I mean, what a great way to find out about alternatives. I'd never heard of "Post" and "Nostr".

Nostr is perhaps the most interesting of the list. Fully decentralized; messages are cryptographically signed; users are identified by their private keys; following is done on the client side, with no stateful server-side component; messages broadcast via stateless relays.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email, in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.

Are relays stateless? When I join a nostr channel I see all previous conversations

Per my understanding, relays are stateless in the sense that they do not store any user state or message state, except what is self-contained within the relayed messages themselves. Also, messages can be relayed by any relay server and by multiple servers, and messages don't necessarily persist.

I've only started learning about it today, though, so my understanding is limited!

Very interesting, thank you.

Per my understanding: most important functionality is implemented in the client; clients can connect to any relay server, and any number of relay servers; messages can be relayed by any number of relay servers; and anyone can spool up a new relay server at any time.

Ok. I will definitely have a look.

My decision so far was to go and run a one-person Mastodon instance but this sounds intriguing.

I was able to get nostr-rs-relay[0] running in <5 minutes on fly.io. Got all my client apps and those of ~5 friends writing to and posting from it. Hasn't crashed yet.

[0] https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay

Neat!

Recommended by Jack too:

https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768

I'll make sure it is sell-out proof then :)

im getting a tweet not found. was that tweet from jack deleted?

No, some nitter problem:

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1603945963944480768

This is probably the reason Nostr makes an appearance in the policy then.

Nostr looks interesting, and its critique of programs similar to Mastodon[1] more or less matched my experience with Pluspora up until the point where it got shut down[2].

[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/sy7e67/pluspora_p...

Is that the Morris worm sendmail with its Turing Complete address rewriting language that I'm seeing in the same sentence with the word "barebones"? ;-)

Nostr is awesome from a technical POV. And they have something that very few projects today get - which is reduced scope.

Their critique of both centralized and dweb alternatives are mostly spot on. The elephant in the room though is whether people-oriented broadcast social media (those with a strong emphasis on one-directional “followers” and personalities) can ever be good. If Nostr was content oriented like Reddit or HN, I would have already started using it. The good news is that it can probably be retrofitted, or at least replicated easily, while adhering to the same technical architecture.

Post (https://post.news) is probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone that I’ve seen. Very similar UX. Supposed to have more emphasis on publishers but that’s not very apparent yet in my feed there.

Right now I use sigmoid.social for tech stuff and Post for mainstream chatter.

I got off the waitlist on Post a few weeks ago and am really disappointed. It’s a giant anti-Musk diatribe no matter who I follow. It’s the worst parts of Twitter, just more concentrated. If that’s their target market, then so be it, but I tried something new to get away from that angst, not wallow in it. Post’s features are also clunky, but that’s understandable with a new product.

I’m excited to check it out, signed up for the waiting list today.

Please don’t just move to another centralized platform. Mastodon is right there, and working.

That's true.

The only proper way that I can see to join Mastodon is to have your own personal instance. And maybe that's how social media should be, but then the difference between that and a webserver with an RSS feed is getting quite small.

The user experience is quite different though?

And I think there’s value in decentralization even without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure, some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the entire network - I hope - would not fail.

Of course, I’ve lived through the death of Usenet, so perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/

Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(

I have a Mastodon, for what it’s worth, but never really figured out how to find a community that resonates with me. It’s quite possible I’m using it wrong in some way.

I’m never sure what people mean when they say things like this.

I found community in Twitter by following people I knew, a small number of organizations, websites and celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned about through retweets or replies.

How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing that just seems overwhelming to me.

I mean all this genuinely - this is not intended as a snark post! I am sure your way of using Twitter is just as valid as mine, and maybe it’ll give me some ideas for things I could do differently.

I wasn’t able to find anyone I know, and the incoming discovery feeds were people I didn’t know anything about talking about stuff I wasn’t interested in. Overall it was just really quiet and felt empty. Maybe this means I joined the wrong server, not sure.

When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot easier.

It sounds like another server would’ve served you better - but I get what you’re saying, it’s not only that, it’s the nature of Mastodon (or, ActivityPub, I guess). Servers basically only know about their own users, and people they follow.

I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network grew from tech folks I’d met in real life out (‘Are you on Twitter? What’s your handle?’ was a common refrain at meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic recommendations, and I never came to really use either.

If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation would be to initially join either a large server (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for hashtags.

Wherever you join, as you follow people it’ll become more rounded out and you’ll start to see boosts from people you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all sorts of servers. It’ll feel more like early Twitter before the algorithmic feed.

I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long time! I finally joined a local geographic one - sfba.social - and it’s pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will admit…) and it’s big enough that the federated feed is pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice doesn’t _really_ matter - it’s easy to move and I haven’t seen any criticism of folks moving.

Thanks for the advice, I’ll give it a shot.

You may want to try those automated tools which search your Twitter following for profiles with Mastodon-Links. Movetodon is rather easy:

https://www.movetodon.org

> Please don’t just move to another centralized platform.

Do you believe that all centralized platforms are inherently evil?

Definitely not! It just seems a bit ‘risky’ to use another centralized Twitter-like when Mastodon seems to be working. I’d rather we gave it a try than another centralized service.

Well, they’re particularly vulnerable to the current twitter failure mode.

Sure, but there are other centralized services not implementing such policies, and I don't think Twitter would exist today in current form if not for being centralized & well funded. I guess there are just tradeoffs in either choice.

> probably the closest to a well funded Twitter clone

Probably, but who needs a clone of what we had and didn't work out? Lets make the next thing better than the last. If it's a clone, then it's another big money-backed "engagement maximisation" play. (2)

Post seems to be dodgy around micropayments (1)

1) https://post.news/terms_conditions

https://home.social/@raccoon/109526574444237572

2)

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternat...

> well funded Twitter clone

In a way that are the failure modes of Twitter itself. Centralized, funded by VCs, susceptible to the whims of the millionaire owners.

Wasn’t Post the clone where, according to their TOS, you couldn’t "discriminate by net worth"?

That's the one.

https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/109422846935825930

But they might have changed that "no criticising the rich" policy now. Since it's such a bad look.

That’s a good policy. You should discriminate by net assets instead.

Someone with a zero net worth because they have millions in assets and millions in debt is probably actually rich - otherwise how’d they get the loans?

Same for a new dentist who’s negative due to student debt but is about to have more than enough income to handle it.

That they included Nostr was interesting to me because it’s far smaller than the others but Jack Dorsey has been promoting it recently.

The irony is Jack has invested in and actively promotes nostr.

"donated to" not "invested in". It's just a plain FOSS project.

No one outside of tech nerds or PR departments is going to get seriously into Mastodon. My wife and her lib/moderate friends checked it out and went right back to Twitter. Too confusing, one husband was banned from one instance and caused issues getting onto others, hard to understand why.

I know from personal experience that this is exactly wrong. Most of the left-leaning blue-checks that I followed on Twitter became mastodon users starting about a week after he carried the literal sink in through the door. It accelerated during subsequent events. While I still laughed when Paul Ford recently characterized Mastodon as "socialists who solder", the truth is that far more ordinary folk than I thought possible made it past the senseless UX hurdles that Mastodon makes new users jump over right away. I was amazed.

Mastodon has moved well beyond where I thought it would in spite of having some pretty glaring shortcomings. If they fix those it will explode.

A 'Mastondoninabox' distribution would be a very nice starting point.

I love this quote.

I also wish Elizabeth Holmes didn't ruin it for me.

Mastodon is the last thing people need to be moving toward. It's an even more isolated bubble than people already experience

Quoting Elizabeth Holmes?

In case you weren't aware, she was quoting Gandhi. Which I'm assuming the parent commenter was doing too.

The internet also says that even Gahndi did not exactly say this ;)