This is our 3rd quarterly update on which platforms are growing, new entries such as #BlueSky, #Substack Notes, #Nostr & all public data on Meta's #project92
Includes latest on the #RedditMigration,
New polling, new posting data & more.
Post from @rabble on why he's chosen to use #Nostr and not #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse. He makes some compelling points. Personally I am not too worried about the server admin parts of his argument (I have enough control, even if I don't control the server), but I agree that this isn't ideal:
A rant about social protocols Introduction
Recently, I read an article that talked about that someone, tried to do a new platform called “Content Nation”. This is a German platform that allows people to write content (to be honest, I don’t really know what it does.) and publish it. And recently, the creators tried to implement the ActivityPub protocol. They did so by using the official documentation provided by @w3c.
The problem was that the last time the official documentation was updated, was in 23 January 2018. So, this means that a lot of new standards that other platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, etc... use are not written in there. But this isn’t the fault of the service developers, this is the fault of the W3C that hasn’t been an update to the protocol officially to support the new standards in the industry such as Webfinger, SharedInbox, Privacy Scopes, and Opt-Out for Search…
The thing, is that this led to a lot of people thinking that this site was some kind of scraper and started making the crawler crash or, even worse, someone tried to load CP inside the platform. BlueSky
Recently, BlueSky opened its AT protocol for everyone to use and federate, due to this, there has been a bit of a discussion inside these platforms. This made me think, why did BlueSky feel the necessity to make another protocol? If there is one already, why do we need another one that competes, wasn’t the objective of protocols to allow interoperability?
So, I did a bit of digging and I found two things. The first one is that they wanted so solve a few things that AP does not support officially (here are the main points, not all of them):
Account portability. A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.
Algorithmic choice. Algorithms dictate what we see and who we can reach. We must have control over our algorithms if we're going to trust in our online spaces. The AT Protocol includes an open algorithms mode so users have more control over their experience.
A lot of these problems are already present on ActivityPub for a long time. The account portability of ActivityPub let’s say it’s not intuitive. You have to do a lot of things and even then, there are some things like the posts that you make or the favourites that don’t transfer (in the case of favourites you need to transfer them manually, the same for blocks and mutes).
Also, right now 99% if not all software that uses ActivityPub, does not have an algorithm that orders content for you to see, but shows you everything in chronological order (I don’t know if its intentional or if it’s a limit of AP) and the only thing you have to discover topics is trough hashtags that maybe someone forgot to tag.
Furthermore, not to mention that on ActivityPub, you are at the mercy of the server moderators, so this means that if you know someone that is on an instance that is blocked by yours, you won’t be able to talk to them unless you change the instance, which in a way it’s not very decentralized. The other protocols
By doing research, I realized that there are a lot of other protocols (for example Nostr) that have its own implementation of things maybe there are some that are bridged and other not.
Such protocols have different features, for example Nostr allows you to suggest content edit to other people’s posts, move your content easily, etc. How can we solve this?
First, we have to know why all these other companies make their own. I must say, that most of them probably do because AP does not allow customization of posts or the adding of new features for everyone and the fact that it’s not been updated for 6 whole years makes matters worse.
What the developers want, is a protocol that lets them create wherever they want and add everything the want, for example the edit thing that I said the Nostr supports, the only way to add it to AP, would be or only on your software or find another software that is willing to implement that feature, the rest of the market is left behind as well as the users that depending on what it is, they don’t understand.
My solution to this problem would be to add some kind of per user plugin system directly to the AP that allows for devs to implement add-ons that do with the JSON strings that add buttons or scripts at least to send and receive data. As well as to add some kind of CSS support for the posts and profiles. Of course, the point of these is that if you make a platform, and you are the only one using these characteristics, well… but in case that everybody wants to use it and everybody makes their own plugins it would be chaos.
For this, the solution I proposed would be like something you add while the W3C updates the protocol to support a very popular feature. #socialprotocols#nostr#activitypub#W3C#ATprotocol#rant#blogpost#ContentNation
ActivityPub was not invented in 2018, in fact it has a history of multiple protocol iterations since 2008 including OpenMicroBlogging and OStatus.
2010 another company named diaspora raised $200k to create another federated protocol. In 2018 #diaspora peaked at 1 Mio. users with 200 federated servers. Then the core dev decided to ignore #ActivityPub. That was the end.
Lets see how #Bluesky and #Nostr inventing the wheel again.
Today is the first day I thought that the #nostr#bluesky model might be a better way to build a decentralized social network. Because seemingly smart and honest people told me those protocols make using one profile for lots of different services much simpler and automatic than #ActivityPub. I still have serious questions re how they seem more likely to remain more centralized via relays and unlikely to do moderation well enough, but we haven't really solved those here yet either. #fediforum
Took a quick peek at #nostr to see what’s going on over there. First post was the main developer saying:
“I cannot understand why people love animals so much they want them living inside their houses.”
My brother in christ, if you have this much trouble relating to such basic human behaviour, maybe you’re not the perfect person to make design decisions that affect an entire social network lmao
Last week i gave a quick 6 minute talk about #Nostr and the #Fediverse at the Fediforum online conference. A recording of the talk is now online. Apologies for any errors or bumbling of the presentation, it was 4am.
In the breakout session later a lot of people were excited about what Nostr can do and they were envious of our apps, interoperability, and ability to monetize. They were held back by the fact that, for them, they've got a way of grouping a community based on a server with a focus on the local timeline, and they felt the instance way of managing behavior worked for them. I, like most folks here, think the coupling of identity, content, with trust and safety in a single instance is fundamentally broken. It's the HOA problem. What stuck out at me was if we could provide an alternative to HOA server admins, that helped bring users together in a community and also let them opt in to a moderation / trust and safety system, they'd be interested in Nostr as an alternative to the ActivityPub based fediverse.
Folks: #Twitter is owned by a horrible new billionaire… Forget the #fediverse, let’s use #Bluesky & #Nostr by the billionaire who created Twitter instead.
Meanwhile…
‘When a Twitter user commented there was “not a chance the DNC allows him to be nominated,” Dorsey replied, "Even more reason.” He later added that the DNC “seems more irrelevant by the day” and wrote “end of an empire,” to which Tesla CEO and current Twitter owner Elon Musk replied with two fire emoji.’
If I am ever feeling imposter syndrome and start doubting my ability to write a protocol, I can always take a look at #Nostr , whose protocol is just this, a vague example of some JSON message object, and then a zillion nonbinding "enhancement possibilities" with no pretense at consistency.
idk why people are excited about this (ok, i do, everything in cryptobro universe is like this), it's literally just a traditional client-server architecture with the phrase "censorship resilient" stapled on top of it.
It would appear that if you don’t endlessly talk about Bitcoin, on #Nostr no one will communicate with you. Not even one person. Nothing. Not a sausage.
New job opening at Bluesky (part-time; multiple positions available).
“Looking for useful idiots to legitimize us so we can achieve network effects before we screw over our user base.
Right candidate can state ‘I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt’ in public with a straight face in full knowledge that we’re a Silicon Valley outfit backed by the founder of Twitter.
Openvibe now fully supports both Nostr and Mastodon protocols! 🌐📲
Experience seamless crossposting and a unified timeline for all your social interactions 🐙
#blusky - folks, I didn't get the point. Why it is still on invitation only? Is it a decentralized and open social network, or what?
Well, I am happy to see that identity is based on DID. It is a big benefit over #nostr, but your repositories - why is it so complex with so much of reinventing the wheel? If you use iplds you don't need a lexicon.
I still didn't get an architecture is it relays or federated servers?
Habe nach dem Weggang von Jack Dorsey von BlueSky das erste Mal bewusst vom dezentralen Social Network #Nostr gelesen. Ich bin ja immer neugierig auf neue Protokolle und Plattformen, aber Nostr scheint sich extrem in der Crypto/FreedomOfSpeech-Ecke zu positionieren und es ist da gar nicht zu erwarten, dass es angenehme Ecken gibt, oder sehe ich das falsch?