this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Nostr vs Mastodon (lemmy.ml)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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 [email protected].

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?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can migrate an account quite easily on Mastodon, so unless your instance dissapears out of the blue one day it isn't really a problem.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] Die4Ever 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I feel like moderation could be an issue though, since Mastodon is only moderated by the instance admins.

If there was a Nostr for Reddit/Lemmy style communication, it could be possible for the communities to have moderators, so that could be good.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

It's my understanding that nostr relays can make moderation choices much like lemmy or mastodon instances do. But the scope is different. In mastodon or lemmy, if a mod takes an issue with you, they can remove you from that instance (and any followers you had following you on that instance). If a nostr relay operator doesn't like you, they can ban you from that relay, but your followers can follow you via other relays. This is because your identity is tied to your public key, not your relay or instance.

[–] Die4Ever 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

But you said you can post to multiple relays, and you can choose what relays to post to freely? Doesn't that mean duplicate work for all the relay admins?

I have thought about nomadic social networks before based on public keys, I do generally think it's a good idea. I'm just not sure if the Twitter/Mastodon style is an ideal fit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Not really. If you are a ban-worthy user on mastodon, other instances may ban your user id, or ban your entire instance if they think your instance's mod actions aren't enough generally. I imagine a "common blocklist" like currently exists in e-mail, mastodon, and other federated networks would emerge so that the actions of one mod can be done more-or-less automatically by mods on other relays.

E-mail is federated and much less moderated than fediverse and even though spam exists it seems like a manageable signal to noise ratio. Anti-spam tools are pretty effective.

[–] Die4Ever 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

A database of bans with tags for the ban reasons could work, like https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/censured

I wouldn't use email as a great example for spam filters, considering how much it caused Gmail to take a monopoly and how often it blocks emails you actually want. You practically can't self host email anymore.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Agreed. The lack of self-hosting ability really comes down to the refusal of the wider web to upgrade away from SMTP. If you follow all the latest backwards-compatible protocols (DKMS etc) you can still get a decent outbound delivery rate.

There were many, many elegant solutions proposed to stop spam but none of them got implemented to avoid breaking backwards compatibility with SMTP. Then again, at this point, most people have moved away from e-mail to other forms of communication anyways due to e-mails problems (spam included). Unless the younger generation gets a sudden, renewed interest in e-mail, it will probably not really exist in another 50 years.

I do think blockchain will probably solve the issue of assigning senders a "spam score" universally once and for all instead of our current system which is a grab bag of blocklists plus each provider's secret sauce. Once you have a universal blocklist every e-mail provider can use and contribute to, it becomes easy to identify most senders as "safe" and new senders will just have to spend a bit of time earning their trust.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Architecturally speaking, Nostr is really cool, and has some great ideas. I think their approach is way better than what we have with instances, but discovery seems to be a fair bit worse, and most of the landscape seems to just be right-wing crypto bros. I've also heard from some people developing for Nostr that it's "easy to learn, but messy", in terms that you're basically always trying to figure out compliance with various NIPs, rather than just following a particular protocol standard.

I think the Fediverse would absolutely benefit from a system that didn't tie user accounts to instances, and made use of a similar relay system.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

I'm not sure what this "wider social graph" you mention is, but you don't really lose your identity - you verify it with external website, so it's easy to switch the pointer to a new identity (I've been around since 2017 and I instance-hop often, I go back and delete old accounts couple of times per year)

Losing followers - well yeah, that sucks if your livelihood depends on your social media reach and patronage, but in that case, you should probably have a more solid base for all your social contacts, random Mastodon instance is probably not the best choice.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You do lose your identity though. If your instance suddenly disappears you have to start from step zero. You have no followers, you follow nobody, and nobody knows you exist. By social graph I mean your connections to others which mastodon facilitates (a list of people you follow and the connection so that others follow you) plus the entirety of the content you have posted since you started your account, your DMs, etc. Losing your social graph isn't an inconvenience, it's losing the totality of the features mastodon gives you as a user all at once. Social media connections are important for people socially, in the job market, etc. Those connections are meaningful. On a network-wide level, it's frustrating for users to be following people and then just have those people vanish off the face of the earth because their instance died. It's terrible UX.

You can no longer tweet as the "old you" and as far as anybody else knows, "new you" is a different person pretending to be "old you" unless they authenticate you in some other way and that's a major pain.

I don't think the ultimate solution is just "pick a stable instance". All instances will eventually experience instability or close, what happens to those users when they do? An account should be 100% portable between instances. And ideally, a somewhat automatic mechanism should be in place so that recovering from an instance loss isn't hard.

I know this fediverse stuff is in its infancy, I know we'll get all these problems figured out in time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

you follow nobody

You can import/export most things to CSV (follows, lists, blocks etc)
This way it's easy to set up a new account on new server (as I said, I've been instance hopping for a long time).

You can also download your media archive in its entirety. And you should.

You should also turn on scheduled deletion of your old posts. You don't really want to leave >6 month old messages behind you. You don't have to lose your stuff, just stick the archive somewhere safe (local disk, or dropbox, whatever). These are all standard Mastodon features.

unless they authenticate you in some other way and that’s a major pain.

You should always authenticate yourself on Mastodon if you're "serious" about your identity. It's very easy to do and re-pointing it to your new "official" identity is just one line of HTML.

Mastodon has also feature for moving instances and forwarding your old identity to your new one.

If your instance admin suddenly disappears and shuts down the service, it's a pain, but obviously you run the same risk with any commercial company shutting down your account without notice or recourse to re-open it. So keeping regular backups of your data is a good idea, the import/export tools are there.

The only thing that isn't automatic is followers. And if your followers are a huge concern (for example, part of your livelihood/patronage) you should probably adopt a multi-platform social media strategy anyway. This way you can always reach your followers, no matter what happens to Twitter or Mastodon (or whatever network). You should be on ALL the networks.

But for most people who are not "content creators" the amount of followers isn't really very relevant. It doesn't mean anything. The quality of the discussions is important. And you can participate in discussions without any followers. It's not like other commercial networks where the algorithm squelches you if you don't have enough "clout". You don't need followers to discuss with people on Mastodon.

[–] Feyter 4 points 11 months ago

Plus: if you are that dependent on you followers maybe it's a good idea to be self hosted or at least choose a reliable instance.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nostr is not moderatable, so it’s already full of ads. It will just continue to attract spam. It’s a great idea, but it doesn’t work in real life. At least not yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

can't users block stuff???

[–] Die4Ever 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

New users don't want to be required to block 1000 accounts when they first start, that's more friction to joining a new social network. I mean Lemmy users already get turned away by the Lemmit bot and that's just 1 single account to block lol literally like 2 clicks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I think it can be helped by having sorta community tools. Like subscribing to blocklists. Users could even publish their user blocklist and someone can subscribe to it as well or just instead of subscribing to them. and we alread have tools to block domains, urls, users, magazines so we don't have to block accounts individually. I have curated my feed quite a bit just by over time taking out stuff here and there. Heck I will block at a group level much easier than a user level. That is I put more scrutiny before deciding to block a user.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

This seems like a good idea. Although I‘d like people to improve mastodon so that you can run a mastodon instance (just an idea) with 2-3 clicks and have automated backups. That way nearly everyone had their own instance and thats it. This also matched with the p2p idea someone recently pitched in my mastodon circle. I think the solution is not make something new but improve what you have since now its our money and time, not elons or spez‘s (i know its not theirs but they have control there).

The same imo goes for lemmy, peertube and matrix. Every person, family or friend group, school, workplace, etc should run their own instance so that we have very many, very stable instances.

I run instances my own so I know how easy federation is. They‘re mini instances for 5 people (my friends) and they federate wonderfully. A common misconception is that small instances dont get seen. They do, just not as fast.

Have a good one.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Portable digital identities are still an unsolved problem, even with Nostr.

They take a step forward in portability by using public keys, but that comes with a step backwards in multiple other dimensions like being able to recover your identity, key rotation, and just general ease of account maintenance.

I think Nostr is an important step in the right direction, but won’t be suitable for general use until those issues are addressed, and addressing them might require more drastic changes than simply adding an additional layer on top of it.