So, what exactly is Nostr and how is it different from the fediverse?
I randomly came across Nostr along with Tildes and Lemmy in my early hunt for THE reddit alternative to make a home. While I decided to make a home in lemmy, on the basis that its interface and structure isn’t that much different from reddit and apollo, curiosity keeps gnawing at me. And I just have to ask.
What exactly is Nostr and how is it different from the Fediverse? What are the pros and cons of each?
And if somehow both platforms mature to the point of mainstream, is an eventual bridge between them feasible? Something like what this site is attempting to do?
wouldn’t you say this would even out with more members coming in?
You're right. I'm not 100% sure, but I think there's like a wallet or some crypto payment thing built-in, but even with that, maybe normal people like us could use it. Crypto-bros might just be interested in decentralized stuff, which is good.
Nostr is a Twitter alternative that's decentralized, not a Reddit alternative.
Nostr is not P2P. Its a broadcast protocol. Nostr is pub/sub, distributed, decentralized; while others such as Matrix,mastodon, bluesky are federated and are somewhat closed than nostr.
No, they (Nostr) are not doing ActivityPub. ActivityPub requires server-to-server communication, which Nostr does not have. They only have client-server communication. And the actual protocol is different to ActivityPub, all the way from the transport (which uses WebSockets rather than HTTP REST) to the schemas of the objects being passed. They also rely much more heavily on public key cryptography.
Nostr takes decentralization too far to be practical for a wide audience IMO. The relay model is even more abstract than Mastodon instances (which can at least be analogized to e-mail hosts) and the public/private key system is both inaccessible (copy/paste a key or look people up in a directory-- like a phone book! Friend codes on steroids) and unforgiving (no password resets). Like much of crypto, there are interesting ideas that don't seem practical in actual use. Curious if it pans out. (https://kbin.social/search?q=nostr)