I’ve been using mastodon for a month or two now. I never used twitter but thought I’d try it out for fun since I love this new fediverse experiment.
Then my mastodon instance started experiencing some downtime and I wondered what happens in this scenario. It seems if the goal is to have lots of smaller instances and decentralize social media, then instances, particularly those not run a big companies (who can reliably fund things for years on end and sell ad space on their platforms), will come and go and users will lose their identity or home base each time this happens along with all their followers and their connection to the wider social graph. This seems not great.
It seems that nostr might actually be a fix for this. In nostr:
- You publish to multiple relays (essentially instances) and anybody from any relay can follow you.
- Your messages are signed by your key so you can prove they are authentic.
- If your relay goes down, people can still follow you via other relays
- You can change between relays without losing your identity. Your post history and followers follow you, not yourusername@relay.com.
Doing some reading, it seems people’s main criticisms of nostr are:
- Interface isn’t as pretty. Looks like this has come leaps and bounds in the past six months but of course could always use more work
- Populated by crypto bros. This seems like not an issue long-term, there’s plenty of crypto bros on mastodon, you can just not follow them if you don’t want to see them. The idea that you can “tip” with a tweet or whatever nostr’s term for that is seems pretty interesting.
Basically, at a protocol level, nostr seems better in some important ways and the cons don’t seem protocol related but userbase and UI related.
What am I missing on the pros/cons list? Anybody got experiences to share?
It seems there would be some easy-to-implement solutions to this problem. Like having a link to an alternate account in every mastodon profile so that if your server does suddenly disappear or if a single instance bans you, your followers can seamlessly follow you to a new server. It doesn’t solve the issue of migrating all your content or your followees though, but perhaps that’s just a matter of regularly backing those things up somehow. Instances could automatically designate a “failover” instance run by another party and could automate this function as part of the sign-up process so users only had to register once.
My understanding is that in nostr, you run the same risk of “relay suddenly disappears” if you only have your content on a single relay. You don’t lose followers but you may lose people you follow. Or perhaps that is stored at the client level and not the relay level? idk
Hubzilla (zot protocol) has something like that i.e. accounts on multiple servers are synchronized. That works quite well but does not translate well to the AP model of domain linked identities.