- 2025
- Mar
- 25
Some thought on nostr after a few months.
A while back, I discovered a completely decentralized social network that fixed the centralized blocklist problem that a lot of federated social networks seem to have. After all, it doesn’t matter to me if you don’t like it, maybe I’d like to make that decision for myself.
You can read that post here: https://wereboar.com … etworking-via-nostr/
And, the nostr outlet I’m using is located here: https://satellite.ea … 0s9sn9xgulwfqsy6uf4w
Anyone is free to post, I’ll see that in my mod queue and approve it if it’s in the spirit of the community.
So what are my thoughts on this service? Well…
- It’s for techies, by techies.
This service isn’t well geared towards people who “simply want to use a social network.” It’s not friendly in the sense that URLs are long keys, and not something you could easily type in and go to. That is how the system works, however, and that’s not going to change unless some abstraction layer is placed on top of the service.
- It doesn’t have reach.
In part, that’s probably because of the daunting URL scheme, but it’s also because the market is so saturated with services that another one isn’t really needed or accepted, except by the aforementioned techies. It’s never going to have the reach - people say that they want to move to a new service every time their little bird does something to make them angry, but they always flood back. It’s going to take an extended outage for something to make that change.
- Spam. Lots of spam.
The service literally has no way to control spam. Anyone can submit things to a community you own or moderate - that’s the idea. But if it’s spam, there’s no way to shunt it off to the side. It simply sits in your modqueue forever, waiting for you to approve it. Anyone else can see it, and if you don’t keep up you’ll find there are hundreds of messages just sitting there. Some method of identifying and pushing this into a spam queue needs to be implemented, otherwise you’re just going to have abandoned communities full of spam waiting to be approved.
So…the long and short of it is that it’s not ready for primetime, even though it’s an interesting idea. Will it ever be ready for primetime? Who knows…but I’ll make the random post on the /oldtech community for you, and I invite you to do the same.
See you there!