Comment by soulofmischief
13 hours ago
My biggest turnoff has been the fact that you don't own your own data/account and are beholden to whichever dictator(s) run the instance you started out on. You can migrate, but that entire process is just convoluted. I should be able to create an account with my own keys and use them anywhere. Servers can choose to use and share allowlists or blocklists. Each instance being its own little world kills discovery and adds a ton of friction.
And instances seem to be pretty heavy on resources. Reminds me of why Matrix never really took off, running a Matrix server is just too difficult and time-consuming for what you get out of it.
I know proponents of Mastodon will point out that you can work around these warts, but I don't want to. I don't think the model is suited for me.
I’m not 100% sure but I think you essentially described how Nostr works in your first paragraph.
Does Nostr have many users these days?
Noster is cool, I've experimented with it but it doesn't solve all of my problems and has some problems of its own, such as spam. Most importantly, it's not really P2P, despite being decentralized.
I have also explored other P2P approaches and built prototype social networks. I prefer a more P2P approach, I think it's more scalable, but it's complicated because IP privacy by default is important in large social networks. I'm still searching for the right solution. I think the advances in LLMs are going to help do a much better job at solving the moderation problem in social networks, and so I am experimenting with that in my off time.