessed directly, just like a website sending out RSS. So saying it “still exist on the network” is technically true, but only in the same way that you would say that about say bittorrent or the open web. What people host/post is present raw, what is amplified/“curated”/relayed is filtered. Client settings/config sets default and custom user content interaction, like a browser which can have adblock or not.
In principle, this seems like a decent solution, but I can see why different users prefer different protocols, differing to moderation takes a burden off of the user to vet inbound content. The same can be achieved via relays but the culture of “curation” seems weaker because the pressure from the userbase is lower to optimize it, as users are not solely reliant on any one relays. An odd network effect, but a truly invested curation/admin team could just as easily build a well “curated” relay as a well moderated instance.