Oddbean new post about | logout
▲ ▼
NaturalNerd | 7 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 That is a good point. I tried out gab and thought this could turn into something good, but it was mostly trashing left wing politics. While I enjoy a good meme trashing any political party, I didn't find anything too useful there. I didn't find any conversations about solutions, or any respectful discussion

I have not convinced any of my friends into joining nostr. I know only one of them is into bitcoin, so maybe that plays a role here. I had a hard time convincing them to join signal for messaging.

I do think many people are pushed away from nostr by 'toxic' bitcoiners. Maybe the 'we're going to topple the government by using bitcoin' is just too obsurd or extreme to many. Or the propaganda that bitcoin is used by terrorists (only because it is useful, lol)
▲ ▼
Aspie96 | 7 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 I have a very strongly negative opinion of Gab because it's promoted as a free speech platform (which is something I would like, if it were), but it's not. A platform which does appear to have genuine permissive policies is Minds, which I do use (although somewhat sporadically).
Minds used to integrate with Nostr, too, and also contributed to it, but now the Nostr integration is mostly broken.

I don't think arguments for joining Nostr should revolve around Bitcoin. They are different technologies with very different ideas behind them.
They do share some technical detail they wouldn't even *need* to share in theory, but the kind of decentralization they provide (full consensus vs no consensus) is almost opposite and the purpose (currency vs social networking) quite different.
It is perfectly consistent to be very interested in one but not the other or even to think one is a great idea and the other a terrible idea. In both directions.

I do not hold the opinion that bitcoiners or, for that matter, users of any other cryptocurrency, are "toxic". All kinds of currencies are the reasons for many to behave in bad ways and of course Bitcoin is no exception. On Nostr that leads to spam, for instance, but I think this might be manageable.

In the case of Nostr, I don't think it is, by itself, an instrument against *government* censorship.
But government censorship isn't the only kind of censorship and it may not even be the one that concerns me the most.
Corporate censorship leads to platforms removing things arbitrarily and having the right to do so, because they own the servers and they aren't even meant to serve us to begin with, just the investors.

I see Nostr as a potential solution against corporate censorship.
And I don't think only certain topics deserve protection against censorship because it can be, and in fact it often is, extremely arbitrary and unreasonable. And even if it weren't in practice (which it is), it'd be bad on a matter of principle and also dangerous to give corporations this much power.

For me it's not about "toppling the government", whatever that would mean, but rather reaching other people, and having them reach me.
It's about social networking without interference.