Embed Notice

Yeah I feel all of that. I think another thing is the fact that culturally, the fediverse has been completely swallowed up by instance and federation drama. Who defederates who and why and when and this and that. It dominates both sides of fedi, the Mastodong troon side where they have these massive lists of wrongthink instances, and the Balormo rightoid side of fedi where instance admins each have their own style on how they handle it, and everybody needs to have an opinion on how every instance admin moderates every instance.

My complaints about it actually aren’t the technicals. Really, it works. The technicals are fine and I think that complaints about them are misguided for this reason. Email works. It functions, in spite of its flaws. But the truth is, the culture is garbage. I see the technical argument for Nostr over ActivityPub trivially.

The bigger problem I see in both Nostr and Fedi is cultural. Both have a very limited window of topics you can discuss and get any traction in. Fedi is dominated by idpol (left and right, depending on which side of it you’re on), anime tits, and tech sperging. Nostr is dominated by crypto wank, cybersecurity wank, and actually I can’t even think of a third topic that gets discussed on it much.

I think the limited scope issue – a cultural, not technical, issue – is the true Achilles heel of these decentralized services. And I think the solution to that is to, somehow, get people who have something to say other than “it’s da jooz” or “pump my bags uwu” to actually use them. I don’t have an answer to this problem, but I know it’s there and I know it’s real.