Oddbean

Exactly - some relays sync between them, but even if you follow me, you might not see my messages if I'm not being synced, or don't post, on the relays you use. I still fail to really understand how this is decentralised. Mastodon's model is; but Nostr seems to be entirely based on a few relays.

That's a very bad drawing that makes my point. It shows Nostr clients posting to separate relays, none of which talk to each other. In order to read a post, you have to connect to a relay that carries that post. But unlike ActivityPub's instance-based infrastructure, it isn't immediately obvious how to find out what relays this post is on, or where I post on Nostr. Every time I come here it's clear that Nostriches are wilfully ignoring how poor this system is, and how the entire power of the platform is hanging off a few big, censorable, relays.

You mostly seem bent on dissing nostr. But you do have a point. Only the strfry relays have a sync protocol to gossip messages between relays similar to scuttlebutt. We also do have a discovery problem mapping which npubs have content on which relays. Some relays have bots attached to them which look up profiles and relay lists, this is how purplepag.es, relay.nos.social, and primal do it. I think some sort of DHT to map users to relay is needed to prevent centralization of relays. That said, it’s a hell of a lot better than ActivityPub which puts all power for identity, content, privacy, and connections in to the hands of single instances. What’s more AP claims it’s interoperable but it’s not really. I can’t use my mastodon.social account to manage my events on a mobilizon events server. If i want to use peertube, again i’ll need a new account, followers, content, etc…. Sure they’re all ActivityPub and part of the fediverse, but it’s kind of like parallel universes, they don’t benefit from each other.

This is the benefit of signing identity, vs hosted identity infra. The user controling their identity by signing messages has always been a goal, having recoginized the weakness of walled garden identity managers like google or facebook auth. I understood, but i'm not sure they will, that you can use your nsec to sign messages and user rights accross any future environment.

I see what you mean. I used to think that too. What client are you using ? For me on Amethyst, seeing and adding what relays you are posting to is as easy as sidescrolling on your profile and clicking "Relays" . There is nothing preventing relays from speaking to eachother and it has already been pointed out that some do, through mirroring. As a simple open protocol, if a relay begins censoring or if a 100x scale up in users occurs, both relay diversity costs and spam prevention through zaps and and subscriber relays, has been part of the design from early on (and tor). From a user perspective or relay provider Nostr is just KISS. No email signup, host lock in, version compliance/updates. Just nsec/npub , json parse and go. If you don't see the elegance, i'm not quite sure how to describe the beauty any better. You like ActivityPub. Do activitypub ! It does not need to be either/or. For me AP is an overdesigned make-work program for specialist, like Lighting Network or Kungfu. Nostr is the Brazialian Jiu Jitsu of social protocols. If you like larping at decentralization, do activity pub! If you are trying to survive an uncooperative street fight, Do nostr. https://image.nostr.build/f073e407c4f792a491adc199a32a63ce86c508ed713a71329c7ac7ca91f2264f.jpg#m=image%2Fjpeg&dim=587x945&blurhash=%5E99ZNTOf%3FKV%3FISoQF%3A%3FJjCohS5Im%25OX0xwayNFWG%3DfR%23%252s%3AaeR-JN%24-W9X8bJV%3FNFW%3FS2smo3NaMwsYn%25S1s%3AsA9rsZNFjFt8j%3DIms%3FNFR*t8bY&x=bb7d897bec6171b0c5dce204d8e252000ca09f0feb3e8d4cb33e8856aa0aa407