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Honestly, I don't get the fuss about these "libertarian-inspired social network protocols". It's not like the technical side of social media is the tough one: i

Honestly, I don't get the fuss about these "libertarian-inspired social network protocols". It's not like the technical side of social media is the tough one: it's always been the political and sociological one. In the end, most people aren't hardcore libertarians and do want content moderation, centralized discovery, spam blocking... I would really find it interesting if it came about a protocol that actually cared about those things and provided a way to handle them other than a megacorp doing all of it. But all those protocols operate under the assumption that people are okay with seeing really bad things that real people come up with (even CP like commented elsewhere in this thread) themselves under the guise of "full decentralized liberty". I suspect that's why they all ultimately fail or at least remain niche things. If the alternative to megacorps is this wild west, people will remain in the megacorps' social media.

Barrin92 4y ago
it's not even a social networking protocol, it's literally just a networking protocol for the reasons you laid out. And of course all the dynamics you talk about emerge naturally. With scale comes concentration and hierarchies out of necessity, the power to blocklist 'relays' across the largest instances, etc. All these experiments basically are a venture in rediscovering economics and politics. The internet started out decentralized. Reinventing html and web servers isn't changing anything.
FireInsight 4y ago
A good Mastodon instance can certanly provide what you say most people'd want. Since it's activitypub, you wont be locked in to mastodon only. And since it's foss, account migration will probably be worked on as it's the #1 critique of Mastodon (aside of onboarding).
- dchnshA 4y ago
  Mastodon already has account migration and had it for a long time.
  - leesalminen 4y ago
    But it requires the cooperation of the owner of the server you created your account on, right? If so it’s only a happy path and doesn’t handle the very common migration scenarios of falling out of favor with your server owner.
leesalminen 4y ago
There's nothing about nostr that prevents any relay and/or client from offering these things (content moderation, centralized discovery, spam filters). They could even share their findings with other relays/clients and build one big cohesive censorship system. If this happened, users would be free to opt-out of that and switch out their client and/or relay with other options that fit their needs without friction. They would keep their identity, note history, friend list, etc. Could be as simple as one client releasing a UI change the user hates. They could just download a different app and keep going.
- drowsspa 4y ago
  "Could", "just", "simple". Sounds like "draw the rest of the owl".
  - leesalminen 4y ago
    Nostr is being built right now. We’d love for you to join us, it’s just a PR away! To be clear, Damus already offers some level of content moderation. Other clients are accepting PRs to implement as well. Nostr itself offers some level of centralized discovery with NIP-05. Relays are starting to look at spam filtering (via pay-to-post models mainly).

Barrin92 4y ago

it's not even a social networking protocol, it's literally just a networking protocol for the reasons you laid out. And of course all the dynamics you talk about emerge naturally. With scale comes concentration and hierarchies out of necessity, the power to blocklist 'relays' across the largest instances, etc. All these experiments basically are a venture in rediscovering economics and politics. The internet started out decentralized. Reinventing html and web servers isn't changing anything.

FireInsight 4y ago

A good Mastodon instance can certanly provide what you say most people'd want. Since it's activitypub, you wont be locked in to mastodon only. And since it's foss, account migration will probably be worked on as it's the #1 critique of Mastodon (aside of onboarding).

dchnshA 4y ago
Mastodon already has account migration and had it for a long time.
- leesalminen 4y ago
  But it requires the cooperation of the owner of the server you created your account on, right? If so it’s only a happy path and doesn’t handle the very common migration scenarios of falling out of favor with your server owner.

leesalminen 4y ago

There's nothing about nostr that prevents any relay and/or client from offering these things (content moderation, centralized discovery, spam filters). They could even share their findings with other relays/clients and build one big cohesive censorship system. If this happened, users would be free to opt-out of that and switch out their client and/or relay with other options that fit their needs without friction. They would keep their identity, note history, friend list, etc. Could be as simple as one client releasing a UI change the user hates. They could just download a different app and keep going.

drowsspa 4y ago
"Could", "just", "simple". Sounds like "draw the rest of the owl".
- leesalminen 4y ago
  Nostr is being built right now. We’d love for you to join us, it’s just a PR away! To be clear, Damus already offers some level of content moderation. Other clients are accepting PRs to implement as well. Nostr itself offers some level of centralized discovery with NIP-05. Relays are starting to look at spam filtering (via pay-to-post models mainly).