The past few days, I have been heavily experimenting with Nostr as another alternative to centralized services. And, I am honestly impressed by just how good it is. The protocol is quite simple and works very fast.
However, the almost constant bugging of the integration with idontcarecoins is a little annoying. Easy to ignore, but still always there.
This is developed by people completely oblivious to the fact that social networking is primarily not a technical but a social problem. Thus to be honest: complete waste of time. But I guess if you want to communicate with a lot of crypto-coin scammers it is a good solution right now /s
My biggest gripe with cryptobros is that they have built some actually good tech; like IPFS.
But then they ruin it with their coins. Filecoin, seriously?...
That said, the sheer protocol of Nostr is actually damn impressive. But man is it verbose (but not as stepp as I thought) to get into... Still, a social network is made and broken by its community. At present, Nostr is the latter.
The community is better in the Fediverse. I like the fact that posts are signed by a private key. makes accounts more portable. Mastodon has better mobile apps.
Even more complicated than Mastodon and feels really janky. Seems like it's likely to always be niche. Also full of cryptobros whenever I've loaded it up again.
It is basically very similar in concept, just without the baggage of inconvenience which comes with crypto coins.
And there is also the DAT protocol, which again is assimilable to IPFS just without the coins, but it seems it really never took off, https://dat-ecosystem.org/
I guess coins scams is really what only can sustain these projects then :/
This is the first I'm hearing of it. What function does it serve? I mean, what kind of social media platform is it? Do you follow topics, or people? Or both? Is it for sharing images or text or...? I did a brief review of the Nostr website, but will admit I didn't dig too deep.
Here's a brief: Instead of tweeting to one server, you tweet to many. When you and another person share the same server, they see you. Those servers (relays) can also be broadcasting your messages to other relays, so you might end up indirectly sharing servers as well. Because there are so many servers that potentially sync data, it is supposed to be "uncensorable". Each user is identified by a public key, and signs their message with a private key.
As for the SN aspect; you follow people. Hence the Twitter comparison.
Now what I did not mention on purpose: You can do microtransactions in bitcoins. And if you read that and thought "oh god no" - then yeah, exactly. xD