Why ActivityPub over Nostr? - function only : fediverse

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 17 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I moved away from centralised social media, because social media owned by multinational corporations benefit from bigotry and rage, and so allow it to fester and grow. They do this by under moderating, or moderating with a bias against the people being harassed and attacked.

So the last thing I would choose to do is go to a platform/network that prides itself on lack of moderation, and requires vulnerable, targeted folk to play whack a mole, with each person having to reactively block individual bigots, one by one, after they've appeared and dumped their payload of hate.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 12 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

The hierarchy of moderation we have here is an underrated feature

[–] squirrel@piefed.kobel.fyi 9 points 6 days ago

I've read somewhere that the fediverse has the most moderators per user of any social network because of it's decentralized nature. Can't find the source right now though.

[–] Cooper8@feddit.online 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

So there are no moderation tools / whitelist/blacklists?

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 12 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

In theory yes, in practice, no.

Nostr uses relays. In some ways, a relay is like an instance on the fediverse. Where they differ though, is that a) relays don't talk to each other and b) users can sign up to many different relays and pull/push content to all of them.

So in practice, in order to see a wide amount of content, you need to end up connecting to multiple relays. And even though a relay does have some moderation capabilities to block content, unless every relay you use blocks the content from the bigoted account, you'll see it.

If you signed up only to a single relay, and that relay had good moderation, then in theory, your Nostr experience wouldn't be terrible, but a single niche relay like that will mean you see basically no content. And as soon as you connect to a larger public relay to get more content, you lose all of the moderation advantages offered by your first instance. Which means in practice, there is no incentive to run a well moderated instance.

And so all of the moderation ends up on the end user, who has to manually block accounts only after they appear and dump their load of hate (at which point, the bigot will just spin up another account). Some people prefer that experience, but when you're the regular target of hate, that approach just doesn't work for many folk.

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com -1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

So there are no moderation tools / whitelist/blacklists?

This is a good thing: bitchasses need to learn words are harmless & they can ignore them like humanity has done for millennia. It's not built into the servers. Client-side tooling would handle it, so it's entirely at the discretion of the user, which seems better to me.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's not about that even if you reduce it to purely that. Without moderation every platform becomes infested by spammers, trolls, astroturfers. Topical communities lose focus and communities become little more than hashtags.

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com -1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Yup, better. Moderation should be opt-in & is better handled at the client: the user could opt-in to a "moderation community" that publishes tags their client would follow. Such curation for anyone who wants that is a better idea. Far better than moderators we don't get to choose.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Yup, better.

Why is that better?

Moderation should be opt-in & is better handled at the client: the user could opt-in to a “moderation community” that publishes tags their client would follow.

Debateable given that any community anywhere online still needs to remove CSAM and gore and other things.

And what do you mean by "tags" here? Just hashtags or something else? Because a hashtag under a no-moderation concept could still be hijacked.

Far better than moderators we don’t get to choose.

Well I suggest you go there then, because the fediverse will never be what you want it to be.

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Why is that better?

User control & flexibility > illegitimate authority. Also, I remember an earlier, untamed, unrulier, more subversive internet than this corporate-friendly crap: it was funner.

any community anywhere online still needs to remove CSAM and gore and other things.

Legal compliance is different from legally unnecessary moderation.

Because a hashtag under a no-moderation concept could still be hijacked.

Not really: Nostr content is cryptographically signed. User's client subscribes to some content curators who post as signed events their tags for other events. The client processes these tagging events to filter according to the user's preferences.

Some proposals already exist:

the fediverse will never be what you want it to be

Not the topic of discussion, which is function & protocol.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Legal compliance is different from legally unnecessary moderation.

Right, so there would still need to be moderators. And if they can remove that, they can remove anything.

Not the topic of discussion, which is function & protocol.

Right, but you're just gunna have an unpleasant time here if you loath all moderation. It's that simple.

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

And if they can remove that, they can remove anything.

That's why there's no limit on the number of relays (events usually publish to multiple) or subscriptions to them (clients usually subscribe to multiple).

unpleasant time here if you loath all moderation

Still off topic, and the moderators here aren't reddit moderator scum so far. The modlog offers decent transparency.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

That’s why there’s no limit on the number of relays (events usually publish to multiple) or subscriptions to them (clients usually subscribe to multiple).

I'm lost. If a mod removes child porn on NOSTR, it removes it for everyone, right?

Still off topic, and the moderators here aren’t reddit moderator scum so far.

Well, sure, but you can still be moderated.

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I’m lost. If a mod removes child porn on NOSTR, it removes it for everyone, right?

No moderators. A relay operator can remove it from their relay. There's any number of relays. It's roughly like usenet with respect to server-side content removal.

Strange to ask me when authoritative information is public online. Seems you don't know much about nostr.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

So the child porn still remains present, effectively.

So Ada described Nostr like this:

"Nostr uses relays. In some ways, a relay is like an instance on the fediverse. Where they differ though, is that a) relays don’t talk to each other and b) users can sign up to many different relays and pull/push content to all of them.

So in practice, in order to see a wide amount of content, you need to end up connecting to multiple relays. And even though a relay does have some moderation capabilities to block content, unless every relay you use blocks the content from the bigoted account, you’ll see it.

If you signed up only to a single relay, and that relay had good moderation, then in theory, your Nostr experience wouldn’t be terrible, but a single niche relay like that will mean you see basically no content. And as soon as you connect to a larger public relay to get more content, you lose all of the moderation advantages offered by your first instance. Which means in practice, there is no incentive to run a well moderated instance.

And so all of the moderation ends up on the end user, who has to manually block accounts only after they appear and dump their load of hate (at which point, the bigot will just spin up another account). Some people prefer that experience, but when you’re the regular target of hate, that approach just doesn’t work for many folk."

This is accurate?

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

So the child porn still remains present, effectively.

Compulsory legal compliance still exists: it's the free, open internet. Did you know laws existed before, too?

Ada

Don't know about that. I think the brief descriptions on websites like nostr.com did a good enough job: there's not much to get.

It's a protocol, not a platform. There's no global moderation/censorship just like there isn't on the whole internet. Relay operators have full discretion over the content available on their relays: if they want to do more than the bare minimum, they can. Clients are free to subscribe to other relays or multiple. It's technically free association rather than anti-moderation.

A user can choose to see only the content of followed users: that should eliminate most unwanted content. Apart from that, there's no perfect moderation solution even on centralized platforms, so there isn't here.

Client-side filtering remains the best approach for those who care. It doesn't have to be manual as I mentioned before.

I recall earlier days of the internet when no one gave a fuck about this, and internet rage was just entertaining, easily ignored nonsense. Then it became eternal summer, and tightass n00bs started acting like moderating the entire internet & foisting their dumbass expectations on everyone made perfect sense without ever having to learn the zen of not giving a fuck. That was the start of when it all turned to shit.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I think you will find that most forums before Digg and Reddit did have rules. There is some revisionism from muh free speech types that seek to redefine them as free speech zones, when many were not.

Moreover, many clients and apps that were had much smaller userbases.

The point about the CP here is that you are saying that it would remain technically on the systems you are referring to.

[–] Cooper8@feddit.online 1 points 5 days ago

My understanding is that the content is essentially self-hosted, so content removed from relays still exists on the posting user's client and can be accessed directly, just like a website sending out RSS. So saying it "still exist on the network" is technically true, but only in the same way that you would say that about say bittorrent or the open web. What people host/post is present raw, what is amplified/"curated"/relayed is filtered. Client settings/config sets default and custom user content interaction, like a browser which can have adblock or not.

In principle, this seems like a decent solution, but I can see why different users prefer different protocols, differing to moderation takes a burden off of the user to vet inbound content. The same can be achieved via relays but the culture of "curation" seems weaker because the pressure from the userbase is lower to optimize it, as users are not solely reliant on any one relays. An odd network effect, but a truly invested curation/admin team could just as easily build a well "curated" relay as a well moderated instance.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

So in your world, I could spam the network with CSAM, gore, rape, and everything else and it would be up to a small group of people to filter that out for the rest so they can subscribe to what that small group thinks is appropriate?

[–] Cooper8@feddit.online 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Client-side curation sounds like whitelisting effectively, if you follow only the curated feed and the curated feed resigns all events posted by selected keys, that's a whitelist and seems like a decent solution for casual users so long as they can find trusted curators and clients that enable them to be easily discovered and subscribed to. What client is best for this currently?

On the flipside, if those "curators" were able to export and import lists of keys to automatically exclude from feeds, that would be very useful for the curators who have to manually or automatically sort events and new users to build their feeds. Is that feature currently available? Eliminating known bot accounts from feeds seems like minimum viable feature set for new curators in the current state of play.

[–] JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

this article and the accompanying discussion from lobsters is very relevant. Though the article itself is a bit one sided in favor of nostr, it doesn't do a great job arguing why a relay really is better

[–] Cooper8@feddit.online 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yes this is a great discussion. Generally speaking I see how user local-first posting mirrored by relays under e2ee can help solve some of the downsides of instance based federation, however it seems like the actual implementation makes or breaks the utility.

I have a concept that came up in reading the comments on lobster, which is that the issue of incomplete data due to asynchronous/intermittent downtime push and pull by users to/from the relays as well as inconsistent relays behavior leads to inevitable incomplete/non-consensus/out of date data access (something federation also suffers from).

My idea is that relays, bothe standard and specialized, could host a dedicated encrypted ledger for each user/key that has posted to it (potentially within a time limit, or with approval) that holds only a sequential identifier (counted since the first event by the key) of the user's most recent activity and a unique identifier/key associated with the event the activity was associated with (so that edits would be associated with the UI of the post being edited for example, or a new message to an ongoing thread would use the UI of the thread and the UI of the message.) Limit this log to very few entries and replace it every time it is updated, say between 1 and 10, and you would keep the size of the file very small, and the pushed update from the user/key would also be very small.

This way a user could push activity log updates to a broader set of hosts/relays than the actual content/event was sent to while keeping the cache/data burden on the broader network down. Ideally this would mean that not only the Relays but also users following the user/key could hold the log (enabling gossip without large cache burden). Unlike a blockchain where the ledgers would need to cross-sync with each-other and seek consensus on larger data chunks, in this case the reader of the ledger can always default to the most recent sequential identifier, and that identifier would be generated by publishing key/user.

This way time code variance isn't an issue, and at time of login a user can pull the logs for all users/keys they follow from relays OR peers they follow and determine the number of events posted by each user/key since they last pulled updates. Then the client could crawl the relays for the actual events with sequential identifiers between those AND stop crawling once they are found.

One issue I see with this sort of system is in the case of deleted events, so perhaps the log would also need to include a string of the sequential identifiers of events which have been deleted within a given time period.

[–] JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch 1 points 4 days ago

I don't actually know how nostr deals with messages if you're offline, if at all, not that familiar with the protocol. But your idea sounds workable.

I tend to come at it from the other side, I like the federated model, but think the "supernodes" could behave more like dedicated relays. Like, a lemmy server right now does a lot of things, like serve a frontend, do expensive database queries to show a sorted feed, etc. and a lot of that does not scale very well. So having different kinds of nodes with more specialization, while still following a federated model makes sense to me. Right now if one of my users subscribes to some community, that community's instance will start spamming my instance with updates nonstop, even though that user might not be active or might not even read that community anymore. It would be nicer if there was some kind of beefy instance I could request this data from if necessary, without getting each and every update even though 90% of it might never be viewed. But keeping individual instances that could have their own community and themes, or just be hosted for you and your friends to reduce the burden on non-techies having to self-host something.

Or put another way, instead of making the relays more instance-y, embrace the super instances and make them more relay-y, but tailor made for that job and still hostable by anyone, if they want to spend on the hardware. But I'm still not clear on where you'd draw the line/how exactly you'd split the responsibility. For lemmy, instead of sending 100's of requests in parallel for each thing that happens, a super-instance could just consolidate all the events and send them as single big requests/batches to sub-instances and maybe that's a good place to draw the line?

[–] Hazematman@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Very coincidental that you just posted this. I've been looking into p2p apps and Nostr caught my attention. Unfortunately like most p2p stuff it seems that most people using it are crypto affliated which is a big turn off.

The more I looked at it though nostr didn't seem that interesting to me as a protocol compared to other p2p protocols like ipfs, Yggdrasil, i2p. Manly because it still seems to centralize around relays and the effectively ended up being your server. From my understanding its easier to move from relay to another since you can publish to multiple relays and your identify is just a key pair so your ID is "portable". The big thing I see from Nostr is a priority to build apps on top of their protocol, compared to the other p2p protocols.

I think it would be neat if there was a non crypto affiliated social media platform built on top of a p2p protocol that did the following

Use key identify system so your ID is portable and not tied to a single identity server
All data is locally stored on your machine by default with the option to pin it to a server similar to the ipfs pinning servers
Since it p2p, built with the idea that your peer maybe offline and queue sharing posts until they are online. The pinning servers could also act as an always online client for you to store messages. Like a bouncer in IRC
No public feed, since it would be a moderation nightmare, you can only see what your followers post and what they reshare. Probably there would be feeds from trusted people you could subscribe to. This shared feeds could be a great way to build communities like in the fediverse
Built on a p2p protocol that handles thing like NAT punch through and peer connection so anyone's device can act like a peer without needing some server to relay messages to them, or having to port forward on their home connection. Nostr doesn't appear to do this, since it relies on all messages passing through (and hosted by) relay servers. So your own device can't act as a peer on Nostr.

These are the things that would make p2p social media more interesting to me than activitypub. Sadly as far as I can tell Nostr isn't really this, and I'm pretty sure none of the other protocols I mentioned have build an app like this on top of them.

[–] Cooper8@feddit.online 2 points 5 days ago

maybe Peergos? I'm not sure, seem to match up on Goals but IDK about execution: https://github.com/Peergos/Peergos?tab=readme-ov-file

[–] Cooper8@feddit.online 2 points 5 days ago

Sounds a bit like Plebbit, though that is more about P2P "communities/boards" that a user starts and others can post to, rather than a microblog type platform. Unfortunately it also has a strong association with Crypto communities as its founders come from that scene. It is built on IPFS.

What you describe also has similiarities to Secure Scuttlebutt and its successor PZP , which are both unfortunately abandoned but layed a lot of groundwork for asynchronous encryption key based networks.

[–] silverpill@mitra.social 9 points 6 days ago (3 children)

I don't know much about recent developments, but the early version of the protocol had several major flaws:

- Identity is based on a non-rotatable key, other types of identity are not supported.
- No privacy without encryption.
- Media attachments are not supported, all images are stored on a single server.
- Servers only store data and don't do anything else, so they get abstracted away and everyone uses the same 5 relays (in Fediverse each server has a personality, and that creates a strong incentive to self-host).

There are also many minor things that I dislike, for example the use of numbers instead of human-readable names, unusual cryptography and so on.

[–] N3M@reddthat.com 2 points 5 days ago

As of more recently:

The identity system is still the same, keys aren't rotatable and still the core of your account. Outside of edge cases like Frost Bunkers (outsourcing key management to a cluster of third party servers), or platforms like DiVine letting you register with an email, keys remain pretty much the same.
Private infomration like DMs have been altered. They're still E2E encrypted, but now only the people involved in the conversation can request a copy of the encrypted DM (I assume that's what you're referring to, but I may be mistaken).
Media attachements are usually uploaded to Blossom servers now. Standard notes still only embed remote media, but the ecosystem has a semi decentralized means of hosting content, and most clients will have a more standard 'upload and share' type of feature that most other platforms/protocols have.
The more recent outbox model (on supported clients) allows you to set the relays that will host your content and replies/reactions to your content, diversifying the ecosystem away from a handful of big relays. Software like Ditto also provides a more Mastodon community style experience - even to the extent of supporting the Mastodon API.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

of numbers instead of human-readable names

TBF, they have introduced a 'verified' system that lets you use human readable names.

[–] silverpill@mitra.social 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I mean event kinds: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips?tab=readme-ov-file#event-kinds

ActivityPub has Note and Follow, Nostr has 1 and 3.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 4 points 5 days ago

Wow, that's bad. I would hate working with this so much.

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com -1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I'm astonished at the way you broke markdown to degrade accessibility. Special type of evil or inebriation?

[–] N3M@reddthat.com 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I'm kind of the oppisite in that I prefer Nostr over ActivityPub, but both have their merits. As for technical ways Activity Pub has a leg up:

Comunities - Activity Pub is built around individual instances, with people able to join communities focused on their interests and/or that have their preferred moderation policies. Some software exists to do similar things on Nostr, but that's not what most people use.
Platforms - In a similar vein, Activity Pub is probably easier to make a platform out of, be it Meta making Threads or you making your own social media service for your friends. On Nostr people's accounts exist outside of the infrastructure they use, so it'd be hard to provide a more unified experience.
Ease of Use - Activity Pub generally has a lower technical barrier to entry, you can sign up with an email and a password on most servers. Outside of (upcoming) DiVine or using Frost Bunkers, there's really no easy way to join Nostr without learning how to manage keys.
Standardization - Acitivity Pub has existed for the better part of a decade, and the protocol hasn't changed much for a while. Nostr is not only newer, but breaks it's functionality into various NIPs (rules on how to interpret posts of specific types, e.g. shortform text, longform text, livestreams, etc) of which there's 100+ official ones (and plenty of unnofocial ones).

[–] Cooper8@feddit.online 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What do you prefer about Nostr?

[–] N3M@reddthat.com 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The identity management is a big one. I've had my ActivityPub account get nuked when Nerdica offline, and my current ActivityPub server (Trom) is sometimes slow and misses remote events. Having an identity I control means that I don't get my account nuked if something breaks, and I can participate within communities without being tied to their infrastrucure if the community is great while their infrastructure is not. It also works across different forms of servers - no needing accounts on Mastodon, Pixelfed, Writefreely, and Peertube in order to experience each form of social media on the network - on Nostr I can just use my same account across the network. It also makes me more tempted to host my own infrastructure, since if I get a case of the stupids, I can't accidentally nuke my account.

I also like the protocol's simplicity. It's pretty lightweight, and pretty easy to extend with some custom code. While custom extentions would break normal stuff (adding custom stuff to shortform posts is just going to make your stuff not work with other people's clients), creating something like a chess app or geocaching app is pretty easy. Even if said apps wouldn't work with your standard shortform or longform clients, they'd still interact with other apps using the same custom code, and be useable with a standard account.

And, while I seem to be a minority in this thread, I also like the moderation structure of Nostr. There's a few different ways to approach that:

I use Nostr like RSS, I follow people I like and see their content - and I moderate it like I 'moderate' an RSS feed, i.e. choosing who I do and don't want to see.
There are other ways to moderate though, for example, by pulling people you follow from the whole network while only setting your global feed (if your client supports a global feed) to pull from specific relays.
Or you could use something like Ditto, which is a Nostr relay behind a Mastodon front end. Ditto gives users a local feed and global feed (though I beleive both can be enabled or disabled), with the content on the Ditto server being capable of moderating content in the exact same way any Activity Pub server can (including accessing content or controlling moderation via the Mastodon API).
Last, if I was famous or had people trying to spam me, I could also set my inbox relay (place where people send their replies on outbox model supported clients) to a relay I control, then set rules/filters on who's allowed to reply and/or what content replies could contain.

[–] Cooper8@feddit.online 2 points 5 days ago

This is helpful thanks, seems like ditto is an interesting middle ground.

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I like Nostr over ActivityPub: simpler, more elegant protocol, decentralized, public key signatures, resistance to censorship, anti-moderation.

Content curation is voluntary & left to the client, giving the user greater control/flexibility & preventing moderator tyranny.

[–] Nemo@slrpnk.net 1 points 6 days ago

Culture's enough.

[+] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago

[deleted]

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Mostly cultural, with a strong focus from NOSTR appearing to be crypto scams.

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

This, mostly. I looked into it. But it was too focused on blockchain and not enough on the social apps. It was a dead zone when I checked it out.

[–] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

See Wikipedia:

The Nostr protocol was first written in 2020 by a Brazilian open source developer known by the pseudonym "fiatjaf" as a response to perceived moderation issues on Twitter, as well as both technical and cultural disagreements with other protocols such as ActivityPub and Secure Scuttlebutt.

Looks like it was never about function or protocol in the first place.

In 2024, in an article reporting on the project's funding, Business Insider claimed to have identified fiatjaf, and had found two websites previously published by this person to disseminate the work of Olavo de Carvalho, a far-right conspiracy theorist.

Sounds lovely and taking one look at a random relay confirms this. The only things discussed there are Bitcoin, "Women-are-evil-because-they-dont-sex-me" and some AI bullshit.

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Not mostly about protocol or function, I agree. But if we are to take Wikipedia literally, they had at least some technical differences of opinion vis a vis ActivityPub.

IMO spritely is doing the most interesting work but I don't understand any of it.

[–] e0qdk@reddthat.com 3 points 1 week ago

I haven't tried Nostr, so have no opinions on what the experience of actually using it is like, but cryptographic identity seems like it'd be a better way (technically speaking) of doing things than AP; tying everything to domain names has worked rather poorly -- as we've seen repeatedly every time an instance goes offline...

I ended up on AP after jumping ship from reddit. I was on kbin first (since it was readable w/o JS and I liked the UI), and then later using the mlmym interface for lemmy as kbin because more unstable and eventually went offline.

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