Nostr seems to make it much more difficult to weed out the bigots as they don’t have a single point of origin (an instance). When you get to the point of making your own instance, it becomes easy to filter out all the users from that instance in one go, if the instance turns into a nazi bar. That is the difference.
The entire purpose of Nostr is about true censorship resistance and speech autonomy. That doesn’t exist with AP. Even if you self host, others can block your instance and no one will think twice about why the server is on the list.
That is by design in AP. If you self host and your instance gets blocked, that’s between you and the other instance. You can still speak all you want, the other instance is just not listening any more. You’ve been excluded from the instance that blocked you because you didn’t follow their rules. So participate in other communities and try to follow their rules and you probably won’t be excluded.
“True censorship resistance” and “speech autonomy” sounds dangerously close to “free speech absolutism” (“freeze peach”).
First of all, it seems too technical for normal people. It requires users to keep their own public/private keys in order. I don’t find this realistic for general users.
Secondly, this kind of “anti-censorship” retoric and features. Yes, of course excessive censorship is bad, especially when done by governments. But a forum moderating users requires censorship and it’s not a problem, it is the solution. I’m not sure I like the idea of relays instead of instances.
Lastly, the whole Nostr community is overrun by crypto-bros, which should tell you enough about the kind of people who are excited about Nostr.
I have a hard time trusting something that advertises itself as “uncensorable”. Good moderation requires censoring (and this is an okay version of censoring, it’s not like your human right to be on a specific fediverse community).
Not being able to censor sounds like an easy way to become the nazi bar. Or in the case of nostr, I guess the blockchain/cryptocurrency bar.
Well that’s a bit of a double-sided sword. Libraries also includes lots of failsafes built in that you’ll need to implement yourself then. And you’ll need to be confident that you don’t implement security issues in your own code instead of relying on widely used libraries. But it makes sense if you’re worried about supply chain attacks.
What other tools than VPNs would you say are important?