Post from @rabble on why he's chosen to use #Nostr and not #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse. He makes some compelling points. Personally I am not too worried about the server admin parts of his argument (I have enough control, even if I don't control the server), but I agree that this isn't ideal:
@ricmac@rabble hopefully we will be able to connect the whole Open Social with openvibe.social and move the space forward. For me it’s much less about which decentralized protocol wins but rather that some decentralized protocol wins over the legacy social media
@ricmac Of the issues that @rabble raises the one that I think is the most important to address is:
"Each kind of fediverse server is isolated. You can use a Peertube instance to federate with other Peertubes for video, or Mobilizon for meetup-style events, or Pixelfed for Instagram-like photo sharing, or WriteFreely for blogs. But each of these is isolated. I need a new account on an instance of each of these servers. They all run the same protocol, but they aren’t actually interoperable. You can’t use a single fediverse identity with your profile and followers in Peertube, Mobilizon, WriteFreely, and Pixelfed. You need a totally separate account in each one. With Nostr, you can use dozens of apps all with your same identity, content, and followers."
For example, if I created a YouTube-style app based on Nostr, people who use Nostr for microblogging would still bristle at this use case if all they ever encountered was Nostr for microblogging.
Having said that, I think that #ActivityPub has far more adoption today than Nostr and that is only going to accelerate as more networks federate in the coming months. While Nostr has a lot of interesting ideas we can learn from, it is also quite arcane and requires an encryption key just to use it. That sets up a hard stop for non-technical people (i.e. mainstream audiences) to ever adopt it.
@JsonCulverhouse ActivityPub IDs are URLs. You could definitely have yourdomain.example or subdomain.yourdomain.example as an ID. There are a couple of servers, like Takahē, that let you bring your own domain.
>I really wish there was something more akin to DID support in the ActivityPub protocol.
There is. I mean, the ActivityPub spec doesn't say anything about it, but it also does not explicitly forbid non-HTTPS identifiers. DIDs alone are probably not enough, because not all of them can carry additional information (e.g. did:key can't)
You can read about the current research in this document:
@mike@ricmac@rabble@evan@Gargron@dansup@JsonCulverhouse@greg@emilynguyen My feeling is that the world’s UI innovators may solve this problem for us. What with Ivory and Mona and Elk and Phanpy, you can already have wildly-different experiences of the same underlying network. Seems to me that many of the things that distinguish these alternate servers can be accomplished with sufficiently good client-ware.
@ricmac@rabble also, ActivityPub uses an extensible format called Activity Streams 2.0 for representing data on the wire. This means we can transfer information about text, video, audio, and images, and also social interactions like checkins, events, and groups. Because it's extensible, you can even add new kinds of activities that weren't even dreamed up when AP was created. It all uses a common addressing and distribution mechanism.
@ricmac@rabble that all said, I think the SocialCG at the W3C is really open to engaging with contributions from all quarters on all kinds of ideas. As long as someone is willing to clear the IP that make their contributions free for everyone to use, we're happy to include them. I look forward to seeing Rabble's issues on GitHub! https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues
@ricmac
The points leading up to the part you quoted are true and valid, but that one is entirely false, and the ones after increasingly irrelevant because linkable solutions exist.
Lack of ability to migrate profiles, including their content, from one server to another, is a problem hardwired to ActivityPub's origin as a server-, rather than user-oriented protocol.
It could be overcome by making each user their own domain name, but that is an exclusionary solution. @rabble
@rabble
"fiefdoms", isolation, messaging, search, algorithms, payment, at the very least. And overall, it seems you chose to take a maximally restricive interpretation of some activitist Mastodon community and claim it describes all of fedi.
@ricmac@rabble Pixelfed and Mastodon are not isolated from each other. I have Pixelfed users in my home feed on Mastodon. That's a very weird definition of isolated. Mastodon has search too. Phanpy has a catch-up algorithm. I don't find the arguments in the post compelling.
@Gargron@ricmac@rabble They raised up a decent point or 2, albeit not fully correct. There is migration, but it’s not user friendly. queer.af did go down, but leaning on country-owned domains isn’t smart. Lot of bad info in the post too.
But goodness, what is all this stuff about keys? Isn’t Nostr, like, a crypto-bro “Jack” thing, which is chock full o’ its own problematic issues?
@renwillis Hey, i'd love to know what i got wrong about AP and the fediverse. I also hope that pointing out how other systems work will improve the fediverse, we're all on team open.
And you're right, using keys is a mixed bag. Atproto uses keys but stores them on your PDS server. Nostr's got this thing called nsec bunker which does the same thing, but not everybody uses it.
But what if queer.af hadn't lost their domain, instead the admins just shut it down or sold it?
@rabble Diff fedi platforms do talk to each other, ex. I posted on Lemmy via Mastodon, follow pixelfed accounts, but yeah, it can have bugs. E2E & money, sure, again, no DMs here yet & yeah I pay my admin outside fedi, but I use this for social media, not as a whatsapp/venmo site. Culture: imo, this is an issue of scale. Every social site is cool until it gets lots of users. I like the community radio feel of fedi, just a bunch of folks hanging out & chatting it up. Just be chill, friend!
@rabble migration works, I’ve done it twice. Yes, servers can go down, but normally you are given a long heads up to migrate. Username changes, accurate, but whatever. There are no DMs here, just not-public mentions. The fiefdom language is inflammatory, there’s 1000s of servers, or go make your own. dot Art was too heavy handed with moderation, so I moved to mstdn.social. (1/2)
@rabble@renwillis@Gargron@ricmac I call that moderation. I use censorship in another way. I'm not obliged to listen to your speech (moderation). You are free to post it though, otherwise you are being censored.
@librenews@rabble@Gargron@ricmac So? This isn’t government property, these are privately run instances. Why should anyone platform legal hate speech or any content they disagree with? It’s their server.
You can start a server now, say anything you want. But you are not free of the consequences of that speech and may find yourself defederated and only surrounded by other hate speech enthusiasts.
@renwillis@rabble@Gargron@ricmac I didn't say anyone should do anything with their server. They own it. They can do what they like with it and any content on it. I just don't call that censorship. I call it moderation
Pixelfed and Mastodon are not isolated from each other. I have Pixelfed users in my home feed on Mastodon. That’s a very weird definition of isolated.
UI-mismatch is the issue there and as well as with the “promise” of the fediverse. A shared protocol isn’t the same as a shared UI.
Then there’s the whole data-model-mismatch problem, where platforms only implement parts of the protocol such that things get lost or misinterpreted between platforms.
And so, despite being technically “not isolated”, people have multiple accounts all over the place to reroute around these mismatch frictions, which are significant enough to create prohibitive separations.
Whether its a misinterpretation from users or an overzealous advocacy of the power of the protocol and fediverse … I think it’s absolutely fair enough to say that we’ve arrived at a point where the promise of multiple platforms and instances all in a single unifying space is a bad over promise.
The friction involved in trying to reach for that is bad enough that most just bounce off of it, either ditching the fediverse, or giving up on this so called promise and staying on their platform of choice, or just creating multiple accounts and tolerating the chaos.
At the root of it is this lack of mobile identity (as well as, IMO, some other general design decisions). Not least because bridging these gulfs is exactly the sort of thing necessary to make the fediverse realise its killer potential. At the moment to many, probably most, the fediverse is in practice “just” a sea of disparate platforms. Which is a shame TBH, but also shouldn’t be glossed over as a non-issue.
“Need” is a strong word I’d say. Instead, I’m coming from the perspective of what “the fediverse”, an ecosystem of connected (“not isolated”) platforms, promises regarding inter-platform connectivity.
And a simple angle into that, I think, is the embedding of GIFs, videos, polls, emoji etc in social media, which has grown into a de facto standard over time for what were originally text-based platforms (over on BlueSky, they’re still whinging about the lack of such).
That’s an enhancement or enrichment of the UI and the scope of social interaction or conversation that basically expands into the big space of features that the web browser affords. In addition to whatever written language is used in the text of a platform, the additional elements of representation, communication and interaction all contribute to forming its “social language and format”, which then ties in closely with its culture.
The more the fediverse promises connectivity between different platforms, the more there’s an expectation that these “languages and formats” get translated across the protocol between platforms. Thing is, this isn’t just about text, it’s about a platform’s full gamut of visual elements and their formatting or arrangement. That is, it’s about their UIs. The more a platform’s UI gets lost as its translated/interpreted by another platform, the more there isn’t real connectivity at a meaningful social (media) level. Expectations matter here too, where disappointingly “lossy” interactions are simply uncompelling for many.
The web browser and internet is an important backdrop to this IMO. All web pages just work (kinda mostly) as they are intended in everyone’s web browser. There’s no loss. Each link takes you to where and what you’re supposed to. Same with books, or PDFs, or films or music. Fidelity of format is and has always been paramount.
And so, as I claim, the protocol is only the beginning, the foundation.
The actual site of the fediverse is in how UIs get translated across different platforms.
At some threshold of mis-translation, the connection, and the promise of the fediverse, is broken (even if not for everyone, as full or wide-band connectivity is the promise IMO).
Coming back to the web browser and the internet — where it’s important IMO to recall many fediverse advocates describing it as an opportunity to “remake the internet” — an obvious alternative presents itself (I think): Our fediverse clients/interfaces ought to be capable of rendering any form of social media in its intended/designed format just like the browser and the internet.
And of course, this doesn’t preclude user customisation such that some or even many might want to restrict content to a certain format. But, it’s also relevant I think to point out that many have accounts and are active on multiple platforms, both on the fediverse and on big social and interact with overlapping sets of people. Which is to say that using the browser/smartphone-OSs, people are already doing what I’m suggesting
In fact, I’d argue that what we have now is strange. Each piece of social media interaction has to get translated into whatever my current platform decides is the appropriate format and understanding of that interaction. In reality, that’s really not much progress on the screen shots used to share inter-platform content on big (unfederated) social media … and I’d say it’s a policy that clearly germinates from the same design culture (where the fediverse is still in its “lets clone big social” phase).
So, UI-Matching (which requires a good deal of Data-Model-Matching) … that’s the actual fediverse. What we’ve got now is some weird middle ground that mostly breaks its promises.
@huitema@maegul@Gargron@ricmac@simon_lucy I’ve heard that in critiques of DIDs but you can have mobile identity on social protocols that only function over tor. I’m not sure one has to lead to the other.
You could create an identity trusted by a common agency, as in certificates issued by CAs and trusted as a chain but that isn't scalable for individuals to generate their own. They have to rely on an issuer so it amounts to the same thing.
@evan@ricmac this was a very quick write up was a reply to a question of why I was working on Nostr and not ActivityPub. It deserves a deeper take because the details matter.
We need to look at not just what is possible on each tech stack, but also what is being actively used. E.G. Nostr does have custom algorithms but it’s clunky and there are only a few dozen. Custom algorithms work really well on Bluesky. I could say, we do the custom algorithms too, but that misses the point.
@ricmac@rabble I also think Nostr is way bigger than Mastodon(or name your AP service) with a portable identity. It's more like a decentralized database with a portable identity. The possibilities are so limitless, it defies description. It's everything digital with a portable identity
Perhaps this is where a technology like Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project would help; where you have a single identity and agree to 'share' that with fediverse apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. I don't know if that's the answer, but I feel like more work on making it possible to fully own your identity on the fediverse would be good.
There's no particular reason that you can't use the same authoriser if they accept oAuth and Mastodon and Pixelfed can do that at least, I don't know about Writefreely.
You have multiple accounts but the same method to authorise.
@ricmac that's the intention of the ActivityPub API. Client apps can create different kinds of activities, and servers store the data and share with your social graph. Solid doesn't add anything there.
Add comment