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1. Embed this notice
   Alex Gleason (alex@gleasonator.com)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jan-2023 01:31:13 JST Alex Gleason

   Okay, I’m going to write my thoughts on Nostr, then nobody ask me about it ever again.

   The guy who made it was on bitcoinhackers.org. He started building an ActivityPub backend in C. We were like “why C?” and he said “I want it to be portable and run anywhere”. He did a livestream coding it, where he was saying “don’t ask me why I’m building my own JSON parser. I’m not happy with the ones in C.” We were like WTF, use a library. Also, Pleroma is portable with OTP releases, there’s no reason not to use that. He acknowledged this and stopped the C implementation.

   So unhappy with Pleroma, unhappy with the JSON parser in C, and unhappy with the ActivityPub spec he went on to create Nostr. At first I thought there’s no way this will catch on. But it turns out he’s a core contributor of Bitcoin, and was able to leverage his existing audience in cryptocurrency to popularize it. So now all the crypto bros on Twitter who never had a reason to care about the Fediverse care about Nostr. Forbes is writing about it, Elon Musk is acknowledging it, etc.

   Is Nostr a good idea? 10 years ago, yes. It’s “simple” because we haven’t been building on it for 10 years. Between the two, I would have picked Nostr 10 years ago, but today it is a big distraction from accomplishing the goal of defeating big tech. It’s fragmentation and division, from a person who is incapable of (or doesn’t want to) work within an existing ecosystem.

   So every time I see Nostr, I wonder if I need to drop everything I’m doing and make an ActivityPub server with decentralized IDs and client/replay paradigm to compete with Nostr. But I suspect even if I did, it would be ignored. It’s unfortunate he used his platform to weaken the Fediverse instead of make us all stronger.

   Now there are calls for “a bridge between ActivityPub and Nostr” because it was an afterthought. It would have been so much less work, so much simpler, to just… make an ActivityPub client do the Nostr thing. So what’s my position on Nostr? No thanks.

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   • Embed this notice
     Zero :zt_think: :artix: (zero@strelizia.net)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jan-2023 02:28:34 JST Zero :zt_think: :artix:

     in reply to
     @alex
     >We were like WTF, use a library. Also, Pleroma is portable with OTP releases, there’s no reason not to use that. He acknowledged this and stopped the C implementation.
     
     idk sounds like it was ur fault lol
     twl likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Alex Gleason (alex@gleasonator.com)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jan-2023 02:45:16 JST Alex Gleason

     in reply to

     • Zero :zt_think: :artix:

     @zero I should have never failed him from art school.

   • Embed this notice
     Alex Gleason (alex@gleasonator.com)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jan-2023 02:57:32 JST Alex Gleason

     in reply to

     • Tassoman

     @tassoman On Nostr ever post is stored on every device.

   • Embed this notice
     Tassoman (tassoman@orwell.fun)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jan-2023 02:57:33 JST Tassoman

     in reply to
     AP behaviour to work in the opposite way internet does, makes everyone unhappy.
     Caching the same shit on hundreds of servers makes me frustrated. Also, lack of identity authenticity makes thing worst.
     If we can solve this two issues, we are done for the next 10 years without adding anything else who could break.
     
     Maybe we can use GPG to sign posts, by having an inbox for public signatures, storing private keys on back-end, already encrypted by the client. The caching issue, have no solution (yet) for me.
   • Embed this notice
     opal hart (opal@ap.maladaptive.art)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jan-2023 03:05:50 JST opal hart

     in reply to

     • Tassoman
     @alex @tassoman every post of interest*
     
     it's akin to mirroring rss feeds from several aggregators
     Alex Gleason likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Alex Gleason (alex@gleasonator.com)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jan-2023 03:06:24 JST Alex Gleason

     in reply to

     • Tassoman
     • opal hart

     @opal @tassoman It wouldn’t make sense to continue storing the post after it’s been delivered to all devices.

   • Embed this notice
     opal hart (opal@ap.maladaptive.art)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jan-2023 03:06:26 JST opal hart

     in reply to

     • Tassoman
     • opal hart
     @alex @tassoman also i think the relays indefinitely store uploaded posts, so in essence its still minimally stored in one place and thats fine too