Mastodon is a great platform. I have an account there, and I have been using it as a twitter replacement for several months. I have been using nostr for around two months. I have also read fairly deeply into how Mastodon and Nostr work. I think nostr is better. Here’s why.
Background:
Mastodon and Nostr offer basically the same thing: a federated/decentralized replacement to twitter. They share the same basic features: tweeting, following people, a public square w/ trending notes and hashtags moderated by instance rules, DMs.
Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin all federate through an underlying protocol called ActivityPub. You create an account at an instance which you use to interact with these sites. Your instance can push/pull data to other instances via the AP protocol.
Nostr is an underlying protocol, like ActivityPub. The main service is hosts currently, called Nostr, is a twitter clone, but there’s other stuff like a video streaming platform. They all federate with each other just like Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin. There is no reddit clone on nostr yet, but I imagine it’s only a matter of tine.
Instead of “instances”, nostr has “relays”. The app or site you connect to nostr through will usually connect to multiple relays (just like your mastodon instance will connect to multiple other instances). Relays, like instances, have their own moderation policies and can choose what kind of content they allow.
Here’s why I think nostr simply works better:
- In mastodon your identity is tied to your instance, in nostr it’s not. If your instance decides to close up? You have to make a new account somewhere else. You lose all your followers, the list of who you follow, your tweets, your DMs, etc. This sucks. This happened to me early in my mastodon experience. It was annoying, but it would be way more annoying if I had spent five years building up that account.
- In mastodon, your instance can stop you from seeing content from other instances and ban users from other instances. While this moderation might be nice sometimes, I’d rather it be opt-in than mandatory. Nostr relays don’t have this power. Likewise, Mastodon instances can stop their followers from following you. Nostr doesn’t allow this.
- In mastodon, admins can read your DMs. If you DM somebody on another instance, that’s two instances that can read your DMs, and so can anybody who breaks into their server. In nostr, all DMs are encrypted by default and can only be read by the intended recipient.
- If mastodon and fediverse’s goals are to create a P2P or federated network of instances, having users tied to instances is not good. It incentivizes users to pick bigger, more stable instances which will lead to centralization over time.
A question of funding
One question that fediverse needs to solve is: how are we going to fund hosting costs for instances and more broadly, development?
There are many valid options such as: ads on instances, selling “badges” or awards like reddit, subscriptions for extra features, etc. What is not a sustainable plan, imo, is just hoping users donate enough to keep things afloat. Open source and free software projects have a long history of being underfunded leading to them closing up shop or not reaching their full potential. Nostr at least has a potential answer for this, while AP/fedi don’t really seem to yet.
Nostr has an optional built-in tipping functionality where you can leave tips for users whose content you like. You can tip a fraction of a penny or $100. And users can tip you. This has a few effects. For one, it incentivizes people to use nostr. Non-profit orgs, for example, can use it to fundraise.
Secondly, it provides a sustainable funding mechanisms for relays and development. When you make a tip, it goes through your “tip pool” and you can select people or entities to give a % of every tip to. So, for example, you can leave a 10c tip on a tweet and 1c automatically goes to the relay operator.
Where Mastodon/AP is better:
- Mastodon has more people I want to follow. There is a greater user base and diversity.
- Mastodon has a more consistent interface. Pretty much every mastodon site looks the same. Nostr has a dizzying array of apps and web portals. That’s great for user choice, not great for user onboarding.
- While nostr relays in theory can filter content and cultivate public squares with specific sets of values, I’ve found in practice this hasn’t been done as much, most relays seem the same. I think in time as the user base grows this will happen organically, there’s just little reason to separate them out now.
- Password recovery/account loss. With nostr, your identity is a private key generated by your client. This means your identity isn’t tied to an instance (yay!). But, if you lose the private key, you lose your identity and have to make a new one. Likewise, if somebody steals your key, they can post as you. And there is no real password recovery functionality since nobody else has your password. There are good technical solutions for this like social account recovery and key revocation certificates but they aren’t currently implemented. I imagine they will be with time.
- Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/etc can all talk to each other through ActivityPub. While Nostr’s underlying protocol supports this kind of federation, the twitter clone is the main platform with users on it and it doesn’t have a reddit clone etc.
Nostr seems to have been designed from the ground up by people who kept getting banned everywhere else, and we’re sick of getting banned, so they made their own Twitter where people are effectively unbannable. They’re going to say the things everyone bans them for and there’s nothing that you can do to stop them!
I’m glad Nostr exists, in the same way I’m glad Truth Social exists; the kind of people it attracts are exactly the kind of people I don’t want on my social feeds. In nostr’s case, that’s tech bros and freedom of speech “absolutists”, which are are exactly the reason why Twitter went to shit in the first place.
Protocol wise, you can absolutely use a portable identity with ActivityPub. Every user has a key pair that us used to sign and verify their posts, and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to use the same key for multiple servers. Nobody actually implements a scheme like that but you could use keys instead of ActivityPub usernames to label accounts, if you wanted to. You could even use multiple servers the same way nostr uses multiple relays!
The lack of E2EE messaging on ActivityPub is a pain, and I think AP “DM’s” should come with a big warning about how they work and what the risks are. Lemmy hae Matrix integration to a certain point, but you’re right that Mastodon has terrible downsides when it comes to DMs.
Except that ActivityPub and Nostr’s moderation functionality is basically identical. Relay/instance operators can block users, filter content, set their own moderation policies, and defederate from other instances with weak moderation policies. The difference is that if your instance admin blocks you from following somebody you want to on AP, you need to make a new account at a new instance and check that account seperately. If your instance admin does that in nostr, it’s just a matter of adding another relay to your list and now you can keep following/being followed by/DMing that person. It’s the best of both worlds: relays can set their own moderation policies and cultivate a certain vibe, users and their identities are not locked in to the moderation policies of the instance(s) they are connected to.
You can do this, but your account is still tied to the instance. If somebody sends a DM or tweet to skullgiver@lemmy.ml but lemmy.ml no longer exists, all the public keys in the world don’t solve that problem. In nostr, tweets and DMs are directed at a key, not at a user at a particular relay.
Don’t forget the crypto bros.
Dear God, so many cryptobros.