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?

  • Hazematman@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    Very coincidental that you just posted this. I’ve been looking into p2p apps and Nostr caught my attention. Unfortunately like most p2p stuff it seems that most people using it are crypto affliated which is a big turn off.

    The more I looked at it though nostr didn’t seem that interesting to me as a protocol compared to other p2p protocols like ipfs, Yggdrasil, i2p. Manly because it still seems to centralize around relays and the effectively ended up being your server. From my understanding its easier to move from relay to another since you can publish to multiple relays and your identify is just a key pair so your ID is “portable”. The big thing I see from Nostr is a priority to build apps on top of their protocol, compared to the other p2p protocols.

    I think it would be neat if there was a non crypto affiliated social media platform built on top of a p2p protocol that did the following

    • Use key identify system so your ID is portable and not tied to a single identity server
    • All data is locally stored on your machine by default with the option to pin it to a server similar to the ipfs pinning servers
    • Since it p2p, built with the idea that your peer maybe offline and queue sharing posts until they are online. The pinning servers could also act as an always online client for you to store messages. Like a bouncer in IRC
    • No public feed, since it would be a moderation nightmare, you can only see what your followers post and what they reshare. Probably there would be feeds from trusted people you could subscribe to. This shared feeds could be a great way to build communities like in the fediverse
    • Built on a p2p protocol that handles thing like NAT punch through and peer connection so anyone’s device can act like a peer without needing some server to relay messages to them, or having to port forward on their home connection. Nostr doesn’t appear to do this, since it relies on all messages passing through (and hosted by) relay servers. So your own device can’t act as a peer on Nostr.

    These are the things that would make p2p social media more interesting to me than activitypub. Sadly as far as I can tell Nostr isn’t really this, and I’m pretty sure none of the other protocols I mentioned have build an app like this on top of them.

    • Cooper8@feddit.onlineOPEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      Sounds a bit like Plebbit, though that is more about P2P “communities/boards” that a user starts and others can post to, rather than a microblog type platform. Unfortunately it also has a strong association with Crypto communities as its founders come from that scene. It is built on IPFS.

      What you describe also has similiarities to Secure Scuttlebutt and its successor PZP , which are both unfortunately abandoned but layed a lot of groundwork for asynchronous encryption key based networks.