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> But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic Jack linked to nostr which trie
by 323 4y ago
> But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic
Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems:
https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768 https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768
> The problem with Mastodon and similar programs:
- User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;
- Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers;
- Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost);
- There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out;
- Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;
- It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often;
- For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-of-how-it-works-if-you-dont-plan-to-read-anything-else https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o...
- r721 4y agoPrevious HN discussions of Nostr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)
- vidarh 4y agoYou can easily achieve the same with ActivityPub relays and a few small tweaks - if this turns out to actually.be useful it'd be easy to provide gatewaying relays for those who care.
- hk__2 4y agohttps://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr > How do I find people to follow? > > First, you must know them and get their public key somehow And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follow. This tends to be abused by spamers, but it’s a great way to follow what’s going on at large events or find stuff related to some topic.
- gr__or 4y agoYou can follow hashtags on Mastodon, it's been added ~3 weeks ago: https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-follow-a-hashtag-on-mastodon/ https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-follow-a-hashtag-on-mastodon/
- kornhole 4y agoYou can follow hashtags on Mastodon. There are many discovery options but they are all pull rather than pushed into your feed. They are under development. Feditrends.com fedi.directory trunk...
- 323 4y agoYou can implement search on top of crypto hashes. This is how decentralized P2P file networks like Kad worked. The discovery doesn't need to be at protocol level. You can have some servers following large number of accounts, analyze the feed, create a "trending" list and publish that under their own account that you follow. Then you can have second level "trending" servers which aggregate over first level ones if you want even more "trendiness"
- leesalminen 4y agoIt makes sense to me to take content discovery out of the protocol. This allows different apps on the same network to create different mechanisms for discovery. Some may want a pure chronological view of posts from people the follow with no algorithm, some may want pure algos a la TikTok. It seems like the nostr protocol allows for all of this. Users can decide their experience by downloading different client apps.