> The most interesting feature of Mastodon is that by its nature it creates communities with shared values that grow in each of its servers. Or, should I say, that should be a feature if it actually worked like that. In fact these are not really communities, but a mashup of users that may share some interests among each other, but also have other interests and those other interests end up polluting the supposed "community" with things that do not interest the other users.
ie. they're complaining that federated communities are too diverse and multi-faceted, instead of being divided into nice little laser-focused grids of shared interests
I think the point of the quote is that Mastodon tries to be both a topic-centered community platform as well as a "everything goes" public social network like Twitter/X but the federation aspect is not true decentralization because you can easily lose your social graph/reach if some instance admin doesn't like you or your own instance gets #fediblocked.
Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?
But...Nostr (and other decentralised social media protocols) can offer things the existing platforms can not do: interoperability.
Imagine the people you follow to be the same from FB, to strava, to spotify... Imagine the content (signed notes) you make are available on different clients/platforms
That UX, perhaps for use-cases and projects we can't imagine today will be so much better than what we have today. I've tasted a little bit of just that switching between my Nostr twitter-like client (Primal/Yakihonne) and the Podcast app (foundtain.fm). It blew my mind.
This opens use cases the existing platforms can only dream about.
That's basically the point of nostr.
Only if you're on a Bluesky-operated PDS. That's straightforward to fix, at which point the most Bluesky can do to “ban” you is stick a label on your account that non-Bluesky applications/clients are free to ignore.
> to my knowledge their promises of being decentralized are comparable to Telegram being E2E encrypted.
AFAICT your knowledge is about a year out of date.
You don't change social media by building yet another closed protocol. You'd be building more of the same. The only option left is to build open protocols, and nostr is another attempt. Checkmate.
These protocols seem to think that people actually want an alternative to what Instagram, Facebook, X etc. give them. They don't, we all just want the comfort of our own little bubble and a constant feeling of perceived fame. The rest, and all the talk about the protocol that underlines this is just fluff for nerds that will have zero impact in a society dominated by tech capital.
Do you wanna change social media? Try and find and effective way to bring them down.